the steady rhythm

There is a steady rhythm in the pulse of the universe.
This I believe 
At the same time I believe

The necessary erratic erranty of the cosmos.
The Great Barrier Reef is dead
And the thousands of salmon continue living

Their lives all about the long return.
So ours, also, must be.

From where to where, from whom to whom, the definitions
May not be necessary.
What is it that we truly long for?

That which is repeated over and over lying between
All the lines and names and breaths
Including the time we stare at the seemingly 

Boundless sea.
Have we moved enough yet? 

Farther or closer who is to know.

jade

Carve out a hollow into your existence

You will find there is no difference 
between you and the American woman
who touched the Maneki-neko,
unashamed to ask for luck and fortune.

    outside the lonely shell of you car

You will overhear two colored women
tell each other organic food is luxury,
will read an unadorned student's poem
say thirty dollars a month for food.

                         through the steady pace of your feet

You will see the question is never too far, 
it is always here, no matter
the whitewashed porch and the flowers 
blooming quiet as if in peace.

                                       this blooming day of falling leaves

You will touch what is intangible, this
palpable need to fill in the hollowed out.
Not unlike how you felt as a child pouring sea
from cupped hands into the hole in the sand.

More nights ahead

We can put together a hundred or more possibilities,
letting two characters meet, in spite the number
of ways, streets, corners, bars, restaurants, cities.
Did you not once say you will have a hard drink
at the bar at the edge of your sleep? Even though cold,
I have returned to the uncertainty of outdoors now, 
stopping at diners where tired men and tired waitresses
call each other by name. The home fries both nostalgic
and sorry. Something always pulls me back. 

Sometimes I look up and watch flocks of birds, mostly
when flocks of young people pass by. Do they
know how we can devote our entire lives
to a cause truly lost?
How the foolish idealism of our once immortal
sense drove us to where we are now. Here...

And is it wrong to think women like you will always be
less lonely? I have come to deny myself. But 
how it bangs its fists on my door wanting
to be let out, telling me 
I am human, human, human. 
So I try to keep away from the door,
away from the bar at the edge of your sleep.

no water but space

What separates us now is space.
Like air   like blank   like nothingness
Not a void   I think  for it too must have
Some vague directions pointing which way
One must go 

Home for now is a transitionary word
Much like the lengthened stay at airports
I have nearly forgotten how it feels like
The not quite entirely have moved in

What sense is it
The mind always knowing this is not the place
Even though it is where the body is
And will be   for years

I try not to think of her warmth 
Realise it has always been this way--a distance
Metaphorical or otherwise

Here  it is the tail end of summer
At 8 PM the sky remains light
I have not yet looked up the skies at night
Knowing there are no stars

So far away from her

Corniche

The road appeared first
before the two packs from the glove compartment
rolled like boulders that fell, one on her lap
the other into the abysmal dark floor. Condoms

two packs of it and in her mind's eye, the corniche
was where they were right that moment, 
perilous turn 
the only thing visible through fog
feet away by headlight; everything else gone

the traffic marsh in the middle of M___ Avenue
and the dinted hood of the car beside theirs.
A woman wading through chest-deep traffic
and the faint honk from somewhere

made it through the window, the glass, to her ear.
Her husband felt the quake, the landslide
saw the boulder on her hand. "Whose this?" 
Not mine he said and gave a name

familiar to her; loose dirt and gravel
she tightened her grip on the phone
searching for the letter and remembering her son
at the backseat with the girlfriend.

All of them supposed to be merry after dinner.
It was all too much a scene from TV
might as well be fiction but the ringing
on the other end and the name's voice answering

"No, not mine." 
Your husband's. 
The tires skid 
and everywhere dust and fog by the cliff 

impossible to see, to breathe--how far deep
was it below--she felt the impassable narrow 
just beyond the turn
anytime now they were to run the light.





For V

When memory is long

it is more difficult to forgive. I remember
the exact words you said 
inside the room 
where all the words we hurled at each other
lay with the shards of glass and mirror

remains of china, frames, memorabilia
what you wore and the colour of the sheets
the sound of begging
and finality, that immovable self-possessed weight.

The stolid words, once arrived, stay
no matter you sweep them with many vacations,
drowning them in tropical seas of laughter
into a forgetfulness; the words know

how to breathe darkly in subterranean waters
finding their labyrinthine way, resurfacing
as beasts of reason
for disbelief and anger 

unfaithfulness. 
You and I do not mention 

the lock is broken and I wonder why 
it cannot be said in plain words.
What we choose not to understand.
How memory gets in the way.
A hallway, a strait. You and I, different shores.

My Father's Birthday

My father's birthday yesterday, I remember but chose not to
Say anything, choosing to remember why not. 
The backstory is long, kept away in a partially closed room

Not far from where most people stay to admire the garden
Among others. Stoicism is plenty, so is civility.
Keeping surface clear, spotless from hostility as a glass table. 

My mother expected me to call. I am always never 
Too far from anything I chose. She must be upset now
Not replying to my message left like an after thought

Pretending forgetfulness. Of course, she knows and chose
Not to remember. My poor brave mother whose dreams 
Must have been as bright as she before bearing a child

So similar in many ways to the father who, too, must have been
As bright as any bright and dreaming young man before 
He succumbed to secret darknesses.

Miracle Fair

Commonplace miracle:
that so many commonplace miracles happen.

An ordinary miracle:
in the dead of night
the barking of invisible dogs.

One miracle out of many:
a small, airy cloud
yet it can block a large and heavy moon.

Several miracles in one:
an alder tree reflected in the water,
and that it’s backwards left to right
and that it grows there, crown down
and never reaches the bottom,
even though the water is shallow.

An everyday miracle:
winds weak to moderate
turning gusty in storms.

First among equal miracles:
cows are cows.

Second to none:
just this orchard
from just that seed.

A miracle without a cape and top hat:
scattering white doves.

A miracle, for what else could you call it:
today the sun rose at three-fourteen
and will set at eight-o-one.

A miracle, less surprising than it should be:
even though the hand has fewer than six fingers,
it still has more than four.

A miracle, just take a look around:
the world is everywhere.

An additional miracle, as everything is additional:
the unthinkable
is thinkable.

[by Wislawa Szymborska; translated by Joanna Trzeciak]

For a colleague, on his passing

The next day everything else remain in place.
No single death can move a sheet of paper 
held by paperweight on your table, waiting for your signature. 
It is a common enough thing such tangible patience
steady and all of us passing.  We sing anyway 
as much to ourselves as to you who must be amused by now.

the body under light of day

Someone takes a photo of the Ganges River.  And only because it tells it is sunrise  do we know.  Otherwise, skies look the same in too many angles and too many ways.  Who can tell.  

India has a lot of things to say.  Too many they carved them in stone.  So that long after the storytellers and instructors are gone, the ways remain:  bodies of labyrinthine desires.  How men and women cannot live in love alone.  

Add desire.  Add hunger for the body.

white

the mornings are white.  and i try to shake off the remains from last night.  difficult when even sleep cannot make the forgetting.  when the waking is by a dream where i was calling in a makeshift

bedroom in a makeshift house.  the entire scene breezy noon, blaring bright.  the bare walls, raw plywood.  and plastered, bond paper size cut-out pictures of newspaper comic strip cartoons. the likes of peanuts. also a 1980s rock and roll star with a large nose. the pictures appeared random.  but 

possibly not, they all have clearly drawn noses.  in the dream i was showing someone the room.  and disturbed by the sight of the pictures, i called for her, i called aloud and i wake up in 

a morning white.  the curtains drawn, the room light with tempered sunlight.  i find myself in bed alone.

truism

here is a photo of quiet, from a long lost time together.  there are never any wrongs on a sunset.  and almost never anything the matter on a sunset shore.  i have learned to cast many of the questions to the universe.  and learned never to expect answers.  on the matter of truth, there are multiples. in spite the existential absolutes.  and so, too, on love and the beautiful.  and all the large and the un-graspable.  here is a photo of quiet.  from a summer long enough ago.  long enough to be able to say it was a time so beautiful.  that it was, at its time, true. 

it can wait

What will 
a sixty-eight-year-old man do
with a four-year-old son
in a country 
more humid than
wherever  he's ever been?
See how he sits now
alone on the porch
sipping coffee
his young wife gone.
He must be thinking
of something 

or waiting.

catching stars

One of my better memories was on a rooftop, on reclining summer chairs nights in the middle of October, November, December.  Those were a long time ago.  Up the flights of stairs, we brought cheap wine, a couple of glasses, a tea light.  And she talked about many things, growing up and childhood.  I listened to her voice, looking at silhouettes of rain tree canopies moving with the breeze.    

after city

The children are dead.
The news does not say
even though their bodies
are all around.  In parts,
in missing wholes.
The entire city has begun
to smell of loss.  There are 
arms, dismembered, waving
at Red Cross trucks carrying relief.
Too many bare feet, caught 
cold in the act of running.
Everybody is howling.
But there are not enough names.

At the centers, the lines are long
for food, for water, for medicine.
Also for calling God.
But the telecommunications 
are all down.  
And the entire city is dark.








(Typhoon Haiyan/Yolanda, Philippines)
 







by shane

birth-day

Here it is a travesty.
That life goes on for a number.
That celebrations are called 
for some other reasons
if one does not care to remember.
In another place, entire towns
and cities are awashed.
Only the memory have names.
Too many bodies are found,
cold and strange. The loved ones
remain missing.  Underneath
all the mud and debris where 
those who survive must stand 
go on living.





(Typhoon Haiyan/Yolanda, Philippines)




by shane





















 

this world as a fold

teach me how to fold origami, fold this paper
piece the way slender fingers do

they are graceful as a woman's,
as precise

as her heart the way it holds the brim of a world
into a cup of her hand.

looking into the well: pessimism and hope

imagine a deep well.  deep and dark, a surface world of dark water, unmoving as it mirrors: a circular piece of sky, clouds, a moon, a firefly, a hint of shimmering light.  

imagine what lies beneath the waters stone cold.  imagine what lies underneath the ground.  imagine the pull, the calling, the fall.  

sometimes

in unguarded moments, we see ourselves, looking up at us from down the well.

long days

the days seem to have become
longer than the last time they were.
i don't know.  we could easily count 
with several fingers the reasons why 

at the end of the day, we seem to
have become older.  
and older.  wearier 
than the last time we remember.


















 

 

one night in June

one night in june, the moon rose full, a large yellow melon from the edge of sea.
it was as closest as it could get to the land, where its lover waits
gazing at it night after night as only one who dreams 
and loves from afar can.