From across

There she is again, the woman with a basketful of mabolo. 
Velvet fruit that must be animal,kitten furry on my hand
Yesterday it looked at me with eyes that meow, meow, meow
Is what the kitten said meow, meow, meow. The woman said

Be careful. Kitten is small and so is the velvet apple
Like puppy head pat, pat, pat. Love, love, love woman said.
She is waving at me now from the other side. I see her
Smile waving her hand. She crosses the water, knee deep

Waist deep, too deep, she says I love you I love you 
I love you and we are on a paper boat
She paddles and says Look! Look at the fish! And I swim
And my skin laughs because it is water, not

So loud, I laugh and laugh and flap about but I don't.
The woman said very good you can do it. I find my hands
Into a circle tracing dots into a heart, Who am I?
The woman asks. She is crossing the waters and there is 

Ripple behind her, there are sounds, there is a car
Brooom, brooom, brooom it is loud and the triangle
On paper is sharp I try to cover it blue, blue, blue
Because it is noisy and loud and sharp and bright

I squint my eyes and see the line and clench my teeth,
Hold the pen, fingers like this, catch a fish, want 
The wide and flail my arms but I don't. The woman said
Very good you can do it I love you I love you I love you.

There she is again, the woman with a basketful of mabolo.
Across the water across the table there are sounds
Something moves at the corners of my eyes, it is breeze.
There are suns on my paper and we are on a boat.

Who am I? she says. She opens her hand and there it is
A mabolo, velvet kitten puppy fish circle dots heart. 





for An

where stars are

Soon, he knows, he will start writing about stars
the sky being a single dome under where they all are.
Not very original, in the same way at one time
someone wrote it is the same sea where they were
wading their feet together merely few hundred miles apart.
He doubts writing about stars would help.
He doubts poetry helps.
Suspicious of words now, finding them out
self-entitled ants proclaiming able to make anything 
better: soul, world, future. Who listens to them, poets?
The heart has finer than fine a multitude of strings

Does poetry even matter against the literal onslaughts
to the body? Real bills, real houselessness, real hunger.
He doubts poetry;
doubts himself, a fool.
But the stars were, are, will still be there. Themselves
mocking the ephemeral fears of his temporal body.

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

Disenchantment

Is perhaps what happens
time and again until 

believing and loving
becomes hard work.

It must begin sooner 
than later in others

more frequently and less
to some, possibly why

it cannot be helped: being
lonely whether one knows it

or not; there are always
alternative companions:

a book, a dog, a date
and sometimes, shadows.

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.

Dear friend with a spindle,

How do you do? I woke up sweating in an hour-less dark 
from last night's sleep from a dream I cannot tell about.
Better to say it was a dream of elephants, pink flamingoes
than others; it was humid in spite of the opened windows

Outlines of plane trees visible in the bright but waning
moon; the few days ago spent at a cove aptly named 
"Hidden" (in English, of course) by well-meaning locals. 
My tan darker now. My weeks here more less than more,

No matter I try not to count. Still, a few days before 
I had finally sent the latest collection of poems 
delayed at least half a year because-- 
A translation work and the editing of an anthology sat 

Beside me nights at the cove where I listened to the sound
of tide coming in and daybreak arriving; and watched locals
searching for seaweed and clams and other shells to eat.
A thirty-one year old woman with seven children 

Gave me a local story (the usual, all hearsay and no ending)
with an oil massage. I had slept in dreamless peace. 
The next day she sold fish from her neighbour's catch
and unripe mangoes from her neighbour's yard. 

It has been awhile since I've had a woman; this is such 
a sexist thing to say and I do not say it to anyone.
Like a sin meant for confession. To which I account
the restlessness. Do women also feel the same way? 

There was a poetry book launch and a literary gathering,
all fairly recently; another one tomorrow by a writer
in a local tongue I have come to love in spite of things--
such as not fully understanding it. The book am reading now

Is Atwood, a collection of her stories on inner lives (or 
tumult?) of women and their placid surfaces; their words
ballet dancers on tiptoes onstage. I find no words 
right enough for women. Again, must be a thing to say.

I am tired and my defences from my own self are down.
(You must be reading between the lines now.) 
I still continue to walk the dogs days and nights, though
I have ceased to run. One might say that in a way, 

I am sad (although it is hard to certainly say). Determine 
a more apt word when a month is now named on the calendar.
There is a net in my mind for catching sadness 
before it arrives, no matter it is visible from the shore.

My eldest dog has become more affectionate and I wonder
if it knows the leaving that is coming soon. Perhaps, 
this is only projection, as nearly everything else perceived.
At night, I memorise the humidity and the outlines made

By shadows and warmth. Her beautiful brown skin too,
the scent of it without perfume. I sense, as in any story,
there will be love making soon in the same wild abandon 
we used to do but--

the space between cities

The space between cities is a body of distance
hardly translatable into a map we can pretend
able to transverse by way of roads and rails,
ports and piers cohering so-called boundaries

of what is there and here and then and now as
east and west and north and south referring to
sun and wind and seasons, the way we attempt
landmarking passages if only to remember all 

places we've been, also those never been to 
except heard by name or gestured at in story.
The space between is body of distance, tunnel
lighted dimly: memory and dream, both palpable

to skin, real enough to hear the laugh from
a mind's photograph of one's own ageless self 
in a moment everlasting. Who else is there?
an entire library of snapshots handwritten in

cursive with names, some clearer than others, 
invoked often as bridges over which one's own 
mind and body travels, loop of a map a place
only in river-spaces crossing between cities.