i started a joke

I should be a little too old for this.
But

in the mornings I still have my tea,
the toast, slices of a piece or two
of fruit

as though nothing has changed.
The weather 
has been kind of late, two days now.

It tells me to come for a run or what
may resemble like it.
I try not to think of a woman 

filling my recent days, with whom
words are exchanged
like gifts.

To each other as though we are young
again, somehow. In a way.
I am a little too old and she is 

a little older than I am; but also, 
married. Isn't it quite an old joke?

light

The conversation tonight was about light. How temporal it is. Like body, like breath. Like how two people meet. Living, and then, also, leaving. Both. Always happening at the same time. This mad provision 

we call here, now, what exists, merely passing in time & space, brushing, lingering, lingered, in transit, a longing, through the vastness this presence, phenomenon, is-ness, then gone, to where? from where? extending, to nowhere, elsewhere, liminal, between, nuance, distance, distances, horizon, eternal.
The commonest road has no name. It is a road that is not a road. It is light. That stretches. A beam, a bridge, crossing, reaching us at the selvedges, where we are on the folds of happenstance, wrinkle in space, in time, breathing each other, are you there? am i there? here i am. here you are.

wsw 18 mph

There are movies about this.
And books, and love affairs
and stories.
How there is a wall, call it
wind, geography, distance

upon which we press our ears
and listen to the other.
Words and breaths.
We place our palms flat
on the wall and listen to

the wind howl, the gusts
shaking the leafless treetops
and making the windows sound

as though knocking, to open.
But we do not. Knowing why
it is better, not.

what a wo/man does

What a woman does, it seems, is keep   But who am I to talk about woman?
all windows and doors, holes, slits,   When there is truly no difference.
fissures and cracks, gaps, spaces,     No lines of be-ing. 

open. That is no sin.                  Isn't everyone not and is     
The sense of whole-ness.               The same?

A continuous flow of wind & water,
fire and memory. There is no sin.      An endless lecture on construction,
Only a means to control people, his-   Suspicion and disbelief...

story, ideology...                     Also, indefatigable hope
I have stopped believing               In all its sarcasm and irony.

six hundred lifetimes ago. Not enough  
knows how we receive distorted forms   I am tempted to ask her
after translations: Freud's            Straightforward.

"die Seele" which meant "the soul"     But here, now, much caution
became "mind" in the pages rendered    Almost not unlike young again.

into what seems an undying treatise.
It is difficult to trust               Is it her rejection?
the nuances after a long time.         There is truly no difference.














                                     
                   

The snowflakes that wait by the road

Dear Friend,

Are the leaves falling where you are? The view of the mountains where I am are beautiful in a quiet and almost sad way whenever it is autumn. Mountains in autumn remind me of both hope and bruise, and that space in between them without a name. Also of Native Americans and the colored people, black, brown, yellow. The weight of history is heavy and long, and though we may want to refuse it, the times remember for us. The length of its memory, the memory of an elephant. Have you ever placed your open palm on a grown elephant? Gentler than the dog's, the dog who loves you and sleeps by your side as though there is nothing else in the world to ask for.

The tree right across my window is black and bare. It is sleeping now that winter has begun. Since my arrival, I have noticed two stray cats called by their names at night by a woman's voice. The cats are not hers. I have seen her on an occasion feeding them in a corner. Sometimes the cats are by porch steps when I arrive; they look at me and I try to put a name to what I feel. I am wary. Though I can count by years the length of stay, moving is always inevitable and necessary. Someone, many years ago, engaged against it: she said there are things that cannot be changed. I let her have her way, though I did not agree and still don't; although admitting, I must say a part of me wants to believe it.

I think about the birds, and the squirrels, and the stray animals at times these days, their lives no more lesser or greater than the lives of those in the Third and war-torn worlds, in conditions where gentleness remains to exist.

On the last days of this semester, students tell of long and heavy histories of themselves; art, again, as always, a catharsis, although...you must have sensed by now I remain grappling: to old to believe and un-believe. Hope. Is Always An Expensive Thing. We buy in exchange of spirit.

There is plenty of sadness and pessimism to share. And yet there remains joy in things so little, like the snowflakes who lives ever so momentarily only to fall and wait by the wayside, to lose itself and rise again.


Signed, P

After, Then

There will be no return, woman. 
No knock on your door, my once beloved.
We both are too weary to attempt 
Any more old familiar dance.
Any better man knows, there really is
No more having back what was lost.
What was lost impossibly scattered now.
Irretrievable. Irredeemable.
All that we have left, you and I
Are the remains. Only another form
Of ashes. Arms wrapped around yourself
Standing by the closed front door. 
I, looking back at you, at the porch, 
The yard, the house, the neighborhood, 
The curb, the life,
From the rearview mirror.

It goes the same way

and the professor says Hegel,
I understand, is a difficult
read, that
Derrida, afraid, couldn't
count the times he revised
his work on Hegel. Hegel 
anticipating our responses
still 
two hundred years later.
No change then, this 
phenomenon that is ourselves. 

What does it mean, this line?

The room remains quiet. 
Graduate students now past 
the courage of teenagers
(who saw futility 
on first day and left)
wrestle within themselves.
Mostly looking away.

Karl and Mao, Fanon, Butler...
The professor, his 
three translations
and academic German.

The room where empty chairs
outnumber the class
below the first floor
where one entire wall is
glass windows looking straight
at an unpainted concrete wall.

What does it mean, this line?











  

It goes the same way

and the professor says Hegel,
I understand, is a difficult
read, that
Derrida, afraid, couldn't
count the times he revised
his work on Hegel. Hegel 
anticipating our responses
still 
two hundred years later.
No change then, this 
phenomenon that is ourselves. 

What does it mean, this line?

The room remains quiet. 
Graduate students now past 
the courage of teenagers
(who saw futility 
on first day and left)
wrestle within themselves.
Mostly looking away.

Karl and Mao, Fanon, Butler...
The professor, his 
three translations
and pocket German.

The room where empty chairs
outnumber the class
below the first floor
where one entire wall is
glass windows looking straight
at an unpainted concrete wall.

What does it mean, this line?











  

a long goodbye 3

Dear Friend, I fancy meeting you in a very crowded street in an intersection of peoples when the red light turns green and everyone including ourselves rush forward to our own elsewheres. 

The preciseness of things will allow us not to see each other unlike the way one morning on a particular June day I met again at once four people in a corner paces away from ---. 

One I was with about two years in my early twenties with no love lost between us at parting. One met in the late twenties leg of whitewashed paintings. Another through her large scales paintings of cats and flowers. The fourth mere hours from an airport. 

What are the chances we meet again? Together in a spot as if rehearsed sometime somewhere. If at ten dreaming in California someone tells us we will commit suicide at 26 and have PhD at 36 and then be half way around the world bearing a kind of slowness of

Being, that there will be sunshine and sea and we will wonder if this is still life or dream. Why should we not fancy multiverses where in another life some things did not happen and all these merely a child's wondering. A child still must be dreaming elsewhere 

On a bed with starships taped on the ceiling and midmorning flooding in a roomful of books. Or must it be a dog, one of the hundreds of strays in a Catholic country with least love for the least. I fancy hectares of land where dogs run and not only dream. When I move 

From one place to another and meet people and memorise faces in spite myself I fancy meeting them again in another life. One where hurriedly passing the crisscrossing pedestrian lines we are less estranged from ourselves.

The Grecian Urn

Finally, I turned off the TV 
getting up after sleeping through a rerun
an old series from more than a decade ago.
Two detectives--a man and a woman--in
futile search of truth. In the long run
of course it no longer mattered.
What once preoccupied the young.

Student activists who raised fists
against superstructures, convinced
to change the world by sheer willpower
and their term papers. Romantics,
the only kind who could not not believe in

love. W, who was asleep on the rug 
close to the couch, woke up and followed me
to the room. The day was over. 
I opened two windows to let in the night.
On the bedside table, close to the light
the still-unmarked end of term essays
remaining certain of tomorrow.

Never enough time

Never enough time to be a mother
Never enough time to be a father
Never enough time for a child
Who grows out of itself by tomorrow

The child will be gone
Replaced by a woman
Replaced by a man
Replaced by a stranger 
Come tomorrow

Never enough time to be wife
Never enough to be husband
To be lover 
To be child
To be constant
Come tomorrow

Come tomorrow
Come stranger

Who does not fear tomorrow?

drowning with woman

Counterculture communes in the 60s and 70s
attempted to distill love
through music, herbs, and freedom in forest
idyllic edens or as thought to be.

My own short experience told me 
youth has a way of imagining 
as does any spring beginnings.
To have a time of easy belief in hope

has its own good, if only to make the later years
bearable with dream-like memories. 

There is always something beautiful
about the long ago we have lived or survived.
Thus, that smile when we are
alone one morning with second cup of coffee

and remembering. Times, there, of love
also of beauty we had not recognised
while it looked us on the face. Gentle gust.
Perched on our palms like easy wind.  

How time flies. 

The hours we wasted arguing and hating
each other as much as ourselves for 
nonetheless loving both self and other. 
No counterculture communes truly survived.

There is no way to distill love.

exes and whys

The programmer I am working with now
knows the landscape and language
I only have the vaguest idea about.
Her algorithmic words she translates
meeting on a plane with my verse 
in an art collaboration we call mad.
On her 13-inch MacAir, 
black on violet Queer. I wonder about
the prompt for such declaration or
the necessity for staking such name.
Or any name for that matter, names
being able and unable to define
at the same time. I understand and not
many familiar names people call
themselves to make more human.
An agender, for instance, refuses any
line, that mark, which maps shapes,
forms, volume, movement, spaces.
The project we are working on
brings abstract spaces into a real.
Something one can hold onto,
participate in. How so many things
I do not fully understand, except,
as the collaboration's theme goes,
we are all children of Eve.

what we left behind in love

Who, what we left behind in love.
Left behind out of love. 
All reasons into one final tangible thing--
The leaving. Who truly understands it

Not even fully the one leaving, 
Feeling only that which comes first
As feeling before any knowing--
Feeling being the very first language

Of that that cannot be enclosed
Into any simple names.
Who, what we left behind in love.
Left behind out of love.

Others, as well as our own selves--
Versions of the less or more of
What we now are.

Stumbling upon another poem

Stumbling upon another poem
while wading through all these daily
words, like warm tea on quiet
afternoon feeling like a respite.
Like an adolescent lost (again)...
If all the doors were open, there

would be more than mere 
associations.  All of us might have 
trouble from all the remembering.  
Lucy van Pelt; and of her father whose got
a reputation, a plane tree; also, others.
Here, a poem on water, on ocean, perhaps
in a jug, in a well.

To Drink

by Jane Hirshfield

I want to gather your darkness
in my hands, to cup it like water
and drink. 
I want this in the same way
as I want to touch your cheek--
it is the same--
the way a moth will come
to the bedroom window in late September,
beating and beating its wings against cold glass,
the way a horse will lower
his long head to water, and drink,
and pause to lift his head and look,
and drink again,
taking everything in with the water,
everything.

the discussion of philosophy

is probably meant not for everyone.  some 
work for the next meal, and this is enough.
the barber whom i see more than the church
tells five reasons to live, in specific order:
college, work, marriage, kids, house.
a man of his world, he is.  tells about his rise
from employee to owner of the salon.
also how to conserve water,
through homebuilt-system of gallons and pipes.
the house needs everything, he says.
and i do not argue with him.  having respect 
for what he does, meticulously.  with heart.

the man does not know hugo or kant.
does not bother with art or phenomenology.
but he thinks not only of his next meal.
and values work.  and honesty.
and also his kids, two of them, whom
i haven't seen.  he probably meant them
when he talks of his house.

and we do talk about the weather, the expected
changes in it.  also the leaving and arriving
that i do, although we never get to specifics.
i do not know if he sees the blue 
of the clear blue sky in this country.
do not know if he thinks of the line
as both phenomenological palimpsest and
illusory divide of consciously built boundaries.

he may not think of these, or of feminism.
although
i think we all do.  between the hours of rain
and morning or the hours of stars and night.
with enough solitude, we all do

discuss philosophy and question
laws, existence, universe, our selves.

a lesser man

I.
the first time i met d* i almost run out of wind, that kind
when you are caught between exhaling and inhaling
so strong the point of shock.  i thought i saw my mother.

a most curious case and i had to remind myself
i was seeing another.  even though there really
was less mistaking in that smile.  
also, those eyes.  the oval face.

of course, mother is older.  with more wear.  a difference
in contexts and years.  although i could not help thinking
seeing d* i am seeing my mother in times much happier.

a lucky man who won her.  although 
i could not say the same for her.


II.
one of my fears is becoming my father.  i look 
at the mirror and see more and more his face.  
some day i am going to write the whole of it.
but not now.  not yet.


III.
there are a moments of most clarity.  
when i see her and wonder
what she sees in this man--
raised to be stubborn, built as 
less.  who meets her halfway 
only under light of day.

what does it take to be a woman.
a man will never know.
he who is always
lesser beside her.

the body under light of day II

Restraint.  One of the first things taught
one of the most enduring things practiced:

never speak too loud, or talk too fast
or eat too much, or want too much.
A golden mean for everything.

In poetry, the practice is not speaking
what you mean to say.  To say it 
in another way.  To let you sense

want and desire, need and a kind of
emptiness to be filled, but does not
speak of it under the light of day.

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.

Exactitude

Is it possible to know what we want?
Don't we still get ahead of ourselves
not at all unlike

a five-year-old child who thinks it knows
what it wants, if only for a moment
an hour, a minute 

before it finds itself wanting something else
yet again.  How we spent years trying
exactitude.  I think I know

as I've been taught, and learned:
to envision the map, to draw it carefully 
as a CV, a bio, a folder of

accomplishments, works in progress and 
downplayed failures, silent emptinesses.
And when the map

is finally done and we stand right at mark
the middle of X, we find ourselves:
the audacious asking:

do you really know what you want?