because a young artist wrote about and i remember you at dusk at sea with dogs

1
Young men leapt over bonfires
while beginning

2
                           artists pass naked for art.
                           There is a difference

3
in the quiet of solace
against empty.

4
I saw a vision of rain forest
green and leaves wet

5
                            falling back from heights
                            spent finally 
                           
6
on the sheets. You on top
head on my chest.

7
Young girls in this country dream snow
as in any other beginning

8
                            except perhaps when told
                            about such cold, such cold.

9
I spent time in quiet
un-counting moments

                            before the leaving. This warm
                            country of people, sun and storm.








                            
               

On Intimacy

Because in the darkness on a sea of sheets we cannot help 
remember even without remembering to, in the night

to step out of our bodies palming our way back to origins. 
I, blind and hungry, feel the shadows for curves, touching familiar

strange landscapes, the soft places I've always known
long before any knowing. Woman, her entirety

the tangible universe and the only god I could bury myself into.
Because the darkness keeps the secret that I could never 

fully grow apart. Helpless, I nestle on her warmth,
suckle at her breasts 

white picket fence

it will take all of daylight to mend the fence.  a number of things has got to be moved away, like folders of paperwork calling from an upstairs tabletop.  but the sun is warm and inviting. the sky never been bluer 

for days.  the nip in the wind reminds of kite flying and childhood home.  where there was guitar and Sunday, eternal-hours and no talk of god.  the really big things we are resigned to ungrasp.  a praying 

mantis somewhere is in company with a newt.  and all is well in other worlds.  who will fix the fence and who will need mending.  who can keep company with the grass, the wind, the chimes, the open palmed

bush with its white jasmin flowers.

A Kind of Burning

A Kind of Burning



it is perhaps because
one way or the other
we keep this distance
closeness will tug us apart
in many directions
in absolute din
how we love the same
trivial pursuits and
insignificant gewgaws
spoken or inert
claw at the same straws
pore over the same jigsaws
trying to make heads or tails
you take the edges
i take the center
keeping fancy guard
loving beyond what is there
you sling at the stars
i bedecked the weeds
straining in song or
profanities towards some
fabled meeting apart
from what dreams read
and suns dismantle
we have been all hapless
lovers in this wayward world
in almost all kinds of ways
except we never really meet
but for this kind of burning.








by Ophelia Dimalanta

banana blossoms

On the way to the grocery and back this morning, the names of summer roll in scents and colors.  Banana blossoms and laurel leaves.  Star anise and sun-dried mushrooms.  The  bright red watermelons and orange cantaloupes, more melons, mangosteens and star apples,  jackfruits, the beautiful warm yellows of mangoes and varieties after varieties of bananas.  Pineapples.  Coconuts.  Along a street, bougainvilleas and hibiscus, and  bushes of wild berries in bloom. 

Eve, the garden, the bush, and the snake

Before the year ends, the project will have been completed and the marsh, reclaimed.  Funny that word, "reclaimed"; as if someone had previously taken the land and turned it into watery nests.  How I would have liked to ask where did the previous inhabitants go, now that the humans have "reclaimed" the land.  The frogs, the crickets, the snakes, among others.  Around the same time last year, I found a snake close to the window, looking in.  It was light green, no thicker than my finger, and had climbed its way up the bush.  Displaced, did it want to come in?

Some nights ago, a cricket found its way in the bedroom.  I let it go. 

The snake, a man killed it with a stone and placed its body in an empty liquor bottle.  Like a prize.  He later showed it off to anyone who cared to look.

One friend, he lives alone with a tely, his father's urn, and a gecko.  He said:  one night, the gecko was nowhere to be found; and the house felt deserted.

I told him there is The Book of Chameleons by Jose Eduardo Agualusa, where there is just a man like him; and a gecko living with the man.  And the gecko, in its previous life, was Jorge Luis Borges, the author my friend most admire. 

The road work for this project is nearly done.  A number of men already doing the road humps and the yellow and black stripes.  If one doesn't care to look, it is easy to mistake this place was never once a marsh.   

Instead of cutting the bush by the window, I let it grow.  And in spite of what might be better ideas, I let open all the house windows.  Sometimes, in the wee hours of early morning, I come downstairs and wonder what would I do: when I open the door and see a snake lying, waiting for me.