Amigo Warfare

Amigo Warfare
Poems by Eric Gamalinda
Cherry Grove Collections
2007 by Eric Gamalinda
Published by Cherry Grove Collections
P.O. Box 541106
Cincinnati, OH 45254-1106
ISBN: 9781933456669
LCCN: 2007923410
Poetry Editor: Kevin Walzer
Business Editor: Lori Jareo
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Acknowledgments
The following journals, webzines and anthologies previously
published earlier versions of these poems, some under
different titles. My gratitude to their editors.
Barrow Street: The Skin of War
Big City Lit: My Generation; Sprung Pidgin
A Habit of Shores: Filipino Poetry and Verse from English
(University of the Philippines Press, Manila:
Gemino H. Abad, ed.): Pictures from a Country in
Mourning, after Botero
The Hat: Autobiography of Water; Ego>Lust>Guilt;
Valley of Marvels; Antonio Machados Off-
Season
Interlope: The End of the World Will Happen on December
21, 2012
Interpoezia: Valley of Marvels; Autobiography of Water;
#846
International Quarterly: Pictures from a Country in
Mourning, after Botero
Literary Review: DMZ; Poem Not Written in Catalan
Love Gathers All (Anvil Publishing/Ethos Books, Manila /
Singapore: Sunico, Yuson, Lee, Pang, eds.):
Bollywood Ending
The Philippines Free Press (Manila): The Remembered
World; Rampart
Pinoy Poetics: Autobiographical and Critical Essays (Meritage
Press, CA: Nick Carbo, ed.): Melting City
Poets & Writers Online: Two Nudes
Rain Tiger: Two Nudes; Politoxic
Respiro: Bollywood Ending; Antonio Machados Off
Season
Search (Colegio San Agustin, Manila): Tektite; Burning
the Body, after Tarkovsky
Structure and Surprise (Teachers and Writers
Collaborative, Michael Theune, ed.): Subtitles Off
The Sunday Inquirer (Manila): Two Nudes; The Map of
Light; Ceremony, after Kiarostami
Tomas (University of Santo Tomas Press, Manila: Alfred
Yuson, ed.): Sign Language; Plan B; Poems of
Sorrow, after Luis Gonzlez Palma
Many thanks to Le Chateau de Lavigny in Switzerland, Le
Chateau de la Napoule in France, and Ledig House
International Retreat for Writers in New York for giving me
the opportunity to work on several of these poems.
I am also grateful to Arthur Sze, Eugene Gloria, and Tina
Chang for reading my manuscript and giving invaluable
advice; the Asian American Writers Workshop; the
Philippine Literary Arts Council; Reynaldo Ileto for the
book's title; Nick Carbo; and D. Nurkse.
And as always to Bunny, Marisse, Mark, Celine, Diana,
Bing, Miel, and our mom, Doris Trinidad: maraming salamat.
Cover photograph: No saba que ella estaba pensando en, 2004
(detail from diptych) | Copyright Luis Gonzlez Palma |
Courtesy Robert Mann Gallery, New York.
Table of Contents
DMZ | 11
Sign Language | 13
Plan B | 15
Poem Not Written in Catalan | 16
False Hopes, True North | 18
Ego > Lust > Guilt | 19
Sprung Pidgin | 21
Bollywood Ending | 22
Daisy Cutter | 24
9/12 | 26
Christians Killed My Jesus | 27
The End of the World Will Happen on
December 21, 2012 | 29
Subtitles Off | 30
Poems of Sorrow, after Luis Gonzlez Palma
| 31
Politoxic | 33
Two Nudes | 37
Autobiography of Water | 38
Self-Portrait in Hell | 40
Posthumous | 41
My Generation | 43
Amigo Warfare | 44
Pictures from a Country in Mourning, after
Botero | 46
Disciples of the Dog | 49
The Skin of War | 51
The Remembered World | 53
The Map of Light | 59
Valley of Marvels | 60
Antonio Machados Off-Season | 62
Burning the Body, after Tarkovsky | 64
Ceremony, after Kiarostami | 65
Koan: The Last Eclipse of the Millennium | 66
Abell 2218 | 67
Yellow Tang | 71
Tektite | 73
le Saint-Honorat | 75
Melting City (1) | 77
# 846 | 79
Rampart | 81
No Fly Zone | 82
Notes | 83
If I had to sum up my impressions of America,
I would list these: waste, innocence, vastness, poverty.
Michelangelo Antonioni
DMZ
At the end of my life I must stagger back to love,
my body a weight I am sick of carrying,
my pockets lled with intricate maps
and useless strategies.
I ask forgiveness of everyone who loved me
you have been grievously misled.
I cash my name in, such a useful thing
lets hope someone else has more luck with it.
I return the suit I borrowed,
promises I couldnt mend,
the happiness just one more quarter-inch
within my reachloose change
still good for a paupers meal.
I surrender my history
and all memory, its ammunition.
The nameless claim me. Exiles
offer me a home. Who else sees me
as I truly am, just another vehicle
transporting so much fuel?
I light my anger like a pile of twigs.
I do this in the desert: it scares away
anything that will devour me.
I do this in the city, where the jackhammer
cracks the cranium of the earth, and nothing
can save me. I lose myself
among the restless immigrants,
their bodies still warm
from the lust and gunre of slums.
Grief is a nation of everyone,
a country without borders.
I roam the avenues of it
11
out of habit. Summoned to testify
on everyones behalf, Im sticking
to my story. Its better not to talk
about the wounded, or the moist remains
of the disappeared. But theres always one
who can tell, in the packed
amplitude of crowds.
We are so many bodies, my friends.
We all move in the same direction.
As though someone had a plan.
12
Sign Language
My friend speaks to me in sign language:
This is beautiful, and Im afraid. The words leap
from her hands, a icker in the dark. The motor
stutters, jungle mangroves drift and vaporize
to snowcapped peaks. Day fades to night, fades back
to day. Her hands busy, though weve already
lost each other, and shes forgotten gestures
to describe whats become inert, her love
turned perfectly invisible. The water
makes no sound, a furtive blue. We cross
the latitudes. Summer blurs to a storm.
We reach the city in the last long reign
of winter. The cobbled alleys glow. No longer
used to land, our feet drag over the stones.
We know were heading somewhere, blizzard-bound
on an empty bus. The windows are opaque.
A curfew has been called. The driver speaks
in echoes, a language we have yet
to understand. Its been like this for weeks,
dropping strangers in the same blind-alley town.
The streets are pocked with holes. A man crawls into
an empty vault in a burial wall. Hes stolen
votive candles, his twilit cave burns like gold.
The wax rips through the punctured hands
of Christ, another illusion, as sharp
as the dream I see us in. My friend says
he will freeze in his sleep, a gentle death.
She tucks her hands in her pockets, warmth
and silence. This is where our story has to end.
In the square a woman offers us owers:
a white cloud lifts in her hands. Her face
is a owers ghost, dirt brown, beautiful once
13
perhaps. Her children are numerous, fast asleep.
In a while they will walk among us, their palms
spread open to the promise of the world.
14
Plan B
I hope you never get tired of waiting for the world
to come to its senses. And that you have a quarter
for every homeless person who asks you for a quarter.
Like Sitting Bull, may you nd America a hard place
in which to save the soul. If you listen closely the city
speaks your native language. I asked someone
for directions to the end of the world and he said,
Keep going till you cant. Twelve years ago
I crossed six time zones, three continents,
half a lifetime. Existence is mathematics:
therefore your life will be as nearly perfect as mine.
I cant recall the last time I truly loved anybody.
But in the corner of emotions Ive kept the light on
for those who still cant nd their way. My father
pounds the walls in the shadow theater
of his grave. In my dreams the dead keep growing,
like ngernails or hair. If I could sum up
all that Ive learned, here it is: Everything
eats everything. There is no escape. Galaxies graze
in endless space and outside of that who knows?
At some junction dappled with the residue
of stars, maybe youll nd yourself as you were
a gigabyte ago. A quasar of desire. Your heart
as mortal as a bird. And when you speak
your voice forms a nest of trebuchets around you.
In the beginning was the Word. The rest is noise.
15
Poem Not Written in Catalan
Out of everything that is not eternal
I deny the patience of water, the divinity of salt, and
the persistence of the spider
I would like to write a suicide note in three and a half
languages
and travel south on a Thursday towards
some form of life outside of earth
And although people will think Im no longer there
I will live in geodesic domes
and count only in numbers less than zero
Sometimes in the city when I walk past trees I hear
them denying me
Normally this doesnt bother me but today
Im not going to take any conspiracies
I deny bodies of water smaller than the Great Lakes
I deny any planet larger than America
I deny the fact that when I kill time, time is actually
killing me
I am air, light, sound, all of which I deny
I deny the Buddha, I do not deny the Buddha
An exact copy of my life is being lived a million light
years away
If theres a way to prove it
If mathematics were the only religion
We are passing an era of turbulence
Make sure your souls are in the upright position
16
I am afraid of the profound certitude of things
Love like an arsonist
steals into my life and burns down all my tenements
(In a court of law, love will deny me
and the burden of proof rests entirely on me)
17
False Hopes, True North
You are moved by the imperfection of things,
the blemish on the surface of the bowl,
the pall of coming rain. Summer ended
quickly, I wasted my time looking for
a job, the nation went to war, we lost
our romance with the world. Our lives
are blissfully irrational, people think
theyre dreaming us but were really
dreaming them: we grow tired of resisting.
Even suffering is illusion, in the equation
between grief and rescue the body
is the unknown factor x, and though mercurial
savants argue brilliantly, were not so lucky,
we nd no refuge in the bone-littered country.
So pay no currency to the Pope, ignore
the Secretary of Defense. Dont change your mind
about the impossible: I believe
I am about to not wake up, and I no longer
wish to be in anyone elses nightmare
but your own, where a curfews been enforced
on the planet, and bombs get smarter than
the president. Our bodies, near like this,
are so mystical no spook can decode
this fractal of grace, no senate undermine
this perfect aw. For the moment let there be
no homeland, no jihad, no Jesus Christ,
no IMF. Let armies yield and frontiers
break away. I will dwell in your transparency.
You are young, you can still be saved.
18
Ego > Lust > Guilt
I take my ego out on a leash.
I pick up its shit and carry it in a plastic bag.
My ego meets other egos along the street
and stops to smell their butts.
Sometimes my ego likes to hump a leg or a tree.
Someone told me I should have my ego neutered.
I spend a couple hundred dollars at the Ego Spa
to have it washed and trimmed.
I feed it Ego Food Supreme, with real meat.
I can make my ego roll over or play dead.
Good ego. Good, good ego.
::::::::::::::
I would like to send lust in plain brown paper packages
to everyone I know.
I would like to send it by overnight
express, urgent, fragile,
consume before it expires.
I would like to place lust on every human tongue,
lust so easy it will cancel
all hunger, all voodoo, all lies.
I would like to be able to walk inside a bar and tell
everybody
the next round of lust is on me.
I would like to solve the trade inequities of the world
by paying all foreign debt
in radiant carats of lust.
I would like to see God one day
secretly turning the pages of life,
19
licking his ngers and savoring the salt
of his own skin.
:::::::::::::
The earth is at as a strip mall. The worlds great wars
are fought on prime time TV. Stage blood,
and all the daisy cutters yawn, made in China,
of polyurethane. And sometimes at sundown,
even without a hangover, the landscape of your life
is like a demolition derby, the wreckage cheered
by bumpkins in the bleachers
swathed with perfumes of gasoline. Welcome
to the suburbs of guilt. Your days are now an endless
loop, a season of reruns. Theres always someone
you dont want to know. An ex, a trick,
a trafcker of bliss. Every whisper
is sinister, every gesture a complicity. Hit something,
and the pink lights icker in the shooting gallery.
Should have wrapped the body in a bag.
Should have sold the evidence
to tabloid news. You stagger wounded
from the ghettos of desire. Love picks you
from the suspect line; should have learned
to live alone. Where you come from is where
youve been too long. Where youre going
is where youve always been.
20
Sprung Pidgin
Take your mondo grass from Japan and let it
sprawl, let oceans swell and conjure Hokusai.
Take your doleful Romeo from Ilocos, turn
tobacco to pineapple, rule big time in Hilo.
Crossbreed hapa and haole and see sprung
pidgin, what hex and melody they utter.
People are like pollen, they migrate and fertilize
and sometimes they make you sneeze. Every second
a million cells in your body die. Even you,
at this very moment, are being revised.
Too much happiness can kill you, like too much
sugar. Just when you think you got it, that is not
enlightenment. Take your dollar Buddha, make him
pick your celery, your grape. What you forget
you dont remember, which implies that absence is
an object, whats lost is constant. You green card
your way through walls and fences, turn so white
youre practically invisible. Now take a poem
you wrote in your blood twenty years ago
and strike out all the lines. Nothing's left but
punctuation and a freeway of erasures. Thats it:
only the open road. Poems are dead things,
a slow process of decomposition. If they dont
decay, something terrible has gone wrong.
21
Bollywood Ending
The bandoneon begins. Sound up
as she walks into the nal jump
cut in the lm, gets her share
of ruthless ecstasies like all
the losers in this loveless town,
gets kicked around
at the laundromat, falls
in love, many frames later,
with a gangster-poet (perpetual
cigarette, disheveled hair).
They rent a convertible,
kill somebody
or themselves. Its all the same,
someone has to break
from the weight of all this light,
someone has to stand
in the panorama of big emotions.
The desert shots will be wider than love.
Love isnt wide,
its smaller than the human heart,
but it casts a shadow from here
to Sierra Nevada. Things die
under its shadow, cars and coyotes,
anything that moves. The interstate
is strewn with wrecks and bones.
She sucks him off at the wheel.
He loves her more than money.
Theyre not going to stop until
the next stretch of nowhere
appears in slow dissolve,
and the nodding nobodies
sleep off their hangover
in a borderland no contraband
has yet described. Until the highway
22
narrows to a dot of sundown,
and their names scroll up
against the blacked-out sky.
23
Daisy Cutter
(3) The homosexuals st fuck in the steam room
while the janitor isnt looking. (10) He calls
and never speaks but you can hear Oahu rain.
(2) Press your ear against the glass and hear another
life
not happening, the soundless blur of snow
on the plasma screen. (1) There is no greater bond
than a shared lie. (24) Its riskier to start a war
under a full moon. (12) Silence the victims
with money. (26) Daisy cutter: wherever you are,
America will nd you. (8) When the molecules
snap, your father and mother disengage
in you. This is called the vanishing of air.
(13) Forgetting, like water, doesnt have its own
shape. (18) All theories are useless, or they thrive
in the afterlife of language, where bodhisattvas
feed on concepts. (6) Live long enough in one place
so that place cancels time. (9) Open your heart
to Jesus. (22) This is not an exit: alarm
will sound. (15) You will stand in the pool of the holy
and be forlorn among the chosen. (11) Bomb the
clinics
and save the smallest souls. (20) Blood of the redeemer
has never been more potable, rivers where
broken cities bleed their toxins. (14) Deliver us
from one another. (21) We have come to the end
of the human era. (16) You wont remember a thing.
(23) Or maybe some celestial database will keep
the avarice of presidents on le. (25) We thank you
for our rage. (7) Its possible that the body
desires in order to need, and absence is
whats truly craven by the soul. (5) Between fear
and tenderness, I choose self-defense. (17) The soul
24
cannot inhabit time, endures precariously,
a paper nautilus, a black pearl. (4) We are born
full of love. (19) Then the world intervenes.
25
9/12
They speak not with words but light, can imitate
the simplest of objects, falsify their
ngerprints, set their souls to sleep so that
the metal detectors dont go off, change
their voices or the color of their skin;
they dont remember being born, nor fear
the sound of water: the nights we dreaded
surng the channels for comfort are here
at last, all that cinema dreamed for us
has come to pass, here is their infestation
of incivilities like mud prints left
on Astro Turf, they are unpacking
their suitcases, lling the corridors
with the scent of spices, colluding in dialects,
having sex, absconding with our taxes,
looking over our shoulder on the train,
eating our burgers and fries, learning the process
of democracies, working below what
were willing to pay ourselves, worshiping
in congregations large and small, holding
national parades, lodging in the most obscure
interstices of our cities, wearing veils
that mystify their intentions, saving
money, working two or three jobs, installing
window guards for obviously nefarious
purposes, holding on to names that no one
can pronounce, no doubt a private cipher
they transmit to one another as they trample
through the park: Wei-sing, Hamil, Irais,
Parisa, Musqur, Sixiang, Duc.
26
Christians Killed My Jesus
Jesus was on his way to California
when he stumbled upon a marriage in the desert,
the party had just begun but they had run out
of wine, and Jesus (being Jesus)
told them to bring out the empty carafes,
and before their eyes geysers of the best
chardonnay spewed forth, and that as we know
is the miracle of the chardonnay, and then and there
the newlyweds, ex-Gen X entrepreneurs,
signed him up to sell miracle wine on the Home
Shopping Network, they could tell Jesus
wasnt going to be just another one-hit
wonder, they googled him and discovered
that he had multiplied bread in Boston
and sh in Maine, had made the snow-blind see
in Chicago and the arthritic walk in Florida,
and someone had even seen him lifting
the lacerated soul of a boy lured by love
one evening in Wyoming, and they said
wait a minute, theres more to this motherfucker
than meets the eye, so they emptied his pockets
and found a fragment of the Dead Sea Scrolls
and a braided lock of his lovers hair, and on his palms
the hennaed remembrances of forgotten Bedouins,
and underneath his eyelids the eternal visions
of the fatal Essenes, and they cat-scanned him
and tested his uids and found in his marrow
the last shrapnel of compassion
and all our nostalgia and all our non sequiturs
and nally they said, listen Jesus,
you carry a torch for the world
youre worth a lot of silver
but we just got to know, have you ever slept
with a man, have you ever cut loose
27
an unborn child, are you a nigger,
a fag, a slope, a Jew, and Jesus repliedI am
the last Adam, in me time begins
anew, time which contains all
and all bodies containbut that went totally
over their heads, too bad, Jesus, the ratings
are going to kill you, so they organized a mob
and nailed him to a windmill outside of
Joshua Tree State Park, this is how we wait
for the second coming, this is how we save
the ones who burn, the January sky
broke open with a funnel of arctic cold,
normal for this time of the year.
28
The End of the World Will Happen
on December 21, 2012
If youre reading this after 2012, the Mayans were
dead wrong. Even so its been wonderful speaking
in the future tense. There must be simpler ways to tell
which way apocalypse is heading. I would like to live
aimlessly, a prophet inspired by pure hallucination.
Desire is the fossil fuel that drives my empire.
The body is the portal of perfection. Not love:
that comes later. I know something moves inside us,
liquid and language, mortal and necessary. But skin
deep, keeping its innermost secrets, it belongs
to the lachrymose danger and commonwealth
of angels. Do you understand what Im trying
to say: well invade each others conspiracies,
all the sorrowful mysteries. Then Ill wake up mornings
already stalking poems hidden in codes so simple
they will bafe the CIA, the MI5. Maybe,
though this is unlikely, there will be cold wars
to decipher them. Underneath the blazing howitzers
will you ever give yourself. Give yourself until
we get tired of each others odors. Ill grow darker
each summer, forget me, Ill be distant and older,
my life expanding like the Big Bang. At 60
I will be as dark as a negro. My body battle-scarred
with sunlight no one can see. Where would you be
but in the solstice of it, the eternal hours
of the end of the world? Ive used you for my pleasure,
comrade, you have satiated me. Ill wait for you
at the junction of burnt emotions. Ill send a postcard
from the sad and brave frontiers. Ill book a table
at the cabaret of forgetting, party of two.
29
Subtitles Off
The lords of largesse anoint you with their yes
Safe passage for the boy whose small body you lay
bleeding on the kitchen tiles
The world is as wide as a letterbox screen
You sit in the dark with the subtitles off
What is unknowable cant exist but
God slogs in outer space, wish he were not love
but logic, wait long enough and he may yet
expose himself, a bleep, a bang, an intelligent
Design, like Ginol, supreme headhunter
of Papuan cannibals, who revised the universe
ve times, devouring the last, imperfect one
Sorrow seeks its own reection among the living
Ill remember your apocalypse if youll remember mine
It will be a holiday of the senses
Its all quiet now in the epicenter of your
(yearning) (desolation) (boredom) (religion)
If A then B: If Jesus died for your sins
Then rest your ruins on the glorious mysteries
Strangle the pedophile in his jail cell
Youre on death row anyway
30
Poems of Sorrow,
after Luis Gonzlez Palma
Theres a child being baptized with a crown of thorns.
Theres a soldier whose best friend will shoot him dead.
Theres an india who grieved for the soldier
even while he was alive;
this is her garland of perfumed skulls.
This is the man who spoke bird language
and escaped unharmed
from the bereavement of human words.
This is destiny written on the face of the woman
who wears the tropics in her hair, black hibiscus
own by jet across the sea, nigger bitch, slave.
This is the angel in his suit of rusty armor.
This is the virgin who lost her laughter to the
harlequins.
This is the boy desired by God the Pedophile.
This is the drug, the holy ghost, that takes away my
fear.
Beyond this cage is America, awless and hermetic.
This is the city shrunk to the size of an eye.
And this is the shirt they will kill me in.
And this the rose that signies many things:
bonre, sister, body breaking.
In the other book of creation God sees sorrow
and says it is good.
This is a tape to measure the circumference of the soul.
This is Juan, who can read only numbers.
This is the girl who danced like air
(shes dead now, her body betrothed to air).
This is the precise ssure of the bone,
its instinct and vocation,
this is how silence oats in the houses of the missing,
the perfect disguise of the dragony.
This is the graveyard of broken watches and discarded
31
chandeliers.
This is the time of the arrival of assassins.
Sorrow is all stillness, a pool of rainwater.
Sorrow is a red silk line between the dreamed and the
disappeared.
This is what I dreamed last night
(you cant see it, because it was just a dream).
32
Politoxic
You will die on your way to America
Youre declared missing long before you disappear
Theyve called off all further search for you
But its still too early to patrol the hemisphere
The bullets are dormant in their breathtaking shells
Someone else will watch the suicides
Lie down beneath the relight of missiles
One world persists in the eye of television
Another in the eye of the newborn
Let the oldest living person have her say
Before the parliaments of the world
Let all who feed on the suffering of others say aye
Cities become longings, departures canceled on a
blinking screen
Let your body be drawn to my body
My heart is ticking inside its shelter
Dug in and waiting for someone to misstep and
explode
You walk away: there are no exits
Your country is your poem: no one has been spared
You will die in the name of America
Fall from the sky, you black suited angels
Grief is a river that hollows out the soul
So that grace in the guise of silence can settle in
May these words be invisible like light
May light inltrate the unsuspecting
33
You say your name: it no longer belongs to you
Your country is your poem: no one has been spared
You walk away: your absence walks ahead of you
34
In times of ascendancy, the conjecture that mans existence
is a constant, unvarying quantity can sadden or irritate us;
in times of decline (such as the present), it holds out the
assurance that no ignominy, no calamity, no dictator, can
impoverish us.
Jorge Luis Borges
Two Nudes
She fears April most of all, when the monsoon
sties the little devotion left between us. I blame
the monsoon, not her. Coasting southwest
from Sarawak, the air reeks of cardamom,
crab roe, corpses. Soldiers are bombing Pikit,
three thousand Muslim refugees pour into
the Christian churches. She doesnt see the irony of it,
how we always wind up nursing the ones
we savage the most. She lies in bed like my
weather-beaten republic, too sad to respond
to how badly I touch her, to how too fast or too slow
I come. You might think Im making this up,
but this morning she told me, Money
is the most beautiful object in the world.
Shes looking for something to believe in,
beyond the obvious thats too bright, too close
to see. Dear Eric, he writes, I run to you
only when Im on the verge of disintegrating.
Summer in the tropics is all Lent, all repentance
and resurrection, and Im sick of it. She sticks her
thumbs
into the scabbed stigmata of my hands. I feel no pain.
She tells me war is inescapable. You must bomb
a few towns if you want peace. If we have children,
they will be among the nine out of ten
who will never speak in the future tense.
For some reason she nds this comforting.
When she lies like this, fetal, one arm stretched out
to touch my face, she reminds me of the crook
of the northern tip of Sulawesi. She showed it once to
me
on a map: a jungle island almost human in form,
teeming with terror, incredibly poor.
37
Autobiography of Water
1
I searched for the origin of my countrys sorrow
like an explorer looking for a rivers source.
I searched for it so I could give it a name
and trace its course on a map, so future travelers
could pinpoint its depths and bends
and say: Ive been there. I wanted to nd
its history, to know if its waters were rich
with mud and minerals that made pottery
glisten like metal, or impoverished
and stricken with bad luck, drifting
eels and corpses to dead-end towns.
If cities were built upon it, wars waged
to win it. Or if it meandered all its life
unknown, a vengeful but healing deity,
crossed only once by a tribe whose name
no one now recalls.
2
If you ask about my life
I will tell you: I once loved someone
who scavenged for shipwrecks.
If you ask for a history I will say:
born at midnight, in a city
hospital, in the year of Sputnik.
If you ask for references I will say:
I told everyone what I thought
was the truth. If you ask for an address
I will say: water is the purest state
of impermanence.
38
3
Water is the opposite
of repose. Hibiscus is the opposite
of mausoleum. Slipstream
is the opposite of stalactite. Memory
is the opposite of fear. Like a magic lantern
that describes the earth in revolutions
of shadow and moonlight, mind is an object
I carry with me: that much to me
is real. Forgetting is the opposite of war.
Love grows out of its own opposite,
which is silence. Albedo is the opposite
of midnight. We are all made of charm,
strange, up and down. God eats us
when we die. We are small
and bitter, like a pill.
39
Self-Portrait in Hell
I will build a wall around my past.
I will build a wall around my country.
I will build a wall around my memory.
I will set broken bottles on top of the wall.
Just like they do in my country.
I will spread thorns and nails and crowns of barbed
wire.
I will put up a sign saying, It is forbidden to lean
against this wall.
In that walled-up space I will let everything grow in
wild abandon.
Weeds, snakes, mushrooms, worms, bacteria, orchids,
hornets,
dragonies, cockroaches, mosquitoes, maggots, rats.
The good will be few and dwindling.
The evil will devour the good.
Just like they do in my country.
I will walk away from the safety of remembering
but I will keep an amulet against those
who still covet the last things I carry:
I will bear my anger in silence.
I will lay down my heart in ames.
I will burn the sign of the cross on my forehead.
I will wear my countrys desolation
as though it were tailor-made for me.
Over the years their meaning will wear out.
Only I will recall what they once stood for,
my anger, my cross, my heart of embers.
No one will ever recognize me.
40
Posthumous
I come from a country called Sorrow,
I was born by a river called Despair,
on a street called Longing, in a month
full of rain. I walked away
and let the summers devour
the silence that settled in my place.
All the laws that had held me down,
bogus like medals on the coat
of a dictatorI renounced them all
and wore my deance like Cain,
young and smeared, a wanderer
among things unspoken.
One night, during curfew, I hid in the back
of an eight-wheel truck. Patrol jeeps rumbled
through the alleys, spooks
on an empty planet. At daybreak
I staggered out to the light
among the early factory workers,
a ragtag army of Lazaruses.
I met a boy who had a dozen names
ripped in blue tattoos on his back,
Lando, Armando, putang
ina mo, mementos of inmates
who had raped him in jail.
A girl I knew got pregnant,
then her boyfriend slashed her throat
and days later the beer bottle shards
splintered around her neck still
stuck gleaming like amber jewels.
41
The monsoon came, six months
of innite rain. The towns I once knew
were wiped clean,
and everyone said it was God
revising his poem.
In a shing village in Mindoro
a tourist from America
offered me money to eat
poison mushrooms with him.
Later that night, before he took
my cock in his mouth, he said:
Youll never forget this.
42
My Generation
One went to war with his own people,
with an AK47 he knew
how to wreck a body long before
he learned to desire one.
Another burned down his peasants huts,
and another was shot down
for reporting it on TV.
And yet another crossed the Alps
on foot, got lucky,
found work as a toilet cleaner
in a palazzo in Rome.
And I became a poet
so I would have nothing to do
with the government of humans,
only to carry like river water
in pails on two ends of a stick
the weight of remembering
and the weight of forgiving.
A decade into the new millennium
we will hold a congress
to assess what weve done.
We will come from many worlds,
many wars. No scars will show.
No memories will be the same.
One will say, I killed a hundred people
in one night. And another,
in the blinding snow
I refused such a beautiful death.
And another, we waited and waited,
but the end of the world never came.
43
Amigo Warfare
Because you seize our land
and call it hope,
because you manufacture desolation
and call it right-of-way. Because
your cavalries cut our children open
to expose their hearts of coal.
Because you send a shining eet
of your youngest men,
lust still forming in their bones.
Because their bodies rape the bodies
of our neighbors. Because you sleep
soundly through it all.
Because you divide us from our history
and install a thousand checkpoints
in between.
Because you line the streets with bricks
torn down from temples,
because our sleepless gods
wander among the missing.
Because your prophets tell us theres a heaven
but theres no more room.
Because you feed your words
into our language, and now we speak
like strangers to one another.
Because you make our women wear
their nakedness like a gem.
44
Because you scorch the jungles
with the counterfeit daylight of cities.
Because you intoxicate our rivers.
Because you harpoon all our whales.
Because you teach us how to torture one another
with the simplest of elements,
re and water.
Because you offer praise and weapons
to our dictators. Because you build blockades
around those who give us strength,
brother, sister, lover, friend.
Because you send your spies out
to investigate our dreams.
Because we dream the dangerous
in which the world is fertile
with remembering, subversive
with desire. Because the old bury
the young. Because we use our sorrow
wisely, as armaments.
Because you brand our tongues
with silence. Because you watch us
in fear, even while we sing.
45
Pictures from a Country in
Mourning, after Botero
1: Ofcial portrait of the military junta
The junta has declared there will be no seasons
but drought and rain. The junta has declared
all mourning will be done on Wednesdays,
all births at noon, and we shall read from right
to left, except on Sundays, when God deserves
our silence. No unauthorized auguries shall prevail;
comets are contraband; all prophets shall repent.
The republic will respect all religions
except those proscribed; there will be quotas
for sources of happiness, such as alcohol and sex.
The ofcial portrait of the military junta
will be displayed in all homes, public ofces,
libraries, churches, and in the private dens
of prostitutes, so that citizens may remember
their allegiance even in the fervency of love.
But only for tonight, let them turn their faces
away from us, let them ignore
the hearts insurgencies. Above our bed
the President hovers, vast as God. His wife,
weighed down by a brocade of pearls,
is small and silent as a spy.
A governess inherited from the State
holds in her arms their only son,
the nations future in a crook
of dusty lace. The archbishop
goes through the motions of benediction,
and various generals are caught
in the crossre of grace, boot-deep
in roses, crowned with halos of ies.
46
2: The thief
The rooftops of Medellin
have the color of dried blood.
The sky over Medellin
is invisible to the naked eye.
Thats why the windows are small
and the rooms reek of perpetual
twilight: this is my kingdom
when the night draws me out.
In my room (in a barrio
I wont name), I keep the fortunes
of my wounded country:
silver chalices, rosaries,
diamonds as impermeable
as a prayer, photographs of people
I will never know, but may meet
occasionally on the street.
I do my work singly and quietly,
and I do nobody harm.
There is heaven beyond
the rooftops of Medellin:
I dredge the towns of the weight
of sin, and in their weightless sleep
I take the sleepers closer
to the skies of Medellin.
3: Matador
There it is: death in the eyes of the man
who will never sleep again.
His suit of lights a size too small,
47
his cape too golden, a cargo
of embroidered roses.
Because it is futile to challenge death
he will challenge it forever:
the only battle worth ghting
is the one he will never win.
In a town south of nowhere
a volcano smudges the sky,
and it showers on his path
an impossible hailstorm,
a rain of apples from a season
still to come. Nothing makes sense
in the world of nal negotiations.
Death lurking beside the man
already remembered by all
the early dead. It is a cherubs
skeleton, a small imp
brandishing a crimson
saber, so small it is nothing
but a whisper.
48
Disciples of the Dog
Every afternoon, while this stupid town takes its siesta,
I like to meander in the streets and pretend Im a dog.
I limp around, a bag of scabs, dragging my two hind
legs
like a leper looking for a Christ. I hoist my carcass
up Calle de Embajadores where I dump my load,
so when the great sedans chug away from the tourist
shops
I can say Ive left my mark on all who pass by Mojacar.
You got to let them know who really rules around this
joint.
These days, no one talks about who once pursued the
waters
echo, the miracle of the earliest wells, the cave
of mimosas, the frog songs by the gorge. The
Phoenicians,
mysterious, self-absorbed, vanished in thin air. The
Muslims
skedaddled soon. And the Christians are all over the
place
its best to ignore them. The levante howls from the
coast
and picks at the dregs of all weve been. Its old now,
toothless
like the gypsy selling raw almonds in the market
square.
Wait long enough and even she will disappear. Por n,
this town will be left to us dogs, and well scamper
around
whether its siesta time or not, and piss in bars, and
ght
49
over food, and share our eas, and brag all night to the
moon
how many bitches will remember us long after were
gone.
50
The Skin of War
The world like the body has grown old and tired of
love.
But love has nowhere else to go. It dies somewhere
in the body, quiet and unresisting, the way the elderly
die in Rajasthan, a place you leave only by dying.
We bid them leave, let go. We empty their pockets
of bread and knives, the things that have held them
down.
Memory is weightless, but it feeds on the massive
space
it inhabits. Open the windows, let it feed on air,
make room and offer it to those in need: to newly-weds
and the newborn. The scraps we throw to pigeons
and orphans, who ght over them like refugees
scrimmaging for aid in a makeshift holding camp.
These gifts mean nothing, are not symbolic:
like bread and knives, nourishment and defense,
ordinary implements we carry on camels backs
from town to shattered town. At the border
the soldiers ask us where weve been, what we own:
goat wool for the cold, shoes with soles scraped thin.
Are we safe now, can we call our mothers?
Hide your faces behind burqas; in war everyone
51
looks the same. And we reply, here is my country,
hidden in the camouage of the body. The gates
have all been left open. Someone is raping
the children. And we have nothing to declare.
For Agha Shahid Ali
52
The Remembered World
The songs that bid the refugee farewell,
the songs that bid the conqueror to stay
resemble one another.
Mahmoud Darweesh
Half the people love,
half the people hate.
And where is my place between such well-matched
halves?
Yehuda Amichai
1
Some of us are born in the year of the dollar,
some in the year of the gun.
But there must be a season
no one has weapons or currency for,
in which the smallest voices
still give praise to rain.
Some leave to become the journey,
to become not nite body but innite road.
Some survive by speaking a language
thats the wrong size for their tongues.
Some learn to respond only
to the numbers that cancel their names.
Like the blind, I touch their faces
and recognize them by what I cannot see.
Tanks uproot tamarind trees
older than my grandfathers grandfather.
Mosquitoes multiply and villages disappear.
53
Some of us die in the year of assassins,
some in the year of greed.
But how did they change the shape of the earth
to t the shape of war?
When did our voices become an instrument
no one can play?
Memory is a territory no parliament has claimed.
Soon bulldozers will come and our stories will bleed
through the porous edges of the remembered world.
2
Lord, on the seventh day
you were done with the world.
With your distance youve erased
all evil and all good. I am alive
in your marvelous silence. The streets at dusk
open themselves to me, like the bodies of lovers
whose scars tell a story so solitary
it can only be shared without words.
I dream the dreams of all my dead. I invade
their emptiness and carry off their names.
I will endure this stillness,
the smoldering hours that continue
to erase me, as though by my birth
I have broken a pact, that I remain
invisible and small.
So I carry everything with me,
though its almost over, though Im tired
of being strong. I leave nothing
for grief to feed on.
Not my mothers young sorrow, my sisters life
54
of water, my fathers solitude,
my brothers cities occupied and broken.
Not these words, though they weigh me down.
Not the mirrors of the moon, be they false oceans, all
illusion.
Not even love, whose October grows ever more faint
in yours.
The shattered Thursdays,
the stories we refuse to surrender, the wounded
and those who woundwhen I take my turn
I will name each one,
no paradise will be so boundless
for all that I will name.
55
The aim of art is to prepare a person for death, to plough
and harrow his soul, rendering it capable of turning to good.
Andrey Tarkovsky
The Map of Light
Because you are indifferent, I can offer each morning
only to starlings and not face their ridicule.
They know the map of light is a burden
shared in poverty. They know that every syllable
is deance, an act of survival.
Mercy looks for moving targets.
Those who have just been born dont know what its
like
to spend an eternity searching. I will let them sleep
quietly, and hope when they wake wed have left
enough of the world to live in.
And as the hours pass I will speak in codes again.
In the sted cold. In the warm evenings
that weaken my resolve. So that those who listen
will keep on asking until all our questions
have circumnavigated the earth.
Someone will release the borders from their tyranny.
When I die my body, a cargo of memories,
will disperse into air. Birds will y
through me, breathing the words
I no longer remember.
59
Valley of Marvels
You must be single-minded as Humberto
Delgarenna, who risked his life
crossing the Valle des Merveilles
to carve his name on Mont Bego.
The year was 1629. He may have fallen
from the crags, his bones now interred
with grafti, the zigzags and apothems
whose inscrutability was sorcery, medicine,
object of fear. Let that be a lesson
to all who want to be remembered.
You must carry nothing, disappear quietly,
leave no other clues. A sailor in a shipwreck,
dazzled by Saint Elmos re. A hunter
or a shepherd, the words wool and venison
sacred to you. Decipher the enigma
of verdigris. Be metal, be clandestine.
Navigate through shadows, use touch
and sound to recognize the shape
of luminance. Learn a skill, how to carve
a rouelle, a awless spoke, perfection
as an act of worship. Find your way back
to water through guesswork; begin from
the cul-de-sacs of Tende. And if you discover
the seven rivers to be true, drink and resist
believing youve been saved. You will not
be saved. You will walk away as blinded
as you were before, and live so long
no one will recall the midnight
you were born. The mornings will be cold.
The towns will lose their tools and weapons.
Invaders will come, rst the Remedello,
then the Rhne. They will nd, clenched
between your teeth, the words dagger
60
and halberd. They will uncurl from your ngers
objects once marvelous to you: billhook,
pickaxe, int. Your bones will resemble rock.
61
Antonio Machados Off-Season
Tombs and the dead terrify me. Yet a young face one
day
appears, short of breath, with no good news from
Seville.
Collioure in November is barren as the outer planets.
Les Templiers Bar and Hotel is only half-full. The
mistral
has shut down the lovely balconies along the
promenade
where, at some point, under a windswept moon,
Antonio Machado walks his mother home to die. You
cant tell
by the calm on their faces how theyve colluded like
streetwise scalawags, how theyve perfected the
illusion.
No one knows that something is about to come amiss,
a pixel will disappear from the screen. The baker is
already
lling the alleys with the telltale scent of rising dough.
Someone is singing a ballad in Catalan, a language
invisible
to the naked eye. The rookie legionnaires will come
later,
but even now their cofns oat along the estuary
among the brightly colored kayaks. The castles
lookout
is only partly lit to save on gas. War is elsewhere
and is always coming near. If you know where to walk
you can follow the shape of a swastika. Young men
drink
in soccer bars, as beautiful as the whores they love to
fuck,
an empire of salt on each others skins. Antonio
Machado
62
throws the windows open. The African wind blusters
in.
He has a view of the cemetery. He knows exactly
where
his bones will continue to die. He clothes his mother
in his own suit and xes his hat on her head. He waits
for her
to fall asleep in a room they havent used in years.
Now he wears her gown, a wig of twigs, her soft red
shoes,
and lies down on her bed. And just as he knew it,
as the moon drowned in the sea, the devil came
with the rumbling of the garbage truck, sniffed around,
recognized the nauseating cologne, and took him
down,
bones and all, to the infralunar of forgetting. This is
how
you save someone. This is how you disappear.
No one knows what happened. The messengers still
keep coming. His mailbox still gets plump with mail.
Nothing gets returned to sender. No one eats the roses.
63
Burning the Body, after Tarkovsky
Our bodies are a sign that time once made
its home in us, we are connected to time
the way the earth wears the orbit of the moon,
and light is how time communicates, feeling
is memory distilled to its purest form:
dont you remember how the evening
wouldnt let go of all that blue, how your tongue
woke salt from its sleep? In the space made sacred
by bone and steel, does the cold still offend you,
what is the velocity of silence,
does your night correspond to our night,
are we foreign now, do the things we touch
turn to light, and is this how we feel
the presence of time, not by remembering
but by touching? In a dream you found
your mothers house, you stood by the door
but she couldnt let you in, the dream
resisted you. You were never at home
in the body, its weighed with longing,
its needs too soon extinct. You lit a candle
across the water until the wind gave up
and let you pass: by mere insistence
you could have saved the world. No one
saw you, no one pulled you out of the sulfur,
but the dying still walk miles to it,
in their minds already healed. Youve taken
everything thats failed, dream, memory,
the soul displaced from its ecliptic,
into a kind of heaven, a sovereign
indifference. You entered it with your body
all on re. Dusk was nesting in winters trees.
The hours burned away. Nothing was spared.
64
Ceremony, after Kiarostami
Where she departs there will be no strawberries
to carry home. No women who will scar
their faces so she wont miss this earth
still new to suffering, this morning
so early and green.
The elds are ripe as butter. Perched on the roofs,
light proclaims the unfamiliar world.
Its said that the good pass on, but inferno
is everything we cant let go,
eternal remembering.
The road curves uphill to the sun. The country
is radiant and wide. May my passing be
as bountiful. Whats tragic is not that
this journey ends, but that we once walked
through such possibilities.
Im learning how to wait, how not to look away.
The stones are dug deep, the soul is xed
in place. Time takes and replenishes,
sweeping towards me
with all my future joys.
65
Koan: The Last Eclipse
of the Millennium
The one who begins this poem wont be the same
as the one who will end it. Words like light
must travel as both particles and waves, defying
the possible. In an hour a million people will fail
to express in twenty-six languages this magnicence,
a momentary snarl of orbits. When the mouth
opens, all are wrong. I think words are like
Schrdingers cat: unless you look, theyre neither dead
nor alive. The one who ends this poem is not
the one who will stand accused and be forced
to deny it. Which dies rst, memory or the thing
remembered? When I think, is my mind thinking me?
Does the soul echolocate its way in the world,
looking for an exit? Fuck words, nothing spoken
comprehends the deantly ephemeral.
I take my incompleteness with the rest, an exile
in any language. In Zen, one arrives at
no-more-language and starts over, the bulls eye
of zero yearning. X = wonder, vivid under
the spells recurring question: Peut-on natre-mourir?
Lust kills joy instantly: half glass fully empty.
Diamond cusp, be beautiful, brief, and blinding.
66
Abell 2218
Using a cluster of galaxies called Abell 2218 as a
gravitational lens to refract light and magnify distances 30
times beyond the cluster, scientists have found what they believe
could be the beginning of the universe.
The object gives a faint light.
Demiurge, Axiogenesis, call it
what you will: the light from which
all light emanates as
hypothesis. The breath roaring out, the Word.
Expressed by the equation x = im/possible,
it persists in memory that is not memory
but a place, and a place-to-be: already,
in the rst convulsions of becoming,
I may be walking down a street,
I may be born or I may be
dying, a sunset would
already ll me with
longing, or would
only now be
learning to
burn. And
I: what
am
I?
67
The object is small,
containing no more than a million stars.
Out of these stars, it is possible
only one planet would be
livable. On this planet, it is possible only two or three
continents would survive economics, politics, war.
Of these continents, only ve or so hegemonies
would rule the world. Of these nations, one
percent of the population would exploit
the rest. In spaces too small for light
to crawl I'll hide everything I own.
I'll keep you there for safety.
I'll build a shelter for your
fears. I'll be your own
suicide bomber, a
satellite in the
dwindling
orbits, a
mortal
Om.
68
The object is physically young.
Born yesterday, I tend to believe
whatever seems likely to save me,
or give me money. Today
I'd be walking down the avenue
and chance upon a saint.
I'll shave my head. I'll move my ass to Dharamsala.
Learn about life from tabloids; death is the end of
now. I dream only of mythological creatures.
I use my body to nd love. I eat all the
wrong foods. I believe what I see
with my own two eyes. Fear
eats me. I have to look
for a job. I can sprint
faster than sound.
I burn forever,
I have no
end.
69
The light at the beginning of the universe
is a mere sliver of space.
In the space that it takes to unravel a star,
how much room is taken
by a third world war? What time is it
in Kabul? How old
would I be in 1521? If a quasar bends in the light,
do cities warp in it, bridges twist and turn, cars
crash? Do words like these get transcribed
by some underpaid clerk in the corridors
of space? Will the end of the world be
televised? And who will I die with?
Memory expands, doesn't it?
Or does it recede, a quick
blue zip, into its own
beginning? And if
it does, do we
age back
into
!
?
70
Yellow Tang
My genesis will reinvent
all things imperishable,
diamonds and bones.
My solar systems will be spectacularly violent,
wrenching moons out of planets,
creatures from a cocktail of toxins.
My angels are jellysh,
electric, nearly invisible,
armed with poisoned harpoons.
My archangels are yellow tang.
They feed on sunlight.
They speak through color.
Anything in their path turns blind.
The same engine that snuffs the stars
propels the plankton and spermatozoa,
foretells the itinerary of rivers
and the extinction of the coelacanth,
compact as a pearl yet massive
as bewitchment, this human need
for darkness, for mystery.
In the dead of night I, too, grow weaker
and give in. I listen only
to what I believe is the sound
of the rst moment of the world,
the solitude of the anemone.
To begin all over and trace the logic
that brought us here,
a farrago squirming in the net of time,
71
a desperate miracle
or a fatal mistake.
But to begin like the protozoan,
a marvel of feeding
and simple multiplication,
innity in a single cell.
To begin this small, to know
one life alone completes the world.
Until the sun cuts through the waves,
until the planets dwindle and hold still,
and love rips us open
and another million years begin.
72
Tektite
In the space that it takes to ll a life with memory
theres an innite receptacle
that never gets lled
In a room or a stairwell, theres a lamp
that was never lit and a word
that died for not being spoken
During nights of misery and insomnia
there was a blue egg of light
that sheltered the children
The rain cracked open the hard dry shell
of the earth, but something
refused to be born
Among words of slander and derision
there was always someone
who said That is not so
Through all the wars of our two centuries
there must have been at least one soul
that remained unbroken
Of all the coins we have given
did one ever begin to solve
the equation of hunger
And today, a day full of rain,
where do I nd one object
that has not felt a longing for water
In elevators, in a shoe, in the waxed
rinds of oranges, there is one atom
73
that has not yet been dened
In the stillness of the virus
or volcano, something stays
awake, painfully small
A tektite travels light years
only to fall in the desert
The lizards gleam and scatter away
74
le Saint-Honorat
The jagged rocks rising out of the bay
are weaker than water, the ants are fat
with sap and dirt. This is the brink
of the world as far as the eye can see,
the verge between what is desired
and what is possible, the vineyards
already attaining their perfection,
across the strait the murmuring women,
their heads shorn, their bodies given over
to penance and Saint Marguerite.
What does all this matter now,
though youve given up the world
the world has not given up on you,
the wars of Genoa still smolder
in you, bread and salt have never been
more worthy to you, the pink light lifting
in San Bernardino, the eyes of sh
stunned in nets and dying of air.
Alone at night it is still the water
you call to: I will bless the cacti
each day that I live, the black heron
that murders for food, the pines that crash
from the sheer weight of thunder.
Theres something in the sky or sea
too deep or too blue to decipher:
you venerate the mysterious because
of the boundaries it denes, the body
made impossibly human. You walk this path
around and around until you recognize
the shape and destiny of the earth,
until your silence resembles
the waters persistence or the fatal
75
patience of the ant, the nameless saints
whose industry is endless praise.
This silence can never be unlearned.
76
Melting City (1)
One of these days Im going to melt all the gold of
Paris
and turn it into money. Ill spread it over the ghettos
of the Arabs, over the palm of the old woman begging
on the steps of Barbs-Rochechouart; shell wake up
with brilliant tattoos burning in her hands.
Ill take all the hunger of the world
and use it as my ammunition. Ill live in frontiers
where languages merge and confuse the tongue.
Ill eat only chickpeas and pepper
and learn to crush olives for oil. Ill use the oil
for bathing and nourishment and sex.
Ill follow an angel in the fog of the baths
and sit next to him while three men take turns
sucking his cock. Ill dream only on Tuesdays
and only at 4 A.M. Ill be a prostitute for a night
and earn my living giving pleasure.
Ive already told you how the earth spins backward
in the wrong direction and well wind up
in the rst moment of the world, a breath, an urge
to be, a calculated uncertainty.
Ive told you that water decrees its own fate
and the deeper it is the less light you need,
that light moves in circles, what you are now
is already a reection in a hundred years.
Ive told you how Ive seen the end of the world,
it will come slowly, like madness, like a boat
cruising the Seine. I feel every life that is shown to me
comes when it is most broken and most in need,
and I tell you what Ive already said:
I will pave the gold of Paris all over your lives,
I will do it with words, if words mean anything to you.
77
This is the way Ive always known it,
though all my life I wanted not to believe,
I did everything I could not to believe.
78
# 846
Time for healing has begun again
light so languid spreads itself
over the vineyard trellises
from Les Arcs-Draguignan
to Gare du Nord
everyones rocked to sleep on the TGV
there you go faster than
the speed of memory
green is dying everywhere
and that is good
the cemeteries stacked on the hills
the dry earth crunching
its nest of bones
the shuttered windows like blue pools of sky
you have chosen to believe in something
and now it is your burden
not to deny it
the telephone wires collect the static
of all the names
youve never called, and night
is a different era
you have begun to worship
nothing in it that declines
the possibility of beauty
to protect what is dangerous to you
whose colors lacerate you
and whose every gesture
is subliminal, that too is good
you will not slow down
till darkness overwhelms you, it will never
overwhelm you, you are the balance
and spire, the armor and sail,
you are the smokestacks
and the spray paint, the shadow
79
of the hanging tree
you are the Saracens
and you are the Cross
nothing you do contradicts
the agreement you made
with your birth
look out the window
at a sky full of innities
no one hears it but you
time for healing has begun
as it never fails to do
this hour, this track
no matter whose sorrow
youve pledged allegiance to
this orbit, this republic
you will be drawn again and again
to where all things must begin,
the zero of caliphs who dreamed
in numbers, drawn back to stations
where poets and soldiers
go home wounded
you will forgive
what is most difcult to forgive
then nothing more
will need your words.
For Reine Arcache Melvin
80
Rampart
If I must learn the art of nothingness
I would have to let go of this hour, the damp light
of cities, such stillness in the air that has given up
looking for itself in these endless rooms.
Time, deposed tyrant, has been reduced
to waiting. Because Ive stopped counting,
the stars grow ever more invisible,
the planets pale. The sun is old, a stranded
speck, unmoored and drifting
among angels and satellites.
But I can still walk down these streets,
I can imagine Im more than light
made visible, and the carriages stop
for me, and the horses neigh in protest
and scrape their hooves against the stones.
Late afternoon. Lying in someones bed,
spellbound by the senses,
I accept the disquietude
of the mortal. One must disappear
without too much paraphernalia.
Ive done away with the river and all its dead.
Ive renounced my allegiance to names
and silence, avenues and dead-ends,
wars of attrition, heads of state.
And if I couldnt stop the sun from sinking
with the weight of its gold, I deny any part
in all this beauty: for all this providence
my words are late apologies, a stful of roses.
81
No Fly Zone
Whatever form you imagine your worst fear,
if the zigzag of sunlight on the stoop profoundly
disturbs you, no matter how much bitterness
your earliest memory casts on your dinner plate,
Whether you come from a country of refugees
or xenophobes, whether you sleep
on the right side of the bed or the left, with a man
or a woman, in whatever language
you articulate your desire,
Even if tanks roll out of armories
looking for the dead center of mothers hearts,
or in a city somewhere someone broods under a lamp
and pronounces a few words
that could have saved a life,
Until the earth implodes with industry
and volcanoes sputter their last reproach,
No matter who you were two weeks ago,
no matter what voluntary evil lurked
in your heart when you woke this morning,
and you smoked a cigarette in the rain
and someones name tasted like blood on your lips,
I am glad to share this lifetime with you,
there is no other planet where the cultivation of souls
is possible, none that we know of;
may the happiness of others protect you,
may you nd the ashing exit signs
at the turnpikes of suffering
and a coin to buy your way out of hell.
82
Notes
The epigraphs are from the following sources: What
This Land Says to Me, by Michelangelo Antonioni,
from The Architecture of Vision (Marsilio Publishers,
1996); Circular Time, by Jorge Luis Borges, from
Selected Non-Fictions, translation by Eliot Weinberger
(Viking, 1999); and Sculpting in Time by Andrey
Tarkovsky, translation by Kitty Hunter-Blair
(University of Texas Press, 1986).
Poem Not Written in Catalan quotes a line from
Salvador Espriu.
Daisy Cutter paraphrases a statement by Slavoj
Zizek: A shared lie is an incomparably more effective
bond for a group than the truth.
Two Nudes: Pikit, a village in the largely Muslim
island of Mindanao, was bombed for weeks by the
Philippine military in support of the United States war
against terrorism.
Amigo Warfare was what the Americans derisively
called the Filipino style of resistance [from 1899 to
1904]. The Filipinos were friends during the day or
when confronted, but at night or when no one was
looking, they were guerrillas. From The Philippine-
American War: Friendship and Forgetting, by
Reynaldo C. Ileto, in Vestiges of War (Shaw, Francia,
eds., New York University Press, 2002).
The Remembered World: The epigraphs are from
Sand and Other Poems by Mahmoud Darweesh,
translation by Rana Kabbani (KPI London, 1986), and
The Selected Poetry of Yehuda Amichai, translation by
Chana Bloch and Stephen Mitchell (Harper Perennial,
1986).
Valley of Marvels: According to archaeologist Henry
de Lumley, the mysterious rock carvings found in the
Valle des Merveilles in the Alps of Southeastern
France were inscribed between 1800 B.C. and 1500
B.C. Shaman-chiefs, called orants, may have used these
grafti to interpret omens, giving them considerable
political power. The valley appears to have been a
sacred place during the Bronze Age, says De Lumley.
But by the beginning of the rst millennium (100
B.C.) its message was lost. Humberto Delgarennas is
the earliest grafto from recorded history, a relic of
pilgrimages shepherds and climbers took from around
the 1600s, risking the punishing 6,000-ft. trek from
Tende.
Koan: The Last Eclipse of the Millennium quotes a
line from Zen master Mumon.
Melting City (1) is the text for a short video, Veras
Room.
Rampart quotes a line from Rene Char.
Eric Gamalinda was born and raised in Manila, the
Philippines, and has been residing in New York City
since 1994. He has received the Asian American
Literary Award for his previous collection of poetry,
Zero Gravity (Alice James Books, 1999), as well as a
fellowship in ction from the New York Foundation
for the Arts.