Glucking

I have on my lap right now The Wild Iris and here is something from it.

The Hawthorn Tree
by Louise Gluck 

Side by side, not
hand in hand: I watch you
walking in the summer garden–things
that can’t move
learn to see; I do not need
to chase you through
the garden; human beings leave
signs of feeling
everywhere, flowers
scattered on the dirt path, all
white and gold, some
lifted a little by
the evening wind; I do not need
to follow where you are now,
deep in the poisonous field, to know
the cause of your flight, human
passion or rage: for what else
would you let drop
all you have gathered?

 

Those you’ve let drop, are they really worth picking up again?

Moving on.

In your house

I plant small things all over your house. A pack of mints by the sink, an old receipt under a pillow, a pen on your table. Things that could belong to anybody. I haunt your house like this.

4:35 PM

Neighbor starts playing With or Without You and it sounds like it’s coming from another point in time. I almost see you standing beside me singing the same song in a karaoke bar and I am thinking that your voice sounds nice. “This is for you ___” you say to a friend who isn’t there, whose name you saw in a list of casualties of a shoot out in Davao.

Whitey

Whitey came to us by sea. Or over the sea. I was six. The family that gave her to us saw her clinging on to a jetty with half her body in water. Last time I saw her, I was 21. I was on my way to school. She was breathing very faintly under a bench full of shoes. My father said she waited for me, managed to get to the door of my room, before the vet finally arrived to put her to sleep. I still call my other cats by her name sometimes.

Burger Machine

You start missing people at the oddest times of the day, even those who don’t deserve to be missed. I remember one early morning, sitting at the counter of a Burger Machine. We were waiting for our orders. My head was on your shoulder and you were holding my hand. You were telling me a story about your gangster father and his hitmen. If there was anything to love about you, it was your voice. I always pass by that Burger Machine on the way home. Some nights, I slow down and in the bright light, I look for you and you are not there.

Medea

Medea

I have taken up gardening
as a hobby, not anymore a profession.
These plants bear flowers,
not poison. Beyond my patch of land is the sea.
I watch the sun go down each night
and I remember the gods
and their goodness.

Mornings, I dress,
cook eggs, toast bread and read
the newspaper. I cut out
interesting headlines like,
“Woman charged for murder.”
I stick them on the refrigerator
and wait for sirens
wailing from a distance.
But it has been years
since I saw white sails
against black sea.

You came to me one day,
unshaven and red
from the sun. I thought that
the heavens
have sent you to me.
But I was not your purpose
here. I was
only incidental.

I want to ask you,
“What is courage?”
It is not you, or your ship of heroes.
It is not your fondness for danger.
Courage is driving a knife
through our children’s throats
knowing they will have no room
in your world.

The gods play no part in this story.

Bah

Received an e-mail today from a Filipina we met in Bangkok. I sat staring at the screen and came up with nothing to say. I thought, what was the use. It’s not as if we’ll see each other again. A few years ago, I was out exploring a temple in Cambodia when someone came up to me and asked for my name. He spoke in broken but comprehensible English. You can be anyone you want to be in a different country, so I was Ana. We exchanged email addresses. I scribbled his down on a sheet of paper and lost it. I wonder why we even bother trying to connect with strangers. “Be ahead of all parting” starts Rilke in one of his sonnets to Orpheus.

Celestina

Time, such a strange thing.

It took me years but I finally understood that I had encountered a true mystery that night, that I had taken a living miracle into my house. That Celestina del Sol was from a world I would never understand. That sometimes Nature improvises. That Nature created a woman that lived outside the field of time and may never die. That someday everyone who ever knew her and remembered her would be gone. That she would live forever in that physical perfection like some kind of exiled and forgotten goddess. And that trying to understand such a life, and why love matters to it, why a god would need to be loved too, was like trying to understand the anatomy of the wind or the architecture of silence or cloud tectonics. Yeah. What better way to respond to a miracle than to fall in love with it?

Anibal de la Luna in Cloud Tectonics by Jose Rivera

Waiting

A mandarin fell in love with a courtesan. “I shall be yours,” she told him, “when you have spent a hundred nights waiting for me, sitting on a stool, in my garden, beneath my windows.” But on the ninety-ninth night, the mandarin stood up, put his stool under his arm, and went away.

- from A Lover’s Discourse by Roland Barthes

It’s hard to keep track of things. I don’t know where my copy of this book is. If anyone has it, our house number is 33.

This wind reminds me of better days

Years ago, I remember walking around the neighborhood with a friend. It was as windy. We saw an empty lot overgrown with sunflowers like that scene in Everything is Illuminated, except the sunflowers were the local kind. The whole place was yellow, and it shifted shades everytime the wind swept through it.