Amigo Warfare: Poems

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 Visit us on the web at www.cherry-grove.com This download version of Amigo Warfare is offered free of charge, and reproduction of the work for non-commercial purposes is permitted and encouraged. Reproduction for sale, rent or other use involving financial transaction is prohibited except by permission.

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 Machado’s OffSeason” 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 Machado’s 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 González 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 sabía que ella estaba pensando en, 2004 (detail from diptych) | Copyright Luis González 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 González 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 Machado’s 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 Île 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 filled 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 —let’s hope someone else has more luck with it. I return the suit I borrowed, promises I couldn’t mend, the happiness just one more quarter-inch within my reach—loose change still good for a pauper’s 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 gunfire 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 everyone’s behalf, I’m sticking to my story. It’s better not to talk about the wounded, or the moist remains of the disappeared. But there’s 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 I’m afraid. The words leap from her hands, a flicker 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 we’ve already lost each other, and she’s forgotten gestures to describe what’s 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 we’re 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. It’s 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. He’s 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 flowers: a white cloud lifts in her hands. Her face is a flower’s 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 find 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 can’t. 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 can’t recall the last time I truly loved anybody. But in the corner of emotions I’ve kept the light on for those who still can’t find their way. My father pounds the walls in the shadow theater of his grave. In my dreams the dead keep growing, like fingernails or hair. If I could sum up all that I’ve 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 you’ll find 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 I’m 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 doesn’t bother me but today I’m 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 there’s 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 they’re dreaming us but we’re 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, we’re not so lucky, we find no refuge in the bone-littered country. So pay no currency to the Pope, ignore the Secretary of Defense. Don’t change your mind about the impossible: I believe I am about to not wake up, and I no longer wish to be in anyone else’s nightmare but your own, where a curfew’s 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 flaw. 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 fingers and savoring the salt of his own skin. ::::::::::::: The earth is flat as a strip mall. The world’s 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. There’s always someone you don’t want to know. An ex, a trick, a trafficker of bliss. Every whisper is sinister, every gesture a complicity. Hit something, and the pink lights flicker 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 you’ve been too long. Where you’re going is where you’ve 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 don’t remember, which implies that absence is an object, what’s lost is constant. You green card your way through walls and fences, turn so white you’re 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. That’s it: only the open road. Poems are dead things, a slow process of decomposition. If they don’t decay, something terrible has gone wrong.

21

Bollywood Ending The bandoneon begins. Sound up as she walks into the final jump cut in the film, 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. It’s 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 isn’t wide, it’s 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. They’re 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 fist fuck in the steam room while the janitor isn’t 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) It’s riskier to start a war under a full moon. (12) Silence the victims with money. (26) Daisy cutter: wherever you are, America will find you. (8) When the molecules snap, your father and mother disengage in you. This is called the vanishing of air. (13) Forgetting, like water, doesn’t 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 won’t remember a thing. (23) Or maybe some celestial database will keep the avarice of presidents on file. (25) We thank you for our rage. (7) It’s possible that the body desires in order to need, and absence is what’s 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 fingerprints, set their souls to sleep so that the metal detectors don’t go off, change their voices or the color of their skin; they don’t remember being born, nor fear the sound of water: the nights we dreaded surfing 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, filling 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 we’re 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, Musfiqur, 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 wasn’t going to be just another one-hit wonder, they googled him and discovered that he had multiplied bread in Boston and fish 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, there’s 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 lover’s 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 fluids and found in his marrow the last shrapnel of compassion and all our nostalgia and all our non sequiturs and finally they said, listen Jesus, you carry a torch for the world you’re 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 replied—I am the last Adam, in me time begins anew, time which contains all and all bodies contain—but 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 you’re reading this after 2012, the Mayans were dead wrong. Even so it’s 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 I’m trying to say: we’ll invade each other’s conspiracies, all the sorrowful mysteries. Then I’ll wake up mornings already stalking poems hidden in codes so simple they will baffle 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 other’s odors. I’ll grow darker each summer, forget me, I’ll 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? I’ve used you for my pleasure, comrade, you have satiated me. I’ll wait for you at the junction of burnt emotions. I’ll send a postcard from the sad and brave frontiers. I’ll 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 can’t 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 five times, devouring the last, imperfect one Sorrow seeks its own reflection among the living I’ll remember your apocalypse if you’ll remember mine It will be a holiday of the senses It’s 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 You’re on death row anyway

30

Poems of Sorrow, after Luis González Palma There’s a child being baptized with a crown of thorns. There’s a soldier whose best friend will shoot him dead. There’s 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 flown 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, flawless 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 signifies many things: bonfire, 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 (she’s dead now, her body betrothed to air). This is the precise fissure of the bone, its instinct and vocation, this is how silence floats in the houses of the missing, the perfect disguise of the dragonfly. 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 can’t see it, because it was just a dream).

32

Politoxic You will die on your way to America You’re declared missing long before you disappear They’ve called off all further search for you But it’s 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 firelight 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 infiltrate 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 man’s 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 stifles 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 doesn’t 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 I’m making this up, but this morning she told me, Money is the most beautiful object in the world. She’s looking for something to believe in, beyond the obvious that’s too bright, too close to see. Dear Eric, he writes, I run to you only when I’m on the verge of disintegrating. Summer in the tropics is all Lent, all repentance and resurrection, and I’m 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 finds 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 country’s sorrow like an explorer looking for a river’s 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: I’ve been there. I wanted to find 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, dragonflies, 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 flames. I will burn the sign of the cross on my forehead. I will wear my country’s 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 dictator—I renounced them all and wore my defiance 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 infinite rain. The towns I once knew were wiped clean, and everyone said it was God revising his poem. In a fishing 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: You’ll 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 we’ve 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 fleet 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 there’s a heaven but there’s 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, fire 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: Official 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 official portrait of the military junta will be displayed in all homes, public offices, 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 heart’s 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 nation’s future in a crook of dusty lace. The archbishop goes through the motions of benediction, and various generals are caught in the crossfire of grace, boot-deep in roses, crowned with halos of flies.

46

2: The thief The rooftops of Medellin have the color of dried blood. The sky over Medellin is invisible to the naked eye. That’s 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 won’t 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 light’s 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 fighting 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 final negotiations. Death lurking beside the man already remembered by all the early dead. It is a cherub’s 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 I’m 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 I’ve 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 water’s 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 it’s best to ignore them. The levante howls from the coast and picks at the dregs of all we’ve been. It’s old now, toothless like the gypsy selling raw almonds in the market square. Wait long enough and even she will disappear. Por fin, this town will be left to us dogs, and we’ll scamper around whether it’s siesta time or not, and piss in bars, and fight

49

over food, and share our fleas, and brag all night to the moon how many bitches will remember us long after we’re 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 fight 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 we’ve 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 camouflage 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 finite body but infinite road. Some survive by speaking a language that’s 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 grandfather’s 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 fit 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 you’ve 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 it’s almost over, though I’m tired of being strong. I leave nothing for grief to feed on. Not my mother’s young sorrow, my sisters’ life 54

of water, my father’s 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 wound—when 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 defiance, an act of survival. Mercy looks for moving targets. Those who have just been born don’t know what it’s like to spend an eternity searching. I will let them sleep quietly, and hope when they wake we’d have left enough of the world to live in. And as the hours pass I will speak in codes again. In the fisted 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 fly 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 Vallée 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 graffiti, 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 Elmo’s fire. 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 flawless 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 you’ve 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, first the Remedello, then the Rhône. They will find, clenched between your teeth, the words dagger

60

and halberd. They will uncurl from your fingers objects once marvelous to you: billhook, pickaxe, flint. Your bones will resemble rock.

61

Antonio Machado’s 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 can’t tell by the calm on their faces how they’ve colluded like streetwise scalawags, how they’ve perfected the illusion. No one knows that something is about to come amiss, a pixel will disappear from the screen. The baker is already filling 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 coffins float along the estuary among the brightly colored kayaks. The castle’s 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 other’s 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 fixes his hat on her head. He waits for her to fall asleep in a room they haven’t 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: don’t you remember how the evening wouldn’t 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 mother’s house, you stood by the door but she couldn’t let you in, the dream resisted you. You were never at home in the body, it’s 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. You’ve taken everything that’s 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 fire. Dusk was nesting in winter’s 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 won’t miss this earth still new to suffering, this morning so early and green. The fields are ripe as butter. Perched on the roofs, light proclaims the unfamiliar world. It’s said that the good pass on, but inferno is everything we can’t let go, eternal remembering. The road curves uphill to the sun. The country is radiant and wide. May my passing be as bountiful. What’s tragic is not that this journey ends, but that we once walked through such possibilities. I’m learning how to wait, how not to look away. The stones are dug deep, the soul is fixed 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 won’t 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 magnificence, a momentary snarl of orbits. “When the mouth opens, all are wrong.” I think words are like Schrödinger’s cat: unless you look, they’re 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 first, 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 defiantly 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 bull’s eye of zero yearning. X = wonder, vivid under the spell’s recurring question: Peut-on naître-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 first convulsions of becoming, I may be walking down a street, I may be born or I may be dying, a sunset would already fill 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 five 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 find 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 jellyfish, 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 first 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, infinity 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 fill a life with memory there’s an infinite receptacle that never gets filled In a room or a stairwell, there’s 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 find 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 defined 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

Île 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 you’ve 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 fish 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. There’s something in the sky or sea too deep or too blue to decipher: you venerate the mysterious because of the boundaries it defines, 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 water’s 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 I’m going to melt all the gold of Paris and turn it into money. I’ll spread it over the ghettos of the Arabs, over the palm of the old woman begging on the steps of Barbès-Rochechouart; she’ll wake up with brilliant tattoos burning in her hands. I’ll take all the hunger of the world and use it as my ammunition. I’ll live in frontiers where languages merge and confuse the tongue. I’ll eat only chickpeas and pepper and learn to crush olives for oil. I’ll use the oil for bathing and nourishment and sex. I’ll follow an angel in the fog of the baths and sit next to him while three men take turns sucking his cock. I’ll dream only on Tuesdays and only at 4 A.M. I’ll be a prostitute for a night and earn my living giving pleasure. I’ve already told you how the earth spins backward in the wrong direction and we’ll wind up in the first moment of the world, a breath, an urge to be, a calculated uncertainty. I’ve 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 reflection in a hundred years. I’ve told you how I’ve 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 I’ve 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 I’ve 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 everyone’s 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 you’ve 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 infinities 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 you’ve 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 difficult 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 I’ve 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 I’m 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 someone’s bed, spellbound by the senses, I accept the disquietude of the mortal. One must disappear without too much paraphernalia. I’ve done away with the river and all its dead. I’ve renounced my allegiance to names and silence, avenues and dead-ends, wars of attrition, heads of state. And if I couldn’t 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 fistful 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 someone’s 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 find the flashing 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 PhilippineAmerican 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

Vallée 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 graffiti 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 first millennium (100 B.C.) its message was lost.” Humberto Delgarenna’s is the earliest graffito 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, Vera’s 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 fiction from the New York Foundation for the Arts.