After the fierce midsummer all ablaze
Has burned itself to ashes, and expires
In the intensity of its own fires,
There come the mellow, mild, St. Martin days
Crowned with the calm of peace, but sad with haze.
So after Love has led us, till he tires
Of his own throes, and torments, and desires,
Comes large-eyed friendship: with a restful gaze,
He beckons us to follow, and across
Once, I tried to banish them all from my writing.
This was America, after all, where everyone’ s at liberty
To remake her person, her place, or her poetry,
And I lived in a town a long way from everything —
Where discussions of “diversity”
Centered mainly on sexuality.
My policy, born of exhaustion with talk about race
And the quintessentially American wish for antecedents,
Eliminated most of my family, starting with the grandparents,
Church of broken toasters and singed fuses,
church of the dripping roof and chipped chimney stack,
of the flooded garage and its split door,
gas-hissing pipes and sibilant water heaters,
church of piss-poor light and shaky ladders
where I unchoke windows and dislodge chopsticks
from pipes, smooth curled up wallpaper and key the locks,
fix clocks sticking or ticking with different times,
church where wings of dead flies drift like petals
Through darkness they came,
covered in ash, scarred by depths
and distance, they bore salt and fire, breath steaming
at edges of decks, hands clutching
railings, their bodies dizzied by the lurching vessel,
trunks pulled by hand, Where are you from? I unwrapped
my legacy from cloth, the marble Buddha
from my grandfather, ancient
as the sea-stained covers of his sutras, the briny odor
I wrap the blue towel
after washing,
around the damp
weight of hair, bulky
as a sleeping cat,
and sit out on the porch.
Still dripping water,
it’ ll be dry by supper,
by the time the dust
settles off your shoes,
though it’ s only five
past noon. Think
The fallen Latte is the sign. It is from within the row of Latte that
we feel our strength. It is the severed capstone that gives us Their
message, "Ti monhayon I che'cho." We will not rest until the
Latte is whole.
— Cecilia C. T. Perez from "Signs of Being: A Chamoru
Spiritual Journey" (1997)
~
i haligi
a pillar
i tasa
a capstone
i tataotao
a body
~
his hands —
husk coconut —
cooks and
feeds [us] —
stories — this
raised house —
at quarry
outline forms
At six I lived for spells:
how a few Hawaiian words could call
up the rain, could hymn like the sea
in the long swirl of chambers
curling in the nautilus of a shell,
how Amida’ s ballads of the Buddhaland
in the drone of the priest’ s liturgy
could conjure money from the poor
and give them nothing but mantras,
the strange syllables that healed desire.
I lived for stories about the war
my grandfather told over hana cards,
slapping them down on the mats
with a sharp Japanese kiai.
Dark thing,
make a myth of yourself:
all women turn into lilacs,
all men grow sick of their errant scent.
You could learn
to build a window, to change flesh
into isinglass, nothing
but a brittle river, a love of bone.
You could snap like a branch — No,
this way, he says, and the fence
releases the forest,
and every blue insect finds an inch of skin.
He loves low voices, diffidence
on the invented trail,
the stones you fuck him on. Yes
to sweat’ s souvenir, yes to his fist
We thought nothing of it, he says,
though some came so close to where we slept.
I try to see him as a boy,
back in the Philippines, waking
to the sound of machine guns.
His family would spend their morning
spreading a paste over the sores
of the house’ s thick walls.
He tells how he touched
points where bullets entered,
his fingers, he says, disappeared into the holes,
as if inside there existed a space
where everything from this world could vanish.
In the harsh glare of an easily
reprehensible life. The channel changer is lost
in the crack of an infinite sofa.
Everything falls apart, everything breaks
down, torn into a million
fragments, Jericho everyday.
I want to be the blameless
victim in this canceled puppet show,
the marionette every mother loves, the one
souvenirs are modeled from.
