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Amigo Warfare

Amigo WarfarePoems by Eric Gamalinda

Cherry Grove Collections

© 2007 by Eric Gamalinda

Published by Cherry Grove CollectionsP.O. Box 541106Cincinnati, OH 45254-1106

ISBN: 9781933456669LCCN: 2007923410

Poetry Editor: Kevin WalzerBusiness 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 Machado’s 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 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.

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 mapsand 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-inchwithin my reach—loose changestill good for a pauper’s meal.

I surrender my historyand all memory, its ammunition.The nameless claim me. Exilesoffer me a home. Who else sees me as I truly am, just another vehicletransporting so much fuel?I light my anger like a pile of twigs.I do this in the desert: it scares awayanything that will devour me.I do this in the city, where the jackhammercracks the cranium of the earth, and nothingcan save me. I lose myselfamong the restless immigrants,their bodies still warmfrom the lust and gunfire of slums.

Grief is a nation of everyone,a country without borders.I roam the avenues of it

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out of habit. Summoned to testifyon everyone’s behalf, I’m sticking to my story. It’s better not to talk about the wounded, or the moist remainsof the disappeared. But there’s always one who can tell, in the packedamplitude 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 leapfrom her hands, a flicker in the dark. The motorstutters, jungle mangroves drift and vaporizeto snowcapped peaks. Day fades to night, fades backto day. Her hands busy, though we’ve alreadylost each other, and she’s forgotten gesturesto describe what’s become inert, her loveturned perfectly invisible. The watermakes no sound, a furtive blue. We crossthe latitudes. Summer blurs to a storm. We reach the city in the last long reign of winter. The cobbled alleys glow. No longerused to land, our feet drag over the stones.We know we’re heading somewhere, blizzard-boundon 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 handsof Christ, another illusion, as sharp as the dream I see us in. My friend sayshe will freeze in his sleep, a gentle death.She tucks her hands in her pockets, warmthand 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 faceis a flower’s ghost, dirt brown, beautiful once

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perhaps. Her children are numerous, fast asleep.In a while they will walk among us, their palmsspread open to the promise of the world.

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Plan B

I hope you never get tired of waiting for the worldto come to its senses. And that you have a quarterfor every homeless person who asks you for a quarter.Like Sitting Bull, may you find America a hard placein which to save the soul. If you listen closely the cityspeaks 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 onfor those who still can’t find their way. My fatherpounds 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 werea gigabyte ago. A quasar of desire. Your heartas mortal as a bird. And when you speakyour voice forms a nest of trebuchets around you.In the beginning was the Word. The rest is noise.

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Poem Not Written in Catalan

Out of everything that is not eternalI 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 towardssome form of life outside of earth

And although people will think I’m no longer thereI will live in geodesic domesand 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 todayI’m not going to take any conspiracies

I deny bodies of water smaller than the Great LakesI 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 denyI 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 itIf mathematics were the only religion

We are passing an era of turbulenceMake sure your souls are in the upright position

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“I am afraid of the profound certitude of things”

Love like an arsoniststeals into my life and burns down all my tenements

(In a court of law, love will deny meand 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 endedquickly, I wasted my time looking fora job, the nation went to war, we lostour romance with the world. Our livesare blissfully irrational, people thinkthey’re dreaming us but we’re reallydreaming them: we grow tired of resisting.Even suffering is illusion, in the equationbetween grief and rescue the bodyis the unknown factor x, and though mercurialsavants argue brilliantly, we’re not so lucky,we find no refuge in the bone-littered country.So pay no currency to the Pope, ignorethe Secretary of Defense. Don’t change your mindabout the impossible: I believeI am about to not wake up, and I no longerwish to be in anyone else’s nightmarebut your own, where a curfew’s been enforcedon the planet, and bombs get smarter thanthe president. Our bodies, near like this,are so mystical no spook can decodethis fractal of grace, no senate underminethis perfect flaw. For the moment let there beno homeland, no jihad, no Jesus Christ,no IMF. Let armies yield and frontiersbreak away. I will dwell in your transparency.You are young, you can still be saved.

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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 streetand 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 Spato 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 packagesto everyone I know.I would like to send it by overnightexpress, urgent, fragile,consume before it expires.

I would like to place lust on every human tongue,lust so easy it will cancelall 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 worldby paying all foreign debtin radiant carats of lust.

I would like to see God one daysecretly turning the pages of life,

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licking his fingers and savoring the saltof his own skin.

:::::::::::::

The earth is flat as a strip mall. The world’s great warsare 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 lifeis like a demolition derby, the wreckage cheeredby bumpkins in the bleachersswathed with perfumes of gasoline. Welcometo the suburbs of guilt. Your days are now an endlessloop, a season of reruns. There’s always someoneyou 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 evidenceto tabloid news. You stagger wounded from the ghettos of desire. Love picks youfrom the suspect line; should have learnedto live alone. Where you come from is whereyou’ve been too long. Where you’re goingis where you’ve always been.

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Sprung Pidgin

Take your mondo grass from Japan and let itsprawl, let oceans swell and conjure Hokusai.Take your doleful Romeo from Ilocos, turntobacco to pineapple, rule big time in Hilo.Crossbreed hapa and haole and see sprungpidgin, what hex and melody they utter.People are like pollen, they migrate and fertilizeand sometimes they make you sneeze. Every seconda million cells in your body die. Even you,at this very moment, are being revised.Too much happiness can kill you, like too muchsugar. Just when you think you got it, that is notenlightenment. Take your dollar Buddha, make himpick your celery, your grape. What you forgetyou don’t remember, which implies that absence isan object, what’s lost is constant. You green cardyour way through walls and fences, turn so whiteyou’re practically invisible. Now take a poemyou wrote in your blood twenty years agoand strike out all the lines. Nothing's left butpunctuation and a freeway of erasures. That’s it:only the open road. Poems are dead things,a slow process of decomposition. If they don’tdecay, something terrible has gone wrong.

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Bollywood Ending

The bandoneon begins. Sound upas she walks into the final jumpcut in the film, gets her shareof ruthless ecstasies like allthe losers in this loveless town,gets kicked aroundat the laundromat, fallsin love, many frames later,with a gangster-poet (perpetualcigarette, disheveled hair).They rent a convertible,kill somebodyor themselves. It’s all the same,someone has to breakfrom the weight of all this light,someone has to standin 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 hereto Sierra Nevada. Things dieunder its shadow, cars and coyotes,anything that moves. The interstateis strewn with wrecks and bones.She sucks him off at the wheel.He loves her more than money.They’re not going to stop untilthe next stretch of nowhereappears in slow dissolve,and the nodding nobodiessleep off their hangoverin a borderland no contrabandhas yet described. Until the highway

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narrows to a dot of sundown,and their names scroll upagainst the blacked-out sky.

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Daisy Cutter

(3) The homosexuals fist fuck in the steam roomwhile 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

lifenot happening, the soundless blur of snowon the plasma screen. (1) There is no greater bondthan a shared lie. (24) It’s riskier to start a warunder a full moon. (12) Silence the victimswith money. (26) Daisy cutter: wherever you are,America will find you. (8) When the moleculessnap, your father and mother disengagein you. This is called the vanishing of air.(13) Forgetting, like water, doesn’t have its ownshape. (18) All theories are useless, or they thrivein the afterlife of language, where bodhisattvasfeed on concepts. (6) Live long enough in one placeso that place cancels time. (9) Open your heartto Jesus. (22) This is not an exit: alarmwill sound. (15) You will stand in the pool of the holyand be forlorn among the chosen. (11) Bomb the

clinicsand save the smallest souls. (20) Blood of the redeemerhas never been more potable, rivers where broken cities bleed their toxins. (14) Deliver us from one another. (21) We have come to the endof the human era. (16) You won’t remember a thing.(23) Or maybe some celestial database will keepthe avarice of presidents on file. (25) We thank youfor our rage. (7) It’s possible that the bodydesires in order to need, and absence iswhat’s truly craven by the soul. (5) Between fearand tenderness, I choose self-defense. (17) The soul

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cannot inhabit time, endures precariously, a paper nautilus, a black pearl. (4) We are bornfull of love. (19) Then the world intervenes.

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9/12

They speak not with words but light, can imitatethe simplest of objects, falsify theirfingerprints, set their souls to sleep so thatthe metal detectors don’t go off, changetheir voices or the color of their skin;they don’t remember being born, nor fearthe sound of water: the nights we dreadedsurfing the channels for comfort are hereat last, all that cinema dreamed for ushas come to pass, here is their infestationof incivilities like mud prints lefton Astro Turf, they are unpackingtheir suitcases, filling the corridorswith 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 whatwe’re willing to pay ourselves, worshipingin congregations large and small, holdingnational parades, lodging in the most obscureinterstices of our cities, wearing veilsthat mystify their intentions, savingmoney, working two or three jobs, installingwindow guards for obviously nefariouspurposes, holding on to names that no onecan pronounce, no doubt a private cipherthey transmit to one another as they tramplethrough the park: Wei-sing, Hamil, Irais,Parisa, Musfiqur, Sixiang, Duc.

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Christians Killed My Jesus

Jesus was on his way to Californiawhen he stumbled upon a marriage in the desert,the party had just begun but they had run outof wine, and Jesus (being Jesus)told them to bring out the empty carafes,and before their eyes geysers of the bestchardonnay spewed forth, and that as we knowis the miracle of the chardonnay, and then and therethe newlyweds, ex-Gen X entrepreneurs,signed him up to sell miracle wine on the HomeShopping Network, they could tell Jesuswasn’t going to be just another one-hit wonder, they googled him and discoveredthat he had multiplied bread in Bostonand fish in Maine, had made the snow-blind seein Chicago and the arthritic walk in Florida,and someone had even seen him lifting the lacerated soul of a boy lured by loveone evening in Wyoming, and they saidwait a minute, there’s more to this motherfuckerthan meets the eye, so they emptied his pocketsand found a fragment of the Dead Sea Scrollsand a braided lock of his lover’s hair, and on his palmsthe hennaed remembrances of forgotten Bedouins,and underneath his eyelids the eternal visionsof the fatal Essenes, and they cat-scanned himand tested his fluids and found in his marrowthe last shrapnel of compassionand all our nostalgia and all our non sequitursand finally they said, listen Jesus,you carry a torch for the worldyou’re worth a lot of silverbut we just got to know, have you ever sleptwith a man, have you ever cut loose

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an unborn child, are you a nigger,a fag, a slope, a Jew, and Jesus replied—I amthe last Adam, in me time beginsanew, time which contains alland all bodies contain—but that went totallyover their heads, too bad, Jesus, the ratingsare going to kill you, so they organized a moband nailed him to a windmill outside of Joshua Tree State Park, this is how we waitfor the second coming, this is how we savethe ones who burn, the January skybroke open with a funnel of arctic cold,normal for this time of the year.

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The End of the World Will Happenon December 21, 2012

If you’re reading this after 2012, the Mayans were dead wrong. Even so it’s been wonderful speakingin the future tense. There must be simpler ways to tellwhich way apocalypse is heading. I would like to liveaimlessly, 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 skindeep, keeping its innermost secrets, it belongsto the lachrymose danger and commonwealthof angels. Do you understand what I’m tryingto say: we’ll invade each other’s conspiracies,all the sorrowful mysteries. Then I’ll wake up morningsalready stalking poems hidden in codes so simplethey will baffle the CIA, the MI5. Maybe,though this is unlikely, there will be cold warsto decipher them. Underneath the blazing howitzerswill you ever give yourself. Give yourself untilwe get tired of each other’s odors. I’ll grow darkereach summer, forget me, I’ll be distant and older,my life expanding like the Big Bang. At 60I will be as dark as a negro. My body battle-scarredwith 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 youat the junction of burnt emotions. I’ll send a postcardfrom the sad and brave frontiers. I’ll book a tableat the cabaret of forgetting, party of two.

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Subtitles Off

The lords of largesse anoint you with their yesSafe passage for the boy whose small body you laybleeding on the kitchen tiles

The world is as wide as a letterbox screenYou sit in the dark with the subtitles offWhat is unknowable can’t exist but

God slogs in outer space, wish he were not lovebut logic, wait long enough and he may yetexpose himself, a bleep, a bang, an intelligent

Design, like Ginol, supreme headhunterof Papuan cannibals, who revised the universefive times, devouring the last, imperfect one

Sorrow seeks its own reflection among the livingI’ll remember your apocalypse if you’ll remember mineIt 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 mysteriesStrangle the pedophile in his jail cellYou’re on death row anyway

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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 soldiereven while he was alive;this is her garland of perfumed skulls.This is the man who spoke bird language and escaped unharmedfrom the bereavement of human words.This is destiny written on the face of the womanwho wears the tropics in her hair, black hibiscusflown 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

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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).

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Politoxic

You will die on your way to AmericaYou’re declared missing long before you disappearThey’ve called off all further search for you

But it’s still too early to patrol the hemisphereThe bullets are dormant in their breathtaking shellsSomeone else will watch the suicides

Lie down beneath the firelight of missilesOne world persists in the eye of televisionAnother in the eye of the newborn

Let the oldest living person have her sayBefore the parliaments of the worldLet 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 bodyMy heart is ticking inside its shelter

Dug in and waiting for someone to misstep and explode

You walk away: there are no exitsYour country is your poem: no one has been spared

You will die in the name of AmericaFall from the sky, you black suited angelsGrief is a river that hollows out the soul

So that grace in the guise of silence can settle inMay these words be invisible like lightMay light infiltrate the unsuspecting

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You say your name: it no longer belongs to youYour country is your poem: no one has been sparedYou walk away: your absence walks ahead of you

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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 monsoonstifles the little devotion left between us. I blamethe monsoon, not her. Coasting southwestfrom Sarawak, the air reeks of cardamom,crab roe, corpses. Soldiers are bombing Pikit,three thousand Muslim refugees pour intothe Christian churches. She doesn’t see the irony of it,how we always wind up nursing the oneswe savage the most. She lies in bed like myweather-beaten republic, too sad to respondto how badly I touch her, to how too fast or too slowI come. You might think I’m making this up,but this morning she told me, Moneyis the most beautiful object in the world.She’s looking for something to believe in,beyond the obvious that’s too bright, too closeto see. Dear Eric, he writes, I run to youonly when I’m on the verge of disintegrating.Summer in the tropics is all Lent, all repentanceand resurrection, and I’m sick of it. She sticks her

thumbsinto the scabbed stigmata of my hands. I feel no pain.She tells me war is inescapable. You must bomba few towns if you want peace. If we have children,they will be among the nine out of tenwho will never speak in the future tense. For some reason she finds this comforting.When she lies like this, fetal, one arm stretched outto touch my face, she reminds me of the crook of the northern tip of Sulawesi. She showed it once to

meon a map: a jungle island almost human in form,teeming with terror, incredibly poor.

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Autobiography of Water

1

I searched for the origin of my country’s sorrowlike an explorer looking for a river’s source.I searched for it so I could give it a nameand trace its course on a map, so future travelerscould pinpoint its depths and bendsand say: I’ve been there. I wanted to findits history, to know if its waters were richwith mud and minerals that made potteryglisten like metal, or impoverishedand stricken with bad luck, driftingeels and corpses to dead-end towns.If cities were built upon it, wars wagedto win it. Or if it meandered all its lifeunknown, a vengeful but healing deity,crossed only once by a tribe whose nameno one now recalls.

2

If you ask about my lifeI will tell you: I once loved someonewho scavenged for shipwrecks.If you ask for a history I will say:born at midnight, in a cityhospital, in the year of Sputnik.If you ask for references I will say:I told everyone what I thoughtwas the truth. If you ask for an addressI will say: water is the purest stateof impermanence.

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3

Water is the oppositeof repose. Hibiscus is the oppositeof mausoleum. Slipstreamis the opposite of stalactite. Memoryis the opposite of fear. Like a magic lanternthat describes the earth in revolutionsof shadow and moonlight, mind is an objectI carry with me: that much to meis real. Forgetting is the opposite of war.Love grows out of its own opposite,which is silence. Albedo is the oppositeof midnight. We are all made of charm,strange, up and down. God eats uswhen we die. We are smalland bitter, like a pill.

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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 rememberingbut I will keep an amulet against thosewho 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 desolationas 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.

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Posthumous

I come from a country called Sorrow,I was born by a river called Despair,on a street called Longing, in a monthfull of rain. I walked awayand let the summers devourthe silence that settled in my place.

All the laws that had held me down,bogus like medals on the coatof a dictator—I renounced them alland wore my defiance like Cain,young and smeared, a wandereramong things unspoken.

One night, during curfew, I hid in the backof an eight-wheel truck. Patrol jeeps rumbledthrough the alleys, spookson an empty planet. At daybreakI staggered out to the lightamong the early factory workers,a ragtag army of Lazaruses.

I met a boy who had a dozen namesripped in blue tattoos on his back,Lando, Armando, putangina mo, mementos of inmateswho had raped him in jail.

A girl I knew got pregnant,then her boyfriend slashed her throatand days later the beer bottle shardssplintered around her neck still stuck gleaming like amber jewels.

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The monsoon came, six monthsof infinite rain. The towns I once knewwere wiped clean,and everyone said it was Godrevising his poem.

In a fishing village in Mindoroa tourist from Americaoffered me money to eatpoison mushrooms with him.Later that night, before he tookmy cock in his mouth, he said:You’ll never forget this.

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My Generation

One went to war with his own people,with an AK47 he knewhow to wreck a body long beforehe 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 Alpson foot, got lucky,found work as a toilet cleaner in a palazzo in Rome.

And I became a poetso I would have nothing to dowith the government of humans,only to carry like river waterin pails on two ends of a stickthe weight of rememberingand the weight of forgiving.

A decade into the new millenniumwe will hold a congressto 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 peoplein one night. And another,in the blinding snowI refused such a beautiful death.And another, we waited and waited,but the end of the world never came.

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Amigo Warfare

Because you seize our landand call it hope,because you manufacture desolation

and call it right-of-way. Becauseyour cavalries cut our children opento expose their hearts of coal.

Because you send a shining fleetof your youngest men,lust still forming in their bones.

Because their bodies rape the bodiesof our neighbors. Because you sleepsoundly through it all.

Because you divide us from our historyand install a thousand checkpointsin between.

Because you line the streets with brickstorn down from temples,because our sleepless gods

wander among the missing.Because your prophets tell us there’s a heavenbut there’s no more room.

Because you feed your wordsinto our language, and now we speaklike strangers to one another.

Because you make our women wear their nakedness like a gem.

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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 anotherwith the simplest of elements,fire and water.

Because you offer praise and weapons to our dictators. Because you build blockadesaround those who give us strength,

brother, sister, lover, friend.Because you send your spies outto investigate our dreams.

Because we dream the dangerousin which the world is fertilewith remembering, subversive

with desire. Because the old burythe young. Because we use our sorrowwisely, as armaments.

Because you brand our tongueswith silence. Because you watch usin fear, even while we sing.

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Pictures from a Country in Mourning, after Botero

1: Official portrait of the military junta

The junta has declared there will be no seasonsbut drought and rain. The junta has declaredall mourning will be done on Wednesdays,all births at noon, and we shall read from right to left, except on Sundays, when God deservesour silence. No unauthorized auguries shall prevail;comets are contraband; all prophets shall repent.The republic will respect all religionsexcept those proscribed; there will be quotasfor sources of happiness, such as alcohol and sex.The official portrait of the military juntawill be displayed in all homes, public offices,libraries, churches, and in the private densof prostitutes, so that citizens may remembertheir allegiance even in the fervency of love.

But only for tonight, let them turn their facesaway 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 Stateholds in her arms their only son,the nation’s future in a crookof dusty lace. The archbishopgoes through the motions of benediction,and various generals are caughtin the crossfire of grace, boot-deepin roses, crowned with halos of flies.

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2: The thief

The rooftops of Medellinhave the color of dried blood.The sky over Medellinis invisible to the naked eye.

That’s why the windows are smalland the rooms reek of perpetualtwilight: this is my kingdomwhen the night draws me out.

In my room (in a barrioI won’t name), I keep the fortunesof my wounded country:silver chalices, rosaries,

diamonds as impermeableas a prayer, photographs of peopleI will never know, but may meetoccasionally on the street.

I do my work singly and quietly,and I do nobody harm.There is heaven beyondthe rooftops of Medellin:

I dredge the towns of the weightof sin, and in their weightless sleepI take the sleepers closer to the skies of Medellin.

3: Matador

There it is: death in the eyes of the manwho will never sleep again.His suit of light’s a size too small,

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his cape too golden, a cargoof embroidered roses.Because it is futile to challenge deathhe will challenge it forever:the only battle worth fightingis the one he will never win.In a town south of nowherea volcano smudges the sky,and it showers on his pathan impossible hailstorm,a rain of apples from a seasonstill to come. Nothing makes sense in the world of final negotiations.Death lurking beside the manalready remembered by allthe early dead. It is a cherub’sskeleton, a small impbrandishing a crimsonsaber, so small it is nothingbut a whisper.

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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

legslike a leper looking for a Christ. I hoist my carcassup Calle de Embajadores where I dump my load,so when the great sedans chug away from the tourist

shopsI 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’secho, the miracle of the earliest wells, the caveof mimosas, the frog songs by the gorge. The

Phoenicians,mysterious, self-absorbed, vanished in thin air. The

Muslimsskedaddled soon. And the Christians are all over the

placeit’s best to ignore them. The levante howls from the

coastand picks at the dregs of all we’ve been. It’s old now,

toothlesslike 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

aroundwhether it’s siesta time or not, and piss in bars, and fight

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over food, and share our fleas, and brag all night to the moon

how many bitches will remember us long after we’re gone.

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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 elderlydie in Rajasthan, a place you leave only by dying.

We bid them leave, let go. We empty their pocketsof 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 refugeesscrimmaging 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

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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 rapingthe children. And we have nothing to declare.

For Agha Shahid Ali

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The Remembered World

The songs that bid the refugee farewell,the songs that bid the conqueror to stayresemble 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 seasonno one has weapons or currency for,in which the smallest voicesstill give praise to rain.

Some leave to become the journey,to become not finite body but infinite road.Some survive by speaking a languagethat’s the wrong size for their tongues.Some learn to respond onlyto the numbers that cancel their names.

Like the blind, I touch their facesand recognize them by what I cannot see.Tanks uproot tamarind treesolder than my grandfather’s grandfather.Mosquitoes multiply and villages disappear.

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Some of us die in the year of assassins,some in the year of greed.

But how did they change the shape of the earthto fit the shape of war?When did our voices become an instrumentno one can play?

Memory is a territory no parliament has claimed.Soon bulldozers will come and our stories will bleedthrough the porous edges of the remembered world.

2

Lord, on the seventh day you were done with the world.With your distance you’ve erasedall evil and all good. I am alivein your marvelous silence. The streets at duskopen themselves to me, like the bodies of loverswhose scars tell a story so solitaryit can only be shared without words.

I dream the dreams of all my dead. I invadetheir emptiness and carry off their names.I will endure this stillness,the smoldering hours that continueto erase me, as though by my birthI have broken a pact, that I remaininvisible and small.

So I carry everything with me,though it’s almost over, though I’m tiredof being strong. I leave nothingfor grief to feed on.Not my mother’s young sorrow, my sisters’ life

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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 woundedand those who wound—when I take my turnI will name each one,no paradise will be so boundlessfor all that I will name.

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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 morningonly to starlings and not face their ridicule. They know the map of light is a burdenshared 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 leftenough of the world to live in.

And as the hours pass I will speak in codes again.In the fisted cold. In the warm eveningsthat weaken my resolve. So that those who listenwill keep on asking until all our questionshave 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 flythrough me, breathing the wordsI no longer remember.

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Valley of Marvels

You must be single-minded as HumbertoDelgarenna, who risked his lifecrossing the Vallée des Merveillesto carve his name on Mont Bego. The year was 1629. He may have fallen from the crags, his bones now interredwith graffiti, the zigzags and apothemswhose inscrutability was sorcery, medicine,object of fear. Let that be a lessonto 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 hunteror a shepherd, the words wool and venisonsacred to you. Decipher the enigmaof verdigris. Be metal, be clandestine.Navigate through shadows, use touch and sound to recognize the shapeof luminance. Learn a skill, how to carvea rouelle, a flawless spoke, perfectionas an act of worship. Find your way backto water through guesswork; begin fromthe cul-de-sacs of Tende. And if you discoverthe seven rivers to be true, drink and resistbelieving you’ve been saved. You will notbe saved. You will walk away as blindedas you were before, and live so long no one will recall the midnightyou 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, clenchedbetween your teeth, the words dagger

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and halberd. They will uncurl from your fingersobjects 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

mistralhas shut down the lovely balconies along the

promenadewhere, at some point, under a windswept moon,Antonio Machado walks his mother home to die. You

can’t tellby the calm on their faces how they’ve colluded likestreetwise 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

alreadyfilling the alleys with the telltale scent of rising dough.Someone is singing a ballad in Catalan, a language

invisibleto the naked eye. The rookie legionnaires will come

later,but even now their coffins float along the estuaryamong the brightly colored kayaks. The castle’s

lookoutis only partly lit to save on gas. War is elsewhereand is always coming near. If you know where to walkyou can follow the shape of a swastika. Young men

drinkin soccer bars, as beautiful as the whores they love to

fuck,an empire of salt on each other’s skins. Antonio

Machado

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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 motherin his own suit and fixes his hat on her head. He waits

for herto 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 camewith 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

howyou save someone. This is how you disappear.No one knows what happened. The messengers stillkeep coming. His mailbox still gets plump with mail.Nothing gets returned to sender. No one eats the roses.

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Burning the Body, after Tarkovsky

Our bodies are a sign that time once madeits home in us, we are connected to time the way the earth wears the orbit of the moon,and light is how time communicates, feelingis 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 doorbut she couldn’t let you in, the dream resisted you. You were never at homein 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 takeneverything that’s failed, dream, memory,the soul displaced from its ecliptic,into a kind of heaven, a sovereignindifference. You entered it with your bodyall on fire. Dusk was nesting in winter’s trees.The hours burned away. Nothing was spared.

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Ceremony, after Kiarostami

Where she departs there will be no strawberriesto carry home. No women who will scartheir faces so she won’t miss this earthstill new to suffering, this morningso 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 infernois everything we can’t let go,eternal remembering.

The road curves uphill to the sun. The countryis radiant and wide. May my passing beas bountiful. What’s tragic is not thatthis journey ends, but that we once walkedthrough such possibilities.

I’m learning how to wait, how not to look away.The stones are dug deep, the soul is fixedin place. Time takes and replenishes,sweeping towards mewith all my future joys.

65

Koan: The Last Eclipse of the Millennium

The one who begins this poem won’t be the sameas the one who will end it. Words like light

must travel as both particles and waves, defyingthe 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 likeSchrödinger’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 atno-more-language and starts over, the bull’s eye

of zero yearning. X = wonder, vivid underthe spell’s recurring question: Peut-on naître-mourir?

Lust kills joy instantly: half glass fully empty.Diamond cusp, be beautiful, brief, and blinding.

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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 memorybut 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 wouldalready fill me withlonging, or would

only now belearning toburn. And

I: whatamI?

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“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 threecontinents would survive economics, politics, war.

Of these continents, only five or so hegemonieswould rule the world. Of these nations, one

percent of the population would exploitthe rest. In spaces too small for lightto 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 ownsuicide bomber, a

satellite in thedwindlingorbits, amortalOm.

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“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 seewith my own two eyes. Fear

eats me. I have to lookfor a job. I can sprint

faster than sound.I burn forever,

I have noend.

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“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 transcribedby some underpaid clerk in the corridors

of space? Will the end of the world betelevised? And who will I die with?

Memory expands, doesn't it?Or does it recede, a quick

blue zip, into its ownbeginning? And if

it does, do weage back

into∞?

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Yellow Tang

My genesis will reinventall 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 starspropels the plankton and spermatozoa,foretells the itinerary of riversand the extinction of the coelacanth,compact as a pearl yet massiveas bewitchment, this human needfor darkness, for mystery.

In the dead of night I, too, grow weakerand give in. I listen onlyto what I believe is the soundof the first moment of the world,the solitude of the anemone.

To begin all over and trace the logicthat brought us here,a farrago squirming in the net of time,

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a desperate miracleor a fatal mistake.

But to begin like the protozoan,a marvel of feedingand simple multiplication,infinity in a single cell.

To begin this small, to knowone life alone completes the world.

Until the sun cuts through the waves,until the planets dwindle and hold still,and love rips us openand another million years begin.

72

Tektite

In the space that it takes to fill a life with memorythere’s an infinite receptaclethat never gets filled

In a room or a stairwell, there’s a lampthat was never lit and a wordthat died for not being spoken

During nights of misery and insomniathere was a blue egg of lightthat sheltered the children

The rain cracked open the hard dry shellof the earth, but somethingrefused to be born

Among words of slander and derisionthere was always someonewho said That is not so

Through all the wars of our two centuriesthere must have been at least one soulthat remained unbroken

Of all the coins we have givendid one ever begin to solvethe equation of hunger

And today, a day full of rain,where do I find one objectthat has not felt a longing for water

In elevators, in a shoe, in the waxedrinds of oranges, there is one atom

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that has not yet been defined

In the stillness of the virusor volcano, something staysawake, painfully small

A tektite travels light yearsonly to fall in the desertThe lizards gleam and scatter away

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Île Saint-Honorat

The jagged rocks rising out of the bayare weaker than water, the ants are fat with sap and dirt. This is the brinkof the world as far as the eye can see,the verge between what is desiredand what is possible, the vineyardsalready attaining their perfection,across the strait the murmuring women,their heads shorn, their bodies given overto penance and Saint Marguerite.What does all this matter now,though you’ve given up the worldthe world has not given up on you,the wars of Genoa still smolderin you, bread and salt have never beenmore worthy to you, the pink light liftingin San Bernardino, the eyes of fishstunned 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 heronthat murders for food, the pines that crashfrom the sheer weight of thunder.There’s something in the sky or seatoo deep or too blue to decipher:you venerate the mysterious becauseof the boundaries it defines, the bodymade impossibly human. You walk this patharound and around until you recognizethe shape and destiny of the earth,until your silence resemblesthe water’s persistence or the fatal

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patience of the ant, the nameless saintswhose 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 ghettosof the Arabs, over the palm of the old woman beggingon the steps of Barbès-Rochechouart; she’ll wake upwith brilliant tattoos burning in her hands.I’ll take all the hunger of the worldand use it as my ammunition. I’ll live in frontiers where languages merge and confuse the tongue. I’ll eat only chickpeas and pepperand learn to crush olives for oil. I’ll use the oilfor bathing and nourishment and sex.I’ll follow an angel in the fog of the bathsand sit next to him while three men take turnssucking his cock. I’ll dream only on Tuesdaysand only at 4 A.M. I’ll be a prostitute for a nightand earn my living giving pleasure.I’ve already told you how the earth spins backwardin the wrong direction and we’ll wind upin the first moment of the world, a breath, an urge to be, a calculated uncertainty.I’ve told you that water decrees its own fateand the deeper it is the less light you need,that light moves in circles, what you are nowis 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 boatcruising the Seine. I feel every life that is shown to mecomes 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.

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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.

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# 846

Time for healing has begun again light so languid spreads itself over the vineyard trellises from Les Arcs-Draguignan to Gare du Nordeveryone’s rocked to sleep on the TGVthere you go faster than the speed of memorygreen is dying everywhere and that is good the cemeteries stacked on the hillsthe dry earth crunching its nest of bonesthe shuttered windows like blue pools of skyyou have chosen to believe in something and now it is your burden not to deny itthe telephone wires collect the staticof all the names you’ve never called, and night is a different erayou have begun to worshipnothing in it that declines the possibility of beautyto protect what is dangerous to youwhose colors lacerate you and whose every gestureis subliminal, that too is good you will not slow downtill 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

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of the hanging treeyou are the Saracens and you are the Crossnothing you do contradicts the agreement you made with your birth look out the windowat a sky full of infinitiesno one hears it but youtime for healing has begun as it never fails to dothis hour, this trackno matter whose sorrowyou’ve pledged allegiance tothis orbit, this republicyou will be drawn again and again to where all things must begin,the zero of caliphs who dreamedin numbers, drawn back to stations where poets and soldiers go home woundedyou will forgive what is most difficult to forgivethen nothing more will need your words.

For Reine Arcache Melvin

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Rampart

If I must learn the art of nothingnessI would have to let go of this hour, the damp lightof cities, such stillness in the air that has given uplooking for itself in these endless rooms.

Time, deposed tyrant, has been reducedto waiting. Because I’ve stopped counting,the stars grow ever more invisible,the planets pale. The sun is old, a strandedspeck, unmoored and driftingamong angels and satellites.

But I can still walk down these streets,I can imagine I’m more than lightmade visible, and the carriages stopfor me, and the horses neigh in protestand scrape their hooves against the stones.

Late afternoon. Lying in someone’s bed,spellbound by the senses,I accept the disquietudeof the mortal. One must disappearwithout too much paraphernalia.

I’ve done away with the river and all its dead.I’ve renounced my allegiance to namesand silence, avenues and dead-ends,wars of attrition, heads of state.

And if I couldn’t stop the sun from sinkingwith the weight of its gold, I deny any partin all this beauty: for all this providencemy words are late apologies, a fistful of roses.

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No Fly Zone

Whatever form you imagine your worst fear,if the zigzag of sunlight on the stoop profoundlydisturbs you, no matter how much bitterness your earliest memory casts on your dinner plate,

Whether you come from a country of refugeesor xenophobes, whether you sleepon the right side of the bed or the left, with a manor a woman, in whatever languageyou 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 lampand pronounces a few words that could have saved a life,

Until the earth implodes with industryand volcanoes sputter their last reproach,

No matter who you were two weeks ago,no matter what voluntary evil lurkedin your heart when you woke this morning,and you smoked a cigarette in the rainand 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 sufferingand a coin to buy your way out of hell.

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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

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.

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