eric gamalinda – amigo warfare

7/27/2019 Eric Gamalinda Amigo Warfare

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Amigo Warfare


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Amigo WarfarePoems by Eric Gamalinda

Cherry Grove Collections


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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

Visit us on the web atwww.cherry-grove.com

This download version of Amigo Warfare is offered free ofcharge, and reproduction of the work for non-commercialpurposes is permitted and encouraged. Reproduction forsale, rent or other use involving financial transaction isprohibited except by permission.
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Acknowledgments

The following journals, webzines and anthologies previouslypublished earlier versions of these poems, some underdifferent titles. My gratitude to their editors.

Barrow Street:The Skin of WarBig City Lit:My Generation; Sprung PidginA 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 BoteroThe Hat:Autobiography of Water; Ego>Lust>Guilt;Valley of Marvels; Antonio Machados Off-Season

Interlope:The End of the World Will Happen on December21, 2012

Interpoezia:Valley of Marvels; Autobiography of Water;#846

International Quarterly:Pictures from a Country inMourning, after Botero

Literary Review:DMZ; Poem Not Written in CatalanLove Gathers All(Anvil Publishing/Ethos Books, Manila /

Singapore: Sunico, Yuson, Lee, Pang, eds.):Bollywood Ending

The Philippines Free Press(Manila): The RememberedWorld; Rampart

Pinoy Poetics: Autobiographical and Critical Essays(MeritagePress, CA: Nick Carbo, ed.): Melting City

Poets & Writers Online: Two Nudes

Rain Tiger: Two Nudes; PolitoxicRespiro: Bollywood Ending; Antonio Machados OffSeason

Search(Colegio San Agustin, Manila): Tektite; Burningthe Body, after Tarkovsky

Structure and Surprise(Teachers and WritersCollaborative, Michael Theune, ed.): Subtitles Off

The Sunday Inquirer(Manila): Two Nudes; The Map ofLight; Ceremony, after Kiarostami

Tomas(University of Santo Tomas Press, Manila: AlfredYuson, ed.): Sign Language; Plan B; Poems ofSorrow, after Luis Gonzlez Palma


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Many thanks to Le Chateau de Lavigny in Switzerland, LeChateau de la Napoule in France, and Ledig HouseInternational Retreat for Writers in New York for giving methe opportunity to work on several of these poems.

I am also grateful to Arthur Sze, Eugene Gloria, and TinaChang for reading my manuscript and giving invaluableadvice; the Asian American Writers Workshop; thePhilippine Literary Arts Council; Reynaldo Ileto for thebook's title; Nick Carbo; and D. Nurkse.

And as always to Bunny, Marisse, Mark, Celine, Diana,

Bing, Miel, and our mom, Doris Trinidad:maraming salamat.

Cover photograph:No saba que ella estaba pensando en, 2004(detail from diptych) | Copyright Luis Gonzlez Palma |Courtesy Robert Mann Gallery, New York.


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If I had to sum up my impressions of America,I would list these: waste, innocence, vastness, poverty.

Michelangelo Antonioni


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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 meyou have been grievously misled.I cash my name in, such a useful thing

lets hope someone else has more luck with it.I return the suit I borrowed,promises I couldnt mend,the happiness just one more quarter-inchwithin my reachloose changestill good for a paupers meal.

I surrender my historyand all memory, its ammunition.

The nameless claim me. Exilesoffer me a home. Who else sees meas 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 awayanything that will devour me.I do this in the city, where the jackhammer

cracks 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 everyones behalf, Im sticking

to my story. Its better not to talkabout the wounded, or the moist remainsof the disappeared. But theres 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.

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Sign Language

My friend speaks to me in sign language:This is beautiful, and Im afraid. The words leapfrom her hands, a flicker in the dark. The motorstutters, jungle mangroves drift and vaporize

to snowcapped peaks. Day fades to night, fades backto day. Her hands busy, though weve alreadylost each other, and shes forgotten gestures

to describe whats become inert, her love

turned 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 reignof winter. The cobbled alleys glow. No longerused to land, our feet drag over the stones.

We know were 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 yetto understand. Its been like this for weeks,dropping strangers in the same blind-alley town.The streets are pocked with holes. A man crawls intoan empty vault in a burial wall. Hes 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 flowers 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 palms

spread 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 someonefor directions to the end of the world and he said,

Keep going till you cant. Twelve years ago

I crossed six time zones, three continents,half a lifetime. Existence is mathematics:therefore your life will be as nearly perfect as mine.I cant recall the last time I truly loved anybody.But in the corner of emotions Ive kept the light onfor those who still cant find their way. My father

pounds the walls in the shadow theaterof his grave. In my dreams the dead keep growing,like fingernails or hair. If I could sum up

all that Ive learned, here it is: Everythingeats everything. There is no escape. Galaxies grazein endless space and outside of that who knows?

At some junction dappled with the residueof stars, maybe youll find yourself as you werea gigabyte ago. A quasar of desire. Your heartas 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.

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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 halflanguages

and travel south on a Thursday towardssome form of life outside of earth

And although people will think Im 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 hearthem denying me

Normally this doesnt bother me but todayIm 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 actuallykilling 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 lightyears away

If theres 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)

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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 think

theyre dreaming us but were really

dreaming 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, were not so lucky,

we find no refuge in the bone-littered country.So pay no currency to the Pope, ignore

the Secretary of Defense. Dont change your mindabout the impossible: I believe

I am about to not wake up, and I no longerwish to be in anyone elses nightmarebut your own, where a curfews been enforcedon 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 underminethis perfect flaw. For the moment let there be

no 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 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 packagesto 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 cancelall hunger, all voodoo, all lies.

I would like to be able to walk inside a bar and tell

everybodythe 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 worlds 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 cheered

by bumpkins in the bleachersswathed with perfumes of gasoline. Welcome

to the suburbs of guilt. Your days are now an endlessloop, a season of reruns. Theres always someone

you dont want to know. An ex, a trick,a trafficker of bliss. Every whisperis 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 woundedfrom the ghettos of desire. Love picks youfrom the suspect line; should have learned

to live alone. Where you come from is whereyouve been too long. Where youre goingis where youve 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, 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 fertilizeand 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 muchsugar. Just when you think you got it, that is notenlightenment. Take your dollar Buddha, make him

pick your celery, your grape. What you forgetyou dont remember, which implies that absence isan object, whats lost is constant. You green card

your way through walls and fences, turn so white

youre practically invisible. Now take a poemyou wrote in your blood twenty years agoand strike out all the lines. Nothing's left but

punctuation and a freeway of erasures. Thats it:only the open road. Poems are dead things,a slow process of decomposition. If they dontdecay, 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 all

the 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. Its 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 isnt wide,its smaller than the human heart,but it casts a shadow from here

to 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.Theyre not going to stop until

the 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 up

against the blacked-out sky.

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Daisy Cutter

(3) The homosexuals fist fuck in the steam roomwhile the janitor isnt looking. (10) He callsand 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 bond

than a shared lie. (24) Its riskier to start a war

under 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, doesnt 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 place

so thatplacecancels 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 wherebroken cities bleed their toxins. (14) Deliver us

from one another. (21) We have come to the endof the human era. (16) You wont remember a thing.(23) Or maybe some celestial database will keep

the avarice of presidents on file. (25) We thank youfor our rage. (7) Its possible that the bodydesires in order to need, and absence is

whats 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 born

full 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 that

the metal detectors dont go off, changetheir voices or the color of their skin;they dont remember being born, nor fearthe sound of water: the nights we dreadedsurfing the channels for comfort are here

at last, all that cinema dreamed for ushas come to pass, here is their infestationof incivilities like mud prints lefton Astro Turf, they are unpacking

their 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 whatwere willing to pay ourselves, worshipingin congregations large and small, holdingnational parades, lodging in the most obscureinterstices of our cities, wearing veils

that mystify their intentions, savingmoney, working two or three jobs, installing

window guards for obviously nefarious

purposes, 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 there

the newlyweds, ex-Gen X entrepreneurs,signed him up to sell miracle wine on the HomeShopping Network, they could tell Jesus

wasnt going to be just another one-hitwonder, 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 said

wait a minute, theres 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 lovers hair, and on his palms

the hennaed remembrances of forgotten Bedouins,and underneath his eyelids the eternal visions

of the fatal Essenes, and they cat-scanned 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 worldyoure worth a lot of silverbut we just got to know, have you ever slept

with 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 repliedI am

the last Adam, in me time beginsanew, time which contains alland all bodies containbut 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 ofJoshua Tree State Park, this is how we wait

for the second coming, this is how we savethe ones who burn,the January sky

broke open with a funnel of arctic cold,normal for this time of the year.

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The End of the World Will Happen

on December 21, 2012If youre reading this after 2012, the Mayans weredead wrong. Even so its been wonderful speakingin the future tense. There must be simpler ways to tell

which 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 belongs

to the lachrymose danger and commonwealthof angels. Do you understand what Im trying

to say: well invade each others conspiracies,all the sorrowful mysteries. Then Ill wake up morningsalready stalking poems hidden in codes so simple

they 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 others odors. Ill grow darkereach summer, forget me, Ill be distant and older,my life expanding like the Big Bang. At 60I 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 hoursof the end of the world? Ive used you for my pleasure,comrade, you have satiated me. Ill wait for youat the junction of burnt emotions. Ill send a postcardfrom the sad and brave frontiers. Ill 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 cant 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 living

Ill remember your apocalypse if youll remember mineIt will be a holiday of the senses

Its all quiet now in the epicenter of your(yearning) (desolation) (boredom) (religion)If A then B: If Jesus died for your sins

Then rest your ruins on the glorious mysteries

Strangle the pedophile in his jail cellYoure on death row anyway

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Poems of Sorrow,

after Luis Gonzlez PalmaTheres a child being baptized with a crown of thorns.Theres a soldier whose best friend will shoot him dead.Theres an indiawho grieved for the soldiereven while he was alive;

this is her garland of perfumed skulls.This is the man who spoke bird languageand 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 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(shes 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 thedisappeared.

This is what I dreamed last night(you cant see it, because it was just a dream).

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Politoxic

You will die on your way to AmericaYoure declared missing long before you disappearTheyve called off all further search for you

But its 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 screenLet your body be drawn to my bodyMy heart is ticking inside its shelter

Dug in and waiting for someone to misstep andexplode

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 spared

You walk away: your absence walks ahead of you

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In times of ascendancy, the conjecture that mans existenceis a constant, unvarying quantity can sadden or irritate us;

in times of decline (such as the present), it holds out theassurance that no ignominy, no calamity, no dictator, canimpoverish us.

Jorge Luis Borges


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Two Nudes

She fears April most of all, when the monsoonstifles the little devotion left between us. I blame

the 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 doesnt see the irony of it,how we always wind up nursing the ones

we 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 Im making this up,but this morning she told me, Moneyis the most beautiful object in the world.Shes looking for something to believe in,beyond the obvious thats too bright, too close

to see. Dear Eric,he writes, I run to you

only when Im on the verge of disintegrating.Summer in the tropics is all Lent, all repentanceand resurrection, and Im 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 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 outto touch my face, she reminds me of the crookof 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 countrys sorrowlike an explorer looking for a rivers 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:Ive been there.I wanted to find

its 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 waged

to win it. Or if it meandered all its lifeunknown, a vengeful but healing deity,crossed only once by a tribe whose name

no one now recalls.

2

If you ask about my lifeI 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 cityhospital, 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 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 lantern

that 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 us

when 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 leanagainst this wall.

In that walled-up space I will let everything grow inwild 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 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 countrys 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 devour

the silence that settled in my place.

All the laws that had held me down,

bogus like medals on the coatof a dictatorI 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 rumbled

through the alleys, spooks

on 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 stillstuck gleaming like amber jewels.

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The monsoon came, six monthsof infinite rain. The towns I once knew

were wiped clean,and everyone said it was Godrevising his poem.

In a fishing village in Mindoroa tourist from Americaoffered me money to eat

poison mushrooms with him.Later that night, before he took

my cock in his mouth, he said:Youll never forget this.

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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 downfor reporting it on TV.

And yet another crossed the Alps

on foot, got lucky,found work as a toilet cleanerin a palazzo in Rome.

And I became a poetso I would have nothing to do

with the government of humans,only to carry like river waterin pails on two ends of a stick

the weight of rememberingand the weight of forgiving.

A decade into the new millenniumwe will hold a congressto assess what weve done.We will come from many worlds,many wars. No scars will show.

No memories will be the same.One will say, I killed a hundred 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 history

and 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 theres a heavenbut theres no more room.

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

Because you make our women weartheir 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 out

to investigate our dreams.

Because we dream the dangerous

in 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 us

in fear, even while we sing.

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Pictures from a Country in

Mourning,after Botero1: 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 deserves

our 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 junta

will be displayed in all homes, public offices,libraries, churches, and in the private densof prostitutes, so that citizens may remember

their allegiance even in the fervency of love.

But only for tonight, let them turn their facesaway from us, let them ignore

the hearts insurgencies. Above our bedthe 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 nations 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.

Thats why the windows are smalland the rooms reek of perpetual

twilight: this is my kingdomwhen the night draws me out.

In my room (in a barrioI wont name), I keep the fortunesof my wounded country:silver chalices, rosaries,

diamonds as impermeableas a prayer, photographs of people

I will never know, but may meetoccasionally 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 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 lights 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 season

still to come. Nothing makes sensein the world of final negotiations.Death lurking beside the manalready remembered by all

the early dead. It is a cherubsskeleton, a small impbrandishing a crimsonsaber, so small it is nothing

but 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 Im 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

shops

I can say Ive left my mark on all who pass by Mojacar.You got to let them know who really rules around thisjoint.

These days, no one talks about who once pursued thewaters

echo, 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

placeits best to ignore them. The levantehowls from the

coastand picks at the dregs of all weve been. Its 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 well scamper

aroundwhether its 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 themoon

how many bitches will remember us long after weregone.

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The Skin of War

The world like the body has grown old and tired oflove.

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 pockets

of bread and knives, the things that have held themdown.

Memory is weightless, but it feeds on the massivespace

it inhabits. Open the windows, let it feed on air,

make room and offer it to those in need: to newly-wedsand 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 borderthe soldiers ask us where weve been, what we own:goat wool for the cold, shoes with soles scraped thin.

Are we safe now, can we call our mothers?Hide your faces behind burqas; in war everyone

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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 language

thats the wrong size for their tongues.Some learn to respond only

to the numbers that cancel their names.

Like the blind, I touch their facesand recognize them by what I cannot see.Tanks uproot tamarind treesolder than my grandfathers 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 bleed

through the porous edges of the remembered world.

2

Lord, on the seventh dayyou were done with the world.With your distance youve erasedall evil and all good. I am alive

in 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 continue

to erase me, as though by my birthI have broken a pact, that I remaininvisible and small.

So I carry everything with me,though its almost over, though Im tiredof being strong. I leave nothingfor grief to feed on.

Not my mothers young sorrow, my sisters life

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of water, my fathers solitude,my brothers cities occupied and broken.

Not these words, though they weigh me down.Not the mirrors of the moon, be they false oceans, allillusion.

Not even love, whose October grows ever more faintin yours.

The shattered Thursdays,the stories we refuse to surrender, the woundedand those who woundwhen I take my turn

I 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 ploughand harrow his soul, rendering it capable of turning to good.

Andrey Tarkovsky


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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 syllableis defiance, an act of survival.

Mercy looks for moving targets.Those who have just been born dont know what its

liketo spend an eternity searching. I will let them sleepquietly, and hope when they wake wed 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 evenings

that weaken my resolve. So that those who listenwill 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 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 Valle des Merveilles

to carve his name on Mont Bego.The year was 1629. He may have fallenfrom the crags, his bones now interred

with 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 Elmos fire. A hunteror a shepherd, the words wooland 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 back

to water through guesswork; begin fromthe cul-de-sacs of Tende. And if you discoverthe seven rivers to be true, drink and resistbelieving youve been saved. You will not

be saved. You will walk away as blindedas you were before, and live so longno 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 Rhne. They will find, clenchedbetween your teeth, the wordsdagger

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andhalberd.They will uncurl from your fingersobjects once marvelous to you: billhook,

pickaxe, flint. Your bones will resemble rock.

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Antonio Machados Off-Season

Tombs and the dead terrify me. Yet a young face oneday

appears, short of breath, with no good news fromSeville.

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

cant tellby the calm on their faces how theyve colluded likestreetwise scalawags, how theyve perfected the

illusion.No one knows that something is about to come amiss,a pixel will disappear from the screen. The baker is

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 castles

lookoutis only partly lit to save on gas. War is elsewhereand is always coming near. If you know where to walk

you can follow the shape of a swastika. Young mendrink

in soccer bars, as beautiful as the whores they love tofuck,

an empire of salt on each others skins. AntonioMachado

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throws the windows open. The African wind blustersin.

He has a view of the cemetery. He knows exactlywherehis 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 havent used in years.Now he wears her gown, a wig of twigs, her soft red

shoes,and lies down on her bed. And just as he knew it,

as the moon drowned in the sea, the devil 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 still

keep 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:dont you remember how the evening

wouldnt let go of all that blue, how your tonguewoke 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 feelthe presence of time, not by rememberingbut by touching? In a dream you found

your mothers house, you stood by the doorbut she couldnt let you in, the dream

resisted you. You were never at homein the body, its weighed with longing,its needs too soon extinct. You lit a candleacross the water until the wind gave upand let you pass: by mere insistence

you could have saved the world. No onesaw you, no one pulled you out of the sulfur,but the dying still walk miles to it,

in their minds already healed. Youve takeneverything thats 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 winters 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 wont 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.

Its said that the good pass on, but infernois everything we cant let go,eternal remembering.

The road curves uphill to the sun. The countryis radiant and wide. May my passing beas bountiful. Whats tragic is not that

this journey ends, but that we once walkedthrough such possibilities.

Im 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 me

with all my future joys.

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Koan: The Last Eclipse

of the MillenniumThe one who begins this poem wont 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 likeSchrdingers cat: unless you look, theyre neither dead

nor alive. The one who ends this poem is notthe one who will stand accused and be forced

to deny it. Which dies first, memory or the thingremembered? 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 bulls eye

of zero yearning. X = wonder, vivid underthe spells recurring question:Peut-on natre-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 agravitational lens to refract light and magnify distances 30

times beyond the cluster, scientists have found what they believecould be the beginning of the universe.

The object gives a faint light.Demiurge, Axiogenesis, call it

what you will: the light from whichall 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 possibleonly one planet would belivable. 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, onepercent of the population would exploit

the 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, amortal

Om.

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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. TodayI'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. Feareats 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 universeis a mere sliver of space.

In the space that it takes to unravel a star,how much room is takenby a third world war? What time is it

in Kabul? How oldwould I be in 1521? If a quasar bends in the light,

do cities warp in it, bridges twist and turn, carscrash? Do words like these get transcribedby 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 quickblue zip, into its own

beginning? And ifit does, do we

age backinto!

?

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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.

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Tektite

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

In a room or a stairwell, theres 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 derision

there 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 given

did 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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le 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 youve 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 fish

stunned in nets and dying of air.Alone at night it is still the wateryou call to: I will bless the cactieach day that I live, the black heron

that murders for food, the pines that crashfrom the sheer weight of thunder.Theres something in the sky or sea

too 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 recognize

the shape and destiny of the earth,until your silence resembles

the waters 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.

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Melting City (1)

One of these days Im going to melt all the gold ofParis

and turn it into money. Ill spread it over the ghettosof the Arabs, over the palm of the old woman beggingon the steps of Barbs-Rochechouart; shell wake up

with brilliant tattoos burning in her hands.Ill take all the hunger of the worldand use it as my ammunition. Ill live in frontiers

where languages merge and confuse the tongue.Ill eat only chickpeas and pepperand learn to crush olives for oil. Ill use the oilfor bathing and nourishment and sex.Ill follow an angel in the fog of the bathsand sit next to him while three men take turnssucking his cock. Ill dream only on Tuesdaysand only at 4 A.M. Ill be a prostitute for a nightand earn my living giving pleasure.

Ive already told you how the earth spins backwardin the wrong direction and well wind upin the first moment of the world, a breath, an urge

to be, a calculated uncertainty.Ive 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.

Ive told you how Ive 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 Ive already said:I will pave the gold of Paris all over your lives,I will do it with words, if words mean anything to you.

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This is the way Ive always known it,though all my life I wanted not to believe,

I did everything I could not to believe.

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# 846

Time for healing has begun againlight so languid spreads itselfover the vineyard trellisesfrom Les Arcs-Draguignan

to Gare du Nordeveryones rocked to sleep on the TGV

there you go faster thanthe speed of memory

green is dying everywhereand that is goodthe cemeteries stacked on the hillsthe dry earth crunchingits nest of bones

the shuttered windows like blue pools of skyyou have chosen to believe in somethingand now it is your burdennot to deny it

the telephone wires collect the staticof all the names

youve never called, and nightis a different era

you have begun to worshipnothing in it that declines

the possibility of beautyto protect what is dangerous to you

whose colors lacerate youand whose every gestureis subliminal, that too is good

you will not slow downtill darkness overwhelms you, it will neveroverwhelm you, you are the balanceand spire, the armor and sail,

you are the smokestacksand the spray paint, the shadow

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of the hanging treeyou are the Saracens

and you are the Crossnothing you do contradictsthe agreement you madewith your birthlook out the windowat a sky full of infinitiesno one hears it but you

time for healing has begunas it never fails to do

this hour, this trackno matter whose sorrow

youve pledged allegiance tothis orbit, this republicyou will be drawn again and againto where all things must begin,the zero of caliphs who dreamedin numbers, drawn back to stations

where poets and soldiersgo home woundedyou will forgivewhat is most difficult to forgivethen nothing morewill 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 Ive 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 Im 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 someones bed,spellbound by the senses,I accept the disquietudeof the mortal. One must disappear

without too much paraphernalia.

Ive done away with the river and all its dead.

Ive renounced my allegiance to namesand silence, avenues and dead-ends,wars of attrition, heads of state.

And if I couldnt 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 man

or a woman, in whatever languageyou articulate your desire,

Even if tanks roll out of armorieslooking 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 someones name tasted like blood on your lips,

I am glad to share this lifetime with you,there is no other planet where the cultivation of soulsis possible, none that we know of;may the happiness of others protect you,may you find the flashing exit signsat the turnpikes of sufferingand a coin to buy your way out of hell.

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Notes


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The epigraphs are from the following sources: WhatThis Land Says to Me, by Michelangelo Antonioni,

from The Architecture of Vision(Marsilio Publishers,1996); Circular Time, by Jorge Luis Borges, fromSelected Non-Fictions, translation by Eliot Weinberger(Viking, 1999); and Sculpting in Timeby AndreyTarkovsky, translation by Kitty Hunter-Blair(University of Texas Press, 1986).

Poem Not Written in Catalan quotes a line fromSalvador Espriu.

Daisy Cutter paraphrases a statement by SlavojZizek: A shared lie is an incomparably more effectivebond for a group than the truth.

Two Nudes: Pikit, a village in the largely Muslimisland of Mindanao, was bombed for weeks by thePhilippine military in support of the United States war

against terrorism.Amigo Warfare was what the Americans derisivelycalled the Filipino style of resistance [from 1899 to1904]. The Filipinos were friends during the day or

when confronted, but at night or when no one waslooking, they were guerrillas. From The Philippine-

American War: Friendship and Forgetting, byReynaldo C. Ileto, in Vestiges of War(Shaw, Francia,

eds., New York University Press, 2002).

The Remembered World: The epigraphs are fromSand and Other Poemsby Mahmoud Darweesh,

translation by Rana Kabbani (KPI London, 1986), andThe Selected Poetry of Yehuda Amichai, translation byChana Bloch and Stephen Mitchell (Harper Perennial,1986).

Valley of Marvels: According to archaeologist Henryde Lumley, the mysterious rock carvings found in the


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Valle des Merveilles in the Alps of SoutheasternFrance were inscribed between 1800 B.C. and 1500

B.C. Shaman-chiefs, calledorants, may have used thesegraffiti to interpret omens, giving them considerablepolitical power. The valley appears to have been asacred place during the Bronze Age, says De Lumley.But by the beginning of the first millennium (100B.C.) its message was lost. Humberto Delgarennas is

the earliest graffito from recorded history, a relic ofpilgrimages shepherds and climbers took from aroundthe 1600s, risking the punishing 6,000-ft. trek from

Tende.

Koan: The Last Eclipse of the Millennium quotes aline from Zen master Mumon.

Melting City (1) is the text for a short video, VerasRoom.

Rampart quotes a line from Rene Char.


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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 afellowship in fiction from the New York Foundation

for the Arts.


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eric gamalinda – amigo warfare

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