Sunsets in Exile

(An island without vowels)

There is an island without vowels.

If the Kabbalists are to be believed, then for every consonant there are three vowels.

If they are to believed, then names are the mark of mortality.

The step the tongue takes from the stem of the letter to its bowl takes three breaths, as long as silence. This is its life.

The step the lips take to let in breath only to expel it again is the length of a kiss. 

Every letter has a soul. (A single word has many souls. A paragraph has memories. A book takes an eternity to expire.)

And yet, there is an island without vowels.

Some old atlases put this off the Welsh coast.

Some even older ones say that an island drifts along the Georgian coast on the Black Sea.

(We know of the multiple errors of cartography.)

Only that I cannot say for certain where it is.

A Sense of Place

I yearn for distant cities
shrouded in fog, the air
constantly washed
by rain, crisp and smelling
of freshly laundered sheets
we wind about ourselves
and retreat to when the days
prove heavy and without remorse.

Sheets are furled and unfurled
by a wind we have no name for
in the languages we share
between ourselves while
they bask in the sun and they drip
until the drops themselves
are gone.

(In that language of ours,
nothing is sacred or profane;
the only people we find
are ourselves. Strangers
help themselves to blankness.)

In that distant city,
our future selves wait
for who we are now
to learn how to unfasten chains
and discover the lost art
of growing wings.
___________

for M. 

(The most organized of all)

He calls it mucking out. I call it a purge.

Stalin was the most organized of them all.

A queue, forms. 

Bureaucracy deals kindly with holes dug in the ground.

It must be according to regulation.

With a standard shovel. Wearing standard garb.

Today: ex-Army Colonels; Professors of Aesthetics at the Polytechnic; milkmen; churchmice. In that order. 

Tomorrow: ex-members of the State Writer’s Workshop; exiled Lamas without reincarnation permits; men who own more than three cats. In that order.

(The great machinery moves without thought.) 

Stalin, most organized of all. 

The pardon appointment list, put up every three months, was released.

A schedule for a tribunal hearing to determine whether one is eligible for an appointment with another tribunal for a pardon.

(Those previously dispatched need not apply.)

Two weeks hence: apple-seed sowers; disgraced church sextons; cobblers. In that order.

Two-and-a-half weeks hence: typesetters; haberdashers; stableboys. In that order.

He calls it mucking out; I call it a purge.

Stalin was the most organized of all. 

Paragraphs and Your Nine-Year-Old

One of the kids at work told me that he doesn’t want to learn how to construct a logically ordered paragraph. He said that it isn’t necessary for school anyway: they never answer questions in paragraph, never answer in complete sentences—hell, I was expecting him to say that they aren’t expected to spell properly either. (And all things considered, spelling properly is the least of worries.) This got me riled up. (It’s easy to get me riled up, after all, his was a feat easily repeatable.) He even told me that one of his older friends said that a paragraph was pointless to learn. (This after saying that he doesn’t know what a paragraph is. How easily does he contradict himself without his knowing.)

Paragraphs aren’t important, aren’t necessary, it seems. And so I asked him to prove to me that paragraphs aren’t necessary. (We aren’t even talking of a serial comma here, or one of those obscure rules of writing—rules I don’t mind being broken as long as they are broken consciously, with purpose—we’re talking about paragraphs. Paragraphs!) I have never gone the way of “Do-as-I-say-since-I-know-better,” I try to explain things as best I could. But confronted with this… senselessness… of a child pronouncing judgment about things he does not understand because it entails more work for him—how easily would this slide into mediocrity, into… the patent stupidity of the adult.

Being unable to justify why paragraphs are unnecessary, he slinked back to his seat. And I, seething. 

Variations: Poems for One Met at a Gas Station (II)

The heat becomes her,
she sheds skins
one after another
and in swift succession,
reptilian-reminiscent,
salamandrous and shameless,
night or no night.

“the cities of Ys and Tyre”

Lines generally get stuck in my head—sometimes where they come from is clear, sometimes impossible to track—sometimes the lines themselves get mangled and garbled and find themselves garbed in other meanings. This matters very little to me. But when a line takes over, for example “the cities of Ys…” four words from somewhere. (From a poem, actually. But the result of my looking for it isn’t what is interesting. At best when I figured out what the fifth word was—a city starting with a ‘t’ and along the Mediterranean—I simply typed the whole phrase into the Google searchbar, and everything was solved. But this isn’t the point.)

When something gets stuck, the pleasure is in the how: how did it get there? A backwards search in my head of everything I’ve listened to and read in the last week drew blanks. (In fact, I haven’t been reading anything in the past week because I’ve been writing letters or having fantastically long calls—but more about that elsewhere.) And the things I’ve been listening to have not even been in English, mostly. (M. is to be blamed for the inundation of songs I can’t understand, but more about M. elsewhere.) But how did it get there?—it comes from somewhere, it isn’t something I dredged out of my guts.  

The whole fragment was “the cities of Ys and Tyre” from a poem by this Polish woman I find fascinatingly brilliant and understated.

There’s a line I attribute to Neruda, although I’m sure I’m misquoting him horribly: “Your body thrums like a meteor streaking through the rain.” The original ought to sound even more fantastical. But it’s precisely this: we are free to mangle these words, free to change them—to abandon them then to take them up again. Nothing is sacred. 

How casually do they touch each other,
fingers grazing the neck, exposed;
hand nestling in the small of the back;
eyes gazing directly into the lens
without regard for what permanence
that might bring, without need to face
interrogations.

“It is here, set down,” they might say;
“Read as much as you will from these hands
from these stares. Read as much as you will,
we don’t care.”

“How great your faith on proof,”
they might exclaim, these two lovers
catching sight of future questions,
“That you ask it of us now,
as though you didn’t know
how far then and there are
from here and now.”

How casually did they touch each other;
and at the causes of this, we need not wonder.

The Telling - Mookie Katigbak

olvalx:

When I tell you that you have an effect
Upon me you may not intend, and you
Ask me to render, not tell,
I think of cities I have been to
And have yet to see, where at some ungodly
Hour, a train slips through unseen tracks,
All grooved wheels and steam pipes
Announcing neither arrival nor departure
But passage, sure and swift as rain after
A dry spell. In the town square, vendors sell
Candied nuts by the glare of gas lights
And the derelict hit-or-miss of prayers
Everyone forgets to follow through.
When a train passes, the makeshift stalls
Allow the ground its procedural
Shiver, then it’s business as usual.
What’s earth-stopping is the howl
Of a train expressly on its way
To not here. It moans a phantom hunger
All the more terrible because unseen
—Hear it?—This is the sound of all
That rifles through us and does not stay.
Everything is in the details; wail of the train
Through tracks unseen, destination
unknown.
When I show you how you and I
Have more hunger than we know
What to do with, I am telling you
Goodbye before you know it.

(Every fourteen days, a language dies)

Every fourteen days,
a language dies.

Does it count
to fourteen
until it expires,

or do others
do the counting?

Every fourteen days,
a language dies.

No more rocks
for it, no more skies;
no more love in it,
no more time.

The world
becomes unconstricted
from it, untied
from sound.

How many
Adams had to point
to how many things
and say how many
names and smile
at how many aptnesses?

Every fourteen days,
a language dies;

can one imagine
the night
before it does?

To say:
“This is the last tear,
this is the last sigh, this,
the last of the last.”

Every fourteen days,
a language dies.

This, even a Scheherazade
cannot stop.