" By a January Lamplight"
The barrio lamps glimmer in tremulous fragility,
the phonograph will remain
closed. This is the forgetting,
the method by which the heart is emptied
of all thoughts, and by some unheard cadence,
divides the mind into compartments
of vast echoes. A porcelain flower pot stands
table side, the curtain lifts
on January wind, the birdsongs linger.
This is the last letter after the ones
left unanswered. Long ago, I wrote to you
of a summer leaf that flew with the breeze
above the rice fields, of the intense fever of noontide
and the painful gaze toward the sea.
I wrote to you of rain, the mud
by riverbanks, the regular spaces
between hooves carabaos left behind.
I wanted you to smell air
full of mango dust, remember the fine gash
pineapples leave on the shy colors
of your soft skin.
I once wrote of how I always saw
what I wanted to see, and of being stabbed
somewhere along Arrocerros street
by the sharp blade of my blindness,
a sleepwalker in a night of provincial deaths.
There were ruins among the crosses that sprang
from earth into an aimless sky;
I wanted to let you know I was among them.
I wrote of how I measured time,
first by the length of your hair,
or the brevity of your smile
and by other excuses that erase
the complexity of our distance, and how
slack repose on a wicker chair
brings a malignant silence.
But I doubt you have read them,
or learned how a universe's dimension
becomes the bamboo cot we shared,
that everything is drowned
save for you and your hand enclosed
in mine. I doubt you have anything to say
after all these years of silence,
except that the night has spread across the fields,
touching even the cobwebs under San Joaquin bridge,
and nothing, not even the stars, has a song.
© 2005 Marty Abuloc
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