May iniisip ka?
Oo.
Ano?
Ayaw kong sabihin. Baka magkatotoo.
Dahil makulit ka
Kilala kita. Oo, ikaw 'yun: Nagkasalubong na tayo minsan, sa LRT, sa Gotohan, sa kanto ng Aurora at Katipunan. Nagkatinginan tayo. Hindi mo ako kinausap, pero alam ko, nakilala mo rin ako. Kaya ka narito, di ba? Para sabihing, Oo, oo, ikaw nga 'yun. Naaalala kita.
na, mula noong 24 Enero, 2006, ang nakitambay dito
dahi gusto kong maging river merchant
Friday, May 19, 2006
The River Merchant's Wife: A Letter Ezra Pound After Li Po
While my hair was still cut straight across my forehead I played at the front gate, pulling flowers. You came by on bamboo stilts, playing horse, You walked about my seat, playing with blue plums. And we went on living in the village of Chokan: Two small people, without dislike or suspicion.
At fourteen I married My Lord you. I never laughed, being bashful. Lowering my head, I looked at the wall. Called to, a thousand times, I never looked back.
At fifteen I stopped scowling, I desired my dust to be mingled with yours Forever and forever and forever. Why should I climb the lookout?
At sixteen you departed, You went into far Ku-to-en, by the river of swirling eddies, And you have been gone five months. The monkeys make sorrowful noise overhead.
You dragged your feet when you went out, By the gate now, the moss is grown, the different mosses, Too deep to clear them away! The leaves fall early this autumn, in wind. The paired butterflies are already yellow with August Over the grass in the West garden; They hurt me. I grow older. If you are coming down through the narrows of the river Kiang, Please let me know beforehand, And I will come out to meet you As far as Cho-fu-sa.
The River Merchant, Stuck in Kalamazoo, Writes His Wife a Letter During Her Semester Abroad Dean Young
We were looking forward to being alive. Now you new place! Me not too! Strange taste afternoon lonely for hummingbird mouthful. You somewhere else make everywhere else elser. I know almost nothing about this flower growing from my chest. Does it need dead-heading? Only you not answer. This complete the test of the emergency broadcast system? Definition of the female breasts as modified sweat gland certainly leave out curfew-breaking! Sunny melon morning all day! Remember! In my dream, almost get your sash off then wake of sadness. Forceful but gentle I not girl-scaring want to explain not like Jim explain his inight in jail so fly-around he explaing other nights in jail. No hello river in the sky then. When someone love you, good to be afraid making in that way? Not nice among dumb bamboo thickets, ga-zillion crickets not one Thelonius Monk. Ha ha only so long. I grow cold. Soon snow fall on the no more factory.
They seemed happy, the five of them. They seemed content to have their own archeologies rotting wild beneath the glassy surfaces of their words. Sometimes the night would scratch its eyes as if to say, "Hello, hi. Do you remember? Once I told you that I looked out my window and remembered..." what? They seemed to have forgotten. Was it a strand, a hand that can't be held? Such long, long lines, dragging towards a smile pregnant with memory. They seemed hungry for home.
Or were they just getting old? It was a Monday, and one of them felt as if he belonged to the moon. It was a parachute, and the moment he looked up he knew that he had stolen a metaphor. But from whom? Everywhere he looked there was a hole, a brittle black space, almost plastic, where once, he supposed, there was a word, or a song, or a friend, whose eyes shone with the wounded light of laughter. It was a Monday. They had yearned, so long, for this. And finally their poems made sense.
2.
Notice: Monday Club Closed
Somebody has locked up the doors. Someone else was looking for the keys, and I am circling the house, I am waiting for the evening to pay me a visit.
Somebody is looking for the doors to the keys. I knew where it was. I kept quiet. I hid myself behind the sign that said "There will always be room for you here."
Somebody is hiding behind the room behind the door. There are mouths and ears and shadows. There is no one inside. Instead some swirling haze, and I know it is just me and nostalgia.
Somebody is crying and I look out the door. Only myself. Left behind. Leaving.
(spider, seven for a secret, like entropy, i am legion)
