Month: March 2024

I want to know how and when you came to be called
this—for even in the diminutive, it is a burden.

From watching you I learned each day was a race:
fifteen minutes' walk to the market, back at just past

the half hour, on your face the sheen of exertion
but also of pride. Early, rather than late. Fingers flew

over every one of our needs—we were blessed 
with nourishment, buttoned up to our chins, nothing

we could possibly want in addition to what you gave. But
I don't know what secrets you carried, besides me. When I 

look into the camera's eye I tilt my head like you. I smile 
without baring all my teeth. The part in our hair is where 

a brush or a comb moved through this little patch of 
darkness into which we climbed every night for rest.

Gabriela, saying your name like this will make
people think I'm writing to my youngest daughter. 

And yes she was named after you, but also after 
my father—himself named after the announcing

angel, the angel of prophecy and visions. As for us,
our visions are no less heraldic, touched by fire and 

the recurring dream of freedom known by whatever 
kind of name. Do angels have to sacrifice, Gabriela? 

When one falls in battle, does another take his place 
the way you moved without hesitation to the helm

of your husband's army after his assassination? 
It was 1762;  the British had just captured Manila.

He had hoped to overthrow the Spanish government 
in Ilocos, replacing it with native leadership. Gabriela, 

townspeople called you La Generala—fiery angel with
sword aloft, astride your horse, leading the charge on 

Vigan. It was not to be. Captured, you and your soldiers hung
like bells in the plaza. Even now, your name is resistance.  
 

In a total solar eclipse, the sky will darken
as if it were dawn or dusk as the moon

passes between the Sun and the Earth.
Ekleipsis: an abandonment, a failing, 

a forsaking, The moon's shadow obscures 
the face of the Sun, and birds and other animals 

grow quiet. The temperature drops and age-old 
fears arc overhead—a dragon is swallowing the light, 

so we bang on drums or shoot flaming arrows into 
its clouded eye. Herodotus wrote in the sixth 

century of Lydians and Medeans negotiating a peace 
treaty to end a six-year war. In the middle of a solar 

eclipse, imagine armies dropping their weapons, 
rendered speechless by this greater darkness. 

I was naive about many things
in the world when I asked the young 
retreat participant where she got 
the camera slung like a gleaming 
pendant around her neck and she said 
her parents bought it for her as a present. 
At the cafeteria buffet you could choose  
a protein to go with your bread and milk.
Meat, fish, or tofu and a sauce to go with it: 
green sauce or red sauce, yellow, or gravy.
Perhaps I believed possession was mostly 
a byproduct of your own labor. I knew
the cost of two meal plans vs. three. 
I felt sorry for so much uneaten food.

Early with Mr. Moore about Sir Paul Neale’s business with my uncle and other things all the morning.
Dined with him at Mr. Crew’s, and after dinner I went to the Theatre, where I found so few people (which is strange, and the reason I did not know) that I went out again, and so to Salsbury Court, where the house as full as could be; and it seems it was a new play, “The Queen’s Maske,” wherein there are some good humours: among others, a good jeer to the old story of the Siege of Troy, making it to be a common country tale. But above all it was strange to see so little a boy as that was to act Cupid, which is one of the greatest parts in it. Then home and to bed.

a clean people
we bury our mask
our old story

making a common
country tale as strange
as great art

Erasure poem derived from The Diary of Samuel Pepys, Saturday 2 March 1660/61.

When you have a dream in which you meet yourself 
coming in the door of your childhood home and you look 

at the you looking at you with a level gaze, of course it is 
unnerving. The you in this visitation places his hand 

on your shoulder before moving past you— or is it through 
you—then proceeding up the stairs toward a skylight in the attic 

you don't recall ever being there. If this is the shadow-self 
coming from that place in you of mystery and wildness

and the unknkown, the message he bears is surprising—
You have to stop. Who is the you watching his shadow walking 

away, caught once again in a swirl of obligations to the world?
Perhaps you'll follow him up the stairs. Perhaps you'll lie back

in bed, into the fog of simple sleep from which you can't
retrieve or remember the dreams that visited in the night.


( a partially found poem; thanks to Drew Lopenzina)