Author: Luisa A. Igloria

On the radio, the man waiting to die 
explains what he is doing to feed  
the stories of his life into a computer
program. The more stories he can tell
before his cancer claims him, the more
information the program will have 
to search through, so any family member
who has a question can hear an answer 
in his own voice, resembling one 
he might give, were he still alive. 

Perhaps it is better to spend the time
left to you, like this. Perhaps the sorrow
is too much, staring at a hospital wall or 
out a window at lake water crisscrossed 
with shadows of ghosts. Some people 
don't wish to be burned when they pass;
some want to go into the earth simply, without
wrappers, so they can grow back as a tree. None
of us know what it really means to be immortal.
You only know you want something of you to go on.

All these years, I've looked for a pattern:
on painted ceramic plates, blue spatter of a willow,
deft foliage reflected in blue waves of water on which 

a single boatman is traveling. I've seen
that footbridge leading to a house in the mountains,
a wall of stones shoring up an edge of earth—

And then, every detail in miniature, as if
a careful hand laid them there against the moss
for someone to marvel at. I can see 

a figure in an upstairs window, but I don't know 
if it is me or you. I don't know if there is a bed in that 
room; or if we are old or older, since we can be 

only those things now. Spring or fall, different
colors enter the world and bind themselves 
to the books we're making. Summer

or winter, we decant clouds of light and dark. 
I think I know how the story ends, how it always ends;
but the woman singing in the hills has other ideas. 

Who's been a parent and, from years
of raising children, has not sometimes
addressed their partner  mom or dad? 
I don't mean intentionally, like the former 
Vice President who calls his wife 
Mother in public, and reportedly never 
eats dinner alone with any woman 
other than Karen (his wife). 

                                  I mean, doesn't hearing 
the sound of your name in your ear, said 
by your beloved, make the phone a richly 
carpeted corridor in a hotel lined with moss-
colored wallpaper? Outside the balcony 
doors, the wind touches every ancient 
magnolia tree along the avenue
as if it knew them, 

                                         which it does. Owls 
signal through the night; frogs submerge 
their bodies in water to amplify the sound 
from their throats. Elephants call each 
other by name, and humpback whales  
weave intricate messages of song 
through the deep.
 

It is the middle of the year
and we are waiting for the first
ripe fig of summer. We are waiting
for stalks of yucca to point 
the way toward a sky hiding 
blunt edges of rain. We are waiting  
for a pause in the air, that hour
between the golden-leaved 
light of afternoon and the moment
the blue-black shade unrolls. 
We are waiting for the matchstick-
struck lights of fireflies to radio
the location of stones, to signal
that it is time to draw one more
oracle card—here is a bee
and here is a hummingbird;
and here is a cormorant 
with a fish in his mouth, larger 
than he could swallow. 

The year I was born, a third
Philippine TV station was launched,
which I guess didn’t immediately matter
because we didn’t own a TV until I was
nearly ten. Unless they were reported
in newspapers, would we have known about
the first male chimpanzee put into a rocket
and sent to outer space; that Barbie was getting
a boyfriend named Ken, or that the Soviet Union
detonated the world’s largest nuclear device
over a test site in the Arctic? I wasn’t there,
but in the year of my birth, The Beatles first
performed under that name at the Cavern
Club in Liverpool. While children giggled
at the animated series about a house
cat and a mouse, prime ministers were hung
in public squares by soldiers. Before the year
was over, American helicopters landed in Saigon,
officially beginning the Vietnam War. It wasn’t
until I was in university that I learned how Bob
Dylan’s lyrics on answers blowing in the wind
pertained to that war, as much as to revolutions
fought on the streets in Manila—until finally,
the dictator was taken down. He and his family
fled to Hawai’i, butterflies with torn wings
still trying to haul suitcases stuffed with pearls
and dollar bills in their wake. Perhaps that’s one way
the past can drag you down; but mostly, we don’t even
see its invisible ripples, and how far and wide
they reach. I was twenty-five and a new mother
when, in dairy farms all over Europe, cows
eating grass ingested radioactive substances
in the fallout after Chernobyl’s No. 4 reactor
exploded. I can remember how I broke my favorite
honey-brown platform sandals that year, but I can’t
remember what I did with unopened cans of imported
Birch Tree powdered milk in the pantry. Even now,
there are still reports of milk products testing
positive for above-normal levels of radioactivity.
Sometimes I wonder if my or my dairy-loving daughters’
shifts in mood are due to a gene trait far back in our
own family line, or to one of many buttons deployed
by history, ticking surreptitiously in the background.

Of course every place is haunted, 
every place manifests 

traces of the energy that once lived there 
or embraced in bed, legs twined,

rocking so the bedposts shook in rising 
rhythm; that steeped in warm, 

fragrant steam from the bath, or stood
looking out of a window  

watching as the warm oil of daybreak
anointed the tops of trees and stones—



Of course every place is haunted,
but most of all the crumbling mansion

that is history, its guttered towns 
and blasted belfries; its burned-down

museums and universities, its libraries
reduced to ashes, its doomed

nurseries and hospital beds. If now there are 
any vestiges of doors or windows, remember 

how they once rang with the sounds of children's
voices, of nothing harsher than falling rain. 

Each day since the last one
wakes and folds the blankets,
plumps the pillows, shuffles
into the bathroom to clear the body 
of its accumulated fluids: piss 
and tears, blood or bile. 

Each day since the last one
rubs and blinks its  eyes 
crusted over with dreams—
sometimes of searching, 
sometimes of walking into a room
where a clear figure rises in greeting.

Each day since the last one
tries to feel optimistic until noon
at least. There is sugar and butter
for toast, and work that helps to quell
the thrashing in its heart 
for the rest of the hours. 

Each day since the last one
sifts the kernels of recent 
history looking for the whole
and not yet broken, 
collecting them in a jar 
to place by the bedside.

A poet wrote, love makes
people. Does it not also unmake them?

You recall that linguistic riddle
about the not unblack dog and the not

unwhite rabbit running through
a not ungreen field—and how 

mathematicians have always said,
remember that two negatives make

a positive. I can tell you
I've made some things out of love 

including people, but I cannot
unmake them. I can only conclude

that some words have edges like glass
and that even their silence can be a severing.
 
But what has anyone said about discernment?
About how it isn't just love that runs

through the grass, marking other
paths for passage? 

Will there be a fig tree at the turn 
or at the crossing into light, and will its leaves
spread like garments of green to drape across 
our thighs?

Will there be persimmons bending
their golden weight across the fences
of neighbors, and the binding 
scent of flowering jasmine?  

No one can tell you 
what it's like and yet we sound
so sure of what the dead will need
in their afterlife—

the price of a ticket,
a blanket for the cold; one
blunt candle, a book of prayers 
to while away the time.

You can still reassemble the ghost

             whose hand parted the gauze nettings at night,

wanting one last touch—an ivory key, soft

            whirr of a cab engine waiting its summons;

a lamp post shrouded in bridal veils

          of palest wings. When you are conjuring 

a ghost, you search through the kitchen

          for acceptable offerings: a tin of luncheon

meat, a dimpled orange, a pour of Calvados

          in a shot glass. What you are hungry for in this

life, you can be hungry for in the next. Press

           a coin into its hand when it comes calling.

Remember to tear off the broiled wing at 
           
            the joint, pinch the boiled rice into a small hill.