Author: Luisa A. Igloria

What was it like when the donkey cart bearing the once 
           powerful to their execution by hanging, by garrote or 
beheading, made its way through crowds pelting spit or stones 
           or eggs which, when they broke open, dripped like viscous
mucus down the once impeccably powdered face of the woman 
          who scornfully wanted to throw pastry at these peasant 
tormentors? I wasn't there, but I remember the EDSA Revolution 
          of 1986: thousands poured into the streets—nuns and civil
servants, holding hands with activists at the frontline. For days,
         my literature teacher made hundreds of sandwiches 
to hand out to all,  including armed and mute-faced soldiers:
         soggy tuna salad on white bread, fakely pink rounds of
salami and cheese sweating in their cellophane wrappers
         in the electric heat of that day. While crowds scaled 
the palace walls, the dictator and his family scrambled 
        into helicopters to be airlifted to Hawai'i; exiled. 
People poured into their previous fortress, losing 
        themselves in wardrobes and closets; a horde of bees
stunned inside a forest made of thousands of shoes, hung
        with useless tapestries of gossamer and pearl.

What is forever, when we live 
near the water? Sand-shifting dunes, 

cords of seagrass. More inland, the soil 
beneath is latticed with roots. Dampness 

and heat give way to spores. When was it 
that planets aligned like beads on a chain? 

At the hinge of the year, we're eager again
to look for portents. A decades-old ban on

psychic readings has just been repealed in Norfolk.
Now I can look for someone who will run her finger

along the lines of my palm and tell me something 
I don't already know. She'll turn my hand sideways

to count the ripples along its edge. She'll pull an oracle
card and light candles that smell of salt and driftwood. 

How lucky that they grow despite our seeming lack of effort:
        the lush fig tree in the yard, a stand of hydrangea pushing out
planet after planet of deepest blue. Beside the front steps,
        gardenia—rosal—unfurl and perfume our recent comings and 
goings. Children are like that too, though we try to be more 
        faithful to their care. I remember how, before he was two,
my grandson didn’t know what sugar was—the kind you spoon
        out of a jar and sprinkle on cereal or toast, though fruit
was fine. In their own childhoods, I watched out for my daughters’ 
        every elbow scrape, every tumble; tended their fevers with cool
cloths. Isn’t a certain steadfastness asked of mothers? That we make
        of ourselves a home to always return to. That we keep
our hands on the rudder, bear them through the narrow channels
        so at the end, they might open up to embrace the sky.

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.