Series: Morning Porch Poems: Autumn 2012

Who was that woman who painted her cheeks with flowers, her hair in disarray?
She walked unabashed in the plaza, passed shopkeepers who hid behind their wares.
We never knew where she slept at night, how she spent the other hours of the day.

She’d disappear during the monsoon months like mist dissolving into grey;
then when the weather turned warmer, we’d hear her shrill cries pierce the air.
She smeared flowers on her cheeks or wound them through her hair in disarray.

She had a name I can’t recall; I only know it reeked of solitude. Fey,
unabashed, her tattered skirts swept plaza stones with eerie flair—
Who knew where she slept at night, how she spent the other hours of the day?

Who didn’t tremble a little at her approach? And yet her eyes— steely, grey,
sharper than the chiseled moon— it seemed could size you up, intuiting your despair.
They say she knew the future: her painted cheek, a screen for our own disarray.

I thought I knew who she once was: an artist’s model, an ingenue, stylish, blasé—
There was this talk: of course a lover, a jilting. (What we don’t know, we embroider.)
We never saw where she slept at night, how she fed the other hours of the day.

She’s her own fable, fantastic narrative: lucid in survival, she laced
hibiscus in her hair, placed unashamed bid for what was due: her share.
Gypsy with flowered cheeks, with tresses in ravaged disarray—
Love’s still our common dream, imperfect to this day.

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

Most days now, the rushing of wings overhead.
Startling as one, rising from the grass,
arrowing into formation;
always ahead of inadequate prophecy.
The moon leans against the roof of the world.
Most of us live in the lower levels:
there, we burnish the soil
with the fire and hunger of our bellies.
With everything this close,
even the hollow in a reed has meaning.

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

“I am small in the rain.” ~ Eugene Gloria

We are all small in the rain;
we are even small in the sunlight,
though the shadows might grant the brief
illusion that we are taller or more brave

than we really are. And we can be small
at dusk, especially at dusk; smaller,
certainly, than in the early morning
when there is that sensation that we

are somehow taller, taking the first
sip of water or coffee, or sliding
into the car behind the wheel. Not only
are we small, returning in the morass

of traffic, or holding on to a strap
in the middle of the lurching bus
or train— also, we are flattened,
hollowed out, or pleated with

nervous anxiety; so that the howl
of the accelerating vehicle passes
like a blade across our bones,
and the drops of actual rain

pelting the windowpane border
on something that can be equal
parts tenderness and sorrow,
or simultaneous regret and

sweet nostalgia. Things live
like this in one and the same
moment, the large sometimes
in the small, the small more

rarely, but brilliantly, filling up
the inside of a room; the chest expanding
with the sudden intake of breath, the cupped
palm curled around a tiny, wavering flame.

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

In the skin theatre,
the characteristic of silence
is the amplification of all
silhouettes within its orbit.
Even the gods and monkeys dance.

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

What have you learned, I am asked; or, Who do you think you are?

I have learned that from the same window, the landscape is always the same, even when it is different. For example, today, heavy frost sheens the branches of trees. Yesterday, they were leafed in ochre and gold.

The seasons are punctuated by construction work, sewers flooding over, the high tide rising, squabbles with the local government over the correct placement and reading of water meters.

Every summer, when tall ships sail into the harbor unfurling flags from different countries, my heart feels that familiar tugging, reminding me of all the times it wants to climb the rigging, all the times it refuses to budge from its crow’s nest.

Patience is not necessarily a virtue learned only through traditional monastic disciplines; one school of teaching conducts its lessons through customer service branches on the telephone. It doesn’t matter for which product— just hit the prompt for “customer service” or “service hotline.”

There are only so many trips one can make to the mall or to the craft shops, hunting for sales, before the price tag evaporates with the steam of adrenaline. The shelf life of products grows shorter by the season.

Half a bag of apples, a few carrots, and a knob of ginger will make juice for around three people.

Who do I think I am? I ask myself the same question over a hundred times a day. Sometimes I think I hear an answer, and then I realize the sound of voices has drifted in through the window from somewhere up the street.

One thing seems a little more certain now than it was before: I do not chafe so much at silence anymore; but still, I know to crave the sweet touch of a hand, the memory of lips and eyes.

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

[and today I have written at least a poem a day, every day, for the last two years]

“Forever and forever, and forever.” ~ Ezra Pound, “The River Merchant’s Wife: A Letter”

When I was six, my biological mother took me to Mido Chinese restaurant in the plaza to meet the lover she was not supposed to have. We climbed the stairs to the mezzanine. The air was stale with the smell of sesame oil, fried onions, and five spice powder. You can have a dumpling with your soup, she whispered. Just don’t tell your mother that we came here, or whom we met. She was referring to her older sister, her only sister, who was raising me as her own, and putting her through high school. Both of them, therefore, were/are my mothers; and I was taught a special name for each of them.

I do not remember the face of the man we met there. I do not know for sure if this is the man she married, one grey morning months later in December. (Was it December?) Gigi, one of the next door neighbors’ daughters, served as flower girl with me. We wore stiff white satin dresses and tiny tulle veils; Gigi had stolen a tube of pink lipstick from her older sister’s dresser. She grasped my chin with her left hand and said, Pucker, then smack. I obeyed, making a fish face as she applied a waxy stripe of color to my lips. We stood in the vestibule, shivering, waiting for the cue to begin walking down the aisle, scattering dahlia and rose petals.

Is she going to faint? Gigi wanted to know. All brides faint at the altar, she said confidingly. That’s because the waistlines of their dresses are tightened, so they don’t show in case they already have a baby. She didn’t know, but I knew that couldn’t be true, because I was so far the only baby— and wasn’t I standing there, in a pair of shoes that pinched, clutching a wicker basket still full of petals husked from beheaded blooms?

No, not many knew. No one knew then, either, that one afternoon this man put his hands under my waistband and said, eyes glinting, I know another way to make you pee. And there they were, bending their heads under the veil and cord, passing a handful of coins from one to the other: making promises, drinking the wine without knowing quite yet we’d already fallen, head-first, all of us, into the rest of everything to come.

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

How flimsy, this work of wish-making: of knotting
thread after thread to necessity, if only to make
beauty from the awareness of our perishing.

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

Nothing went to waste:
sweetened skins from gourds,
pickled rinds as edible
scherenschnitte. Their seeds,
sprinkled with salt and roasted
on a tray— we cracked them
between our teeth while gossiping
on Sunday afternoons. We snipped
every last button from shirts
rubbed thin at the elbows,
and saved them like coins
in jars. I loved best the ones
covered with lattice strips
of leather— each nubbed
surface, a little luxury.

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

“Paciencia y barajar.” (Patience and shuffle the cards.)
~ Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quijote

Open certain books, and windmills
become giants, most certainly arrived
to take over or worse, defile the earth.
Since no one else apparently sees

the impending danger, you have to be the one
to don your suit of armor, fix the brass
washbasin on your head, hoist the pennant
of your dirty dishrag— Turn the ignition

of your trusty, pre-owned chariot and ride
through fields of goldenrod drying in late
winter light, as birds scatter cryptic
messages in the air. And who’s to say

this isn’t the waking world, after all?
The stakes remain the same: beneath
its newfangled disguises, love; honor,
in a world where it grows harder

to tell the nobleman from the thief.
The story that knighted you, the song
you were given, that you have
to keep trying to sing.

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.