its ancestor under his arm
in a bolt of jute & the boxcar dark. He was young
& bound for the provinces, fleeing
with his bride the rifled
capital, the Arisaka Type 99, its stock
chrysanthemum-stamped, the blade
jabbed half-jokingly into my grandmother’s
stomach: swollen the private thought
not with limbs but a stash.
Dowry; doubloons; maybe
even meat. In the clatter & sway
the hen held its tongue, producing
eggs but no epiphanies
although the flesh of its forebears had delighted
the palates of missionaries, good-
intentioned Baptists in the wake of cholera
& reconcentration: nation builders; tenderfoots;
virgins still wet with honeysuckle & whitewash.
Who brought among other things home
economics, so that fifty years later my mother
would have to corner
& seize it. Wring its wattled links.
Pluck it & gut it & waste
nothing.
Tula
An immigrant’s son
I have ears like the blind.
Music comes easily;
night frightens me.
Home late from the hospital, she comes to my door—
I fake sleep.
She sings a soothing song
in the language I never learned:
prayers against rain.
Catalog of mythic birds.
As many names for music
as English has for theft.
Using them I invent
a country with only two citizens.
The word I choose for mother
sounds like the one for dream.
Notation
Her singing—sight-reading—while we
were supposed to be sleeping.
Dad downtown in a tower
& thrum of the graveyard shift.
Her piano: even pianissimo
throbbed the snow-muffled rambler.
Hymns that taught what the word is: a spell
for collapsing distances. And folk songs,
her forte, a rep rehearsed for classmates
who sometimes passed through:
they’d belt them out together,
flower prints crowding the upright.
Afterward cackling in her language:
uncrackable, although I thought I caught
the upshot: why here, in this white cold
& quiet? As if winter could cure a childhood
of cholera & typhoons. Her hand:
she transcribed my favorite melodies
as capitals on scrap paper. I hadn’t learned
notation, but the keys I could solve, a code
checked against the ear. My brother too
& the cousins who came for holidays,
some of them born in Manila:
I asked them all to string
songs into letters, caravans
braving the whiteout. Everyone played;
some even understood Tagalog.
Later not one of us could speak.
Tula
Music comes easily:
on notepads I puzzle out
birds’ microtonal scales, the tala
in which the song thrush improvises: I untangle
the incomplete anagrams of the 11
Umbric urn rills.
My whistles are so accurate the birds
love me: they come to die in the shallow water
of my e, and e, and e.
Tula
One night I am my grandfather.
It’s summer; no wind.
My daughter has found
work & love in another world.
The pictures of her son look
almost white.
Her political brother’s in prison. The youngest
floats
facedown in a river.
It’s a season of abduction.
God is under house arrest.
Doors hang open.
The day before, I saw a man so heavy with blood
his soul couldn’t rise out of his body.
I should send word I’m dying but
no one can move, not even
to wipe the sweat from their eyes.
Noon, not a sound: even the songbirds
are under martial law.
Counting in Tagalog
isa
you say
each sound back to me
gliding up under ash & sycamore
dalawa
a game echolalia
I’m trying to make up
for lost time
[not time exactly but music]
[not your loss but mine]