[Island Without Ancestors]
No stroke or syllable has ever been made
to mean bone.
You are first, & alone, & final:
the island an eardrum. The island
a womb through which you catch hints
of the sea & its voices.
Driftwood. Whale song.
Tail end of a squall.
Shoals translucent
as a backlit sundress:
soft fire, tombstone, frogspawn,
organ pipe—coral
teeming with damselfish.
The interior a green wall.
Sheer & permian.
Karst limestone nested with swiftlets.
The Silverest Tongue in the Philippines
after Jaswinder Bolina
I can hear my uncle muttering in the stillness of his cell.
Badmouthing Aguinaldo. Reciting Marx & Mao.
He has the sharpest tongue in the Philippines.
It’s why His Excellency the President hates him
& why his doomed brother
worships him.
I can hear him all the way
from Bloomington
wheedling inside cowry shells
ice buildup in our gutters.
I won’t be born for years
but my ears are preternaturally sharp.
The brother drops out of school & joins
the partisans in Antique.
Picks up where he left off—agrarian
politics & explosives.
Or maybe it’s his cellmate
who has the deadliest tongue in the Philippines.
But my uncle is alone—
it’s the silence I call
his cellmate because he has to give it space,
be wary of its moods.
It’s big & oppressive; solitary.
He balls up inside minutes, fissures,
the spoon-dug tunnel of his throat.
Even the shrikes
who’re supposed to angle in & give succor
shy away.
He meets me at the terminal
in aviators & a black BMW.
Even I can tell, though I hardly speak
the language—he has the silverest
tongue in the Philippines.
Bus boys, shop girls, investors, bureaucrats, even
the cop he u-turns illegally in front of—
they blush, chuckle, kowtow, make promises
to look out, for example, for his nephew
who has the most leaden tongue in the Philippines.
We meet his friends in the lounge of the Shangri-La:
oysters, live music. He doesn’t drink
but talks & grows younger
as he does so.
He’s younger even
than I am: he’s got the most gifted
tongue in the Philippines. He wins an award & the Palace
invites him to fly out & speak. But he gets up, lashes out
at the President seated behind him:
speaks storm surge, speaks outrage, speaks velocity
& eruption.
Now his words are getting muffled:
the blizzards that give birth to me are whiting out his cell.
He’s spellbound. Horrified. Something’s finally
gotten his tongue. He can hear
three hundred miles away: the jeep muttering up
to the checkpoint, soldiers placing the faces,
his brother making a break for it
but dropping what he’s tucked in his shirt; the explosion
doesn’t kill him
but is followed by a sudden report—
a firearm
making more silence
in a dazed & speechless country.
Trans Am
The opening credits of Knight Rider
were when we could expect Dwayne
a friend of our questionable neighbors
who staggered over to squat with us on the shag
& poke through golf balls we’d harvested
from the backyard, hooks & slices
off the fenced-off fourteenth hole.
For a clutch he’d shell out five, even ten
& for that or a more elusive sympathy
our parents let him drink his liver yellow & ash
in a bowl for long dead mollies.
It took a week of jasmine rice & adobo
to get the Marlboro out of the curtains.
His eyes lit up at the tricked out pony car
whooshing across a nuclear desert. Speed
he said to no one is the sole cleanser
of the world & by that I knew he meant floored
& windows down in even the dead
of winter. When he worked, he worked on cars;
he’d rigged wheels too in Nam & grumbled
about shortage & regulation, lost torque
& muscle, the third generation F-body
giving up the Coke bottle curves
of the first, the Bandit swoop of the second
even the wings painted off the hood
left unplugged stereo component black:
a creepy birdless starless Cold War night.
In the cul-de-sac we’d freeze when the sirens
cranked up to a keen, my precocious heart stalling
until I remembered it was tornado season—
a drill—& we resumed our maneuvers
in the yards & driveways, plugged
into every other cul-de-sac from sea to shining
sea: avenues, interstates, commerce & defense.
Sudden static made me jump too until we realized
it was the same neighbors, shimmying up
our adjoining pole to splice our Falcon
& our Snowman. Mom said they needed
new distractions since Dwayne no longer came.
Still we hosed & spit-shined those Dunlops,
Spaldings, Titleists, but especially
the Pinnacles, the ones he’d pay the most for
before chucking our chins & staggering out
to the trunk of his ’78 Firebird Trans Am.
He took a shine to us, the Asian kids who lived
next door to his erstwhile friends, & we took a shine
to his car, which we ogled while he dumped
the balls in with the rest, which even then I assumed
he never used, there were so many.