Carrying

In the face of death,

somebody said something to us about
resurrection. Does that mean your empty eye
sockets will see?

– Raúl Zurita

***

Suppose, before they said silver or moonlight or wet grass, each poet
had to agree to be responsible for the innocence of all the suffering on
earth,

because they learned in arithmetic, during the long school days, that if
there was anything left over,

you had to carry it.

– Robert Hass

1
 Contents
Opening 3

What’s In the Heart 4

Carrying 5

A Story About Fire 7

Hypothesis 9

Confession 10

Animal 11

Taking It 12

Field 14

Incarnare 15

Q&A 17

Fragments 18

After This Rain 22

Dangle 23

Morning 25

2
Opening

When they closed the casket, I opened

My heart. I fought the pavement with my shoes.
Ran, danced, sang. My throat hoarse but the song livid.
Found a country within myself. Dodged all
The bullets off a war, the one with everyone
I loved. Nursed a wound beside a river that sang
About my sorrows: The woman whose voice propels
My veins to explode, the man who shrouds me
With his shadow, the kid who’s still holding on
To the string of a red balloon. A stone leaves my hand
And embraces drowning. All of this to say
I swallowed my pain. I turned my back
Against a kingdom to work the loam. I screamed
Only at some point to cover my mouth.
Let it be deserted. Let the heart grow in the mist
Of thickets. Let the trees cover it.
And when your blood throbs, when it has
Untethered itself from the cage of hurting,
Learn to crawl toward and ask somebody
To open your eyes.

3
What’s In the Heart

A house with opened doors. A child

Running from one of those doors.
A window with no curtain looking at the world
Past his little shadow. A garden
Full of holes, making room for ants.
A fruit rotting somewhere. A clearing for everyone
To seek or run from. A graveyard.
Sometimes, a butterfly fleeing a gravestone.
Warblers chanting their sorrow song
On a burned-out streetlight.
The eye of the moon
Worried for a derelict on a sidewalk.
The sadness of a white gaze.

I forgot who it was who told me that

Naming the threat puts a better face on it.

A knife then.
A fire just put out.
A mouth darkening after its last breath.

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Carrying

Suddenly this brokenness. To tell you I lost

Track of how long the air preserves
Your sighs, how many times your breath quivers
At night, who hears them, or pretends to,
Is like cutting down a tree in a forest miles
From the reach of everybody
In the throes of waking. As in
The dream I had last night when your bare hands
Reached out to me, so brightly
They could have been filled with light.
And I clasped them tightly against my chest
And held onto them and said to you: I promise,
I know this pain. How could I have lied.
This morning, nothing escapes my breath.
I walked out of this house like an animal
slobbering for prey, careful with each step,
Not knowing the earth somehow
Mirrors my yearning for a feast. I don’t know
Who God thinks He is. I believe His hand
Touching every breathing thing in this world
Is a curse we refuse to abandon. When I remember
The morning you cupped my hands and pressed
Them against the soil, to teach me
How to make a garden out of twigs, I think
Of how badly you tried to impersonate the rain.
The way it asks of all of us to take refuge
Underneath roofs we left to rust, to shroud
Our skin with so much clothing, to protect

5
Ourselves from its needles. Before it gives
In to the fall. When I was a child, I only wished
To be free. When I was the bird I watched.
When I was the leaf dangling from a branch, waiting
To fall. When I was the burden of breath I want now
To let go. If I were still a child, I wish these hands
To be empty. I want to hold nothing. The way I hold you.

6
A Story About Fire

My friend once told me a story about fire,

How it eats everything including itself
When all has turned into ash. At my grandfather’s house,
We used to sweep the gutters, gathering leaves
And afterward throwing them into a barrel
For burning. My grandfather’s love feels like fire.
Every day, he would wake me up at dawn,
Not saying a word. He liked letting his body speak
For itself. In this sense, silence became a plurality.
Our glances at each other courted friction threatening
To combust at any given utterance. I was silent
In my sweeping. In this way, I learned how hard
The pavement is, how numb it is to all the carcasses
Of leaves and cats and derelict homes along the street.
I was silent in filling my rusting barrel with leaves
In the yard. In this, I saw the many days of my childhood
Burning away as I hear my kid neighbors calling
For me, asking if I wanted to see the new slide
At the park, as I ignore them. I watched every leaf
Turn into ash. It amused me how none of them pleaded
To be saved. In this way, I learned. The only way
The body survives a love that burns it is to allow
The body to be consumed in flames. I let my body
Speak to everything that burns it, as my grandfather’s
Love turns into ash. Nobody said the dying embers
Could char as much as the combustion’s hunger.
Nobody said how silent it is in its persistence
To transform what is living to what is dead. How silent

7
The fire is in the barrel now. How even the ash
Splayed around the very thing that consumed it.

8
Hypothesis

Half of what I think is false is worrisome.

This morning, I woke up as a child
Putting on his shoes, preparing
To run for a thicket only to wake up as myself again.
Made breakfast, spoke to myself, stared at a blank canvas
To find the burgeoning flight of crows emerge
From it. I must have forgotten to draw
The curtains. My window deceives
Me again with the shadows of trees, and I believe everything
I cannot hold. Half of what I love is dying.
My grandfather called today. His voice escaped
My ears the soonest I saw the many routes
It took to avoid the street named Goodbye.
Somebody tell me he will live at the other end
Of this telephone. Give me a roll call of all
The names he once called himself.
Somebody tell God I will repent
Before I make a second call and hear
Only the ringing. A friend once told me that
When a person dies slowly, our bodies
In grief become a hypothesis. Maybe I am
Still a child, and my days are running
Toward a thicket. Maybe I know how
To count but pretend I have no fingers. Maybe
Somewhere there is a phone ringing,
And I am elsewhere strolling,
Trying not to look at the names of the streets.

9
Confession

Today, a friend asks me to speak of truth. I once loved

The little yard we turned into a garden. The pots cracked but still
Lining a pathway, the fallen petals licking the stones, the crickets
Crying or perhaps making love as the blanket of night expands
Over the city. At breakfast, I once broke bread refusing your prayer,
Thinking instead where my parents slept in the darknesses they created.
Those they flew into when they promised me a good life. We bowed
Nonetheless because bowing allows us to mark the earth with certainty.
There were times when I thought about graves when you handed me
The shovel. When you asked me to carve the soil, I asked about the need
For graveyards. Another hand pulls it, another shadow bends, another hole
Is full. This is where the seedlings go, you tell me, tapping and disturbing
Their little funerals. Today, sadness and its many children are lost,
Asking me for directions. I once told them, Try the window, but they wouldn’t
Leave me alone. This was the time I learned I’m scared of falling.
When you died, I fell and kept on falling. Every step always a proximity
From a cliff that knows my name. Every patch of earth a mouth asking
To be fed a body. Another day passes. Another sparrow leaves
Its nest. Another bird is left to sing out of the brokenness he’s born into
As sunlight reaches for your shadow and makes room for leaves.
Every heart is full of holes.

10
Animal

“He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster.”
–Friedrich Nietzsche

Stare into flower. Long enough to forget the world as mother

tells father about hell. Is it home if you do not suffer?
Cadavers in crematoriums know this well: a way to wake
when you are dead is to give yourself away. The need to pretend
as flowers only to attract bees. Tell me about repetition.
Every litany rising from our tongue is stone we push to recall our ruin.
Can we trick death and not push boulders for eternity?
For God, promise, heavier than stone. For promise, reduction
only to possibility. Less certain than earth attracting dust.
Bone to gravity. We should learn to wake the same way.
Enough morbidity. Everything modular. Let us become disciples
of every event. Worship trees more often. Listen to silences
our bodies indulge in as sadnesses consume our life. Study hurting,
pain. Let me have your disappointment. Ask if you were sad
the day you watched fourteen sunsets. Forget clocks exist. Sleep
and wake with new eyes. When we look at tragedy again,
it would have been reborn with new eyes. The trouble with looking
is looking. What comes after? Beyond flesh and bones,
numen we cannot grasp. Making and unmaking death. The animal
we know. This unbearable stillness of my limbs.
This prayer the wind swallows as flower turns into abyss.

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Taking It

To put a finger in the wound,

You have to be a stone longing for the edge
Of a creek. To stop the cascade of pain,
You have to be a boulder. To endure
Everything blasted, the earth, nothing
But the earth. To survive the buzzing noise
Of Everything ends you’ll see, you need
To christen yourself. Little Assassin, switchblade
In the pocket, waiting to kill every fruit
Of feeling inside the heart. It happened when
Grandfather appeared to me in a dream. Listen kid,
I’ll dig a hole in which to stay the night,
An empty socket waiting for the eye of light.
The next morning: Some possibility of being
With him once more losing its shape. Every shaft
Of light a blade tearing tufts of grass to reveal
The air dancing its way to nothingness. Dance,
Little wind, I can hear you whisper. Here,
Say the ants, follow this trail. Mark me
On my body, says the barren tree. Court me
With your throbbing desire to enter
This twilight, welcomes the thicket.
Your footsteps a cry for help.
You wail only to hear yourself.
To carve a place then. To keep your body
Close to the earth. To be one with it.
Oh this task of confronting one’s ending.
This sad labor of running, falling, getting up,

12
Falling, staying down.

13
Field

Somehow we come back to the world, even to look down on hands

still bleeding. How to say this. Just as you learn every bull charged
charges, just as you find yourself compelled, even ready for clouds,
to renew wonder, just as you stretch out a spring, you forget to dance.
Watch out for trees if you have to run after the sky. Watch out for animals
keen on laying eggs in your wounds. Do you remember the first time
you bled? So much salt in your wound, so much grain, you could call
yourself field. There, what grew in tangled ways? Tree trunk cannot be
one of them, perhaps only its roots. Time to admit you cannot die
from contradictions. Observe this fact: particles annihilate each other
only to disappear. Where do they go? Elysian fields perhaps, waiting
for applause for innovation. Disappearance is too easy. Have you tried
existing in a room? Consider faces keeping their grin before you
leave me alone, before comatose, before close up shot of my mouth
making up prayers. Dear God, will you forgive me if I say I am tired?
Dear God, how to say this. When I was in third grade, I confessed
my love, confessed myself, too. I confessed my sins to you. Said I
want you, want to watch you smile as time struggles to repeat itself.
You disappeared. I looked for you in dreams, poems about dreams,
dreams about poems. When you died, were you happy? Perhaps
you dreamt fields with just enough trees to avoid, clouds nursing you.
Perhaps lullaby, futility of mouth opening wider than cathedral.
Perhaps everyone counting stones. Everyone gathering them in pockets.
Everyone throwing them into the ocean, wishing for less things to bear.

14
Incarnare

“The object of this poem is not to annihila”

– Robert Hass

Quick. Nurse me to sleep

lest the dream about dead children consumes
my mind again, draw first blood
again. Like God’s teeth
spilling blood all over my bones resting
in their catacomb.
Something about metaphors makes you wish the world
would cradle all the dead
bodies it swallowed.
Continues to swallow. Else, swaddle
itself in soil like a child searching for the tongue of beauty
in the mud. Bereave is the norm.
Believe it. In 2021, epigeneticists
rediscover wonder. They learn
that bee proteins print genomes
yielding heterogenous insects.
In other words, the bee is many bees.
What is new we call surprise.
In Manila, mouths bloom like flowers
when the sun singes the tongues of their petals,
forgoing convulsion as cause of death,
thinking instead: prayer
will nurture, even save us.
And them. I swear
this is true. Mornings we take salt

15
from the market to coat rice again, learn
taste again. We steal it.
Yesterday, another body
hugged the soil, praised hunger.
This hunger, many
hungers: the apple of our crime
still the apple of our crime.
Let the world remind you
that some limbs are drawn
to gravity like branches, depending on stones
bodies swallow in their grief,
crows resting on their shoulders.
Some days, poetry
and prayer are the seed of my death, blossoming
in my veins, reassembling all the dead
bodies as dried leaves. Compost
of this country. Land of loam and blood.
What fruit shall they bear?
What word will satisfy
The world, desecrate
the appetite of an animal?
Beauty, surprise me.

16
Q&A

What pleases you?

Not the routine of days. I enter the teeth of hours, and always I leave in pieces. Sunlight goes by,
the gaze of the moon goes by. All the rusting cogs of this city go by. But I don’t worry. At the
end of each day, I put on a song on a player, and I listen. Sometimes, I sing along. Having
survived drowning, the human voice colors everything.

What are you escaping from?

I lived in a house with four rooms. Only two were occupied. One by an old man, another by me.
He taught me a lot of things. He once gave me a gun but asked me never to pull the trigger. He
lent me a shovel and told me to help around the house. In the mornings, we planted flowers and
rid his garden of dead leaves. There was a wall between us, and every day a small piece of it
would fall off, as small as a child’s hand.

Where do you go now?

My friend thinks that there exists a country none of us could visit alive. I think we’re partly dead.
Therefore, this country partly visible. If you close your eyes, you could make out the black trees
bowing to the ground under this blacker night.

What do you see?

Me, still burning my dead leaves.

17
Fragments

1.
In this world, the red rose in the garden is nothing but the red rose in the garden. Someone else
will write a poem about this sprouting and think of everyone he loves. The sun will continue to
be itself, draining everything that wants water.

2.
In this country, there are only two seasons: Drought and rain.

3.
I’m permitted to return to my childhood. I’m wearing red shoes. All I can think about is hunger.
Lola is cooking pork in the kitchen. I can tell the meat is beginning to disintegrate, disowning the
small bones holding it together, by how long the scent lingers in the room. Lolo is crouched
outside, tending to all the flowers in the plant boxes he put together in the last five years. It’s hot,
and I ought to give him a glass of water. I can hear both calling to me now. My task is to walk
carefully to each body, carefully so as not to wake myself.

4.
In the novel I was reading, there is a story of a man who is losing. He is a careful man: Looks left
and right and left again before he crosses the street, keeps the receipt of every purchase, logs every
minute detail in a journal for days both special and ordinary. On January 25, he wrote, “I was in a
room. There was a woman before me. We were very happy.” On February 4, “Wrote emails at my
desk, tried to fast but yielded to dinner, had wine and thought of her all night. She tasted so sweet.”
On February 10, no entry. When I closed the book, I imagined the man to be in a very dark place,
trying to breathe between the pages. The tulips at his desk wilting. My cat snuggling beside me,
reminding me to sleep.

18
5.
I had a student once who grew fond of reading Dante. We talked of how the Italian poet took from
Virgil’s classicism the idea that – because Art followed Nature, and Nature followed God – every
poem is a child of Nature, a grandchild of God. She objected, asking, But isn’t life a canvas?
Couldn’t my life be the art? And she proceeded to recall the many things she did but didn’t
understand at the time of doing. I didn’t protest. We lied to each other, saying, Yes, yes. The world
is sometimes a poem we are all trying to write.

6.
What I didn’t tell her: There are no edges to our days.

7.
I was in a children’s party once. A child came running to me asking about the color of sky. He
kept saying brue brue but didn’t understand what it meant. I looked for a balloon of the same color
and tightly pressed its string in his hand. He smiled. There are nights when I think I should have
given him more balloons. Perhaps black, orange, and purple balloons. But a child can only hold so
much in his hand.

8.
I don’t think I can hold this any longer.

9.
The doctor was kind. Honest, but kind. The patient has a few days left. Maybe a few weeks. I taught
you the stretches. Ask him to do them every morning. He needs this much fruit. See to it he eats on
time. Measure the water up to this point of his cup. See to it you do not overfeed, et cetera, et cetera.
A voice is an exhibition. We are all staring in a museum of grief. We have these options: Let the
works themselves speak to you or let the curator’s labels explain them. I’m hearing the timbre of
the doctor’s voice, and I’m choosing to be shattered. I don’t care to understand. I want to be
shattered.

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10.
I don’t think I’m crazy. I just love the world too much.

11.
Somewhere, there is a house in which night appears with many holes. In one room, an old couple
shares a single bed. In another, a boy keeps to his own mattress on the floor. Every time it rains,
the boy gathers five pails and places them at different locations. Always, the sound of rain terrifies
him, but not more than the cloak it places over the earth. Sometimes, all you can do is state the
obvious: Everywhere, the soil is waterlogged, the flowers drowning. The boy is convinced: His
heart, too, is full of holes.

12.
Can you see? Even water can be violent.

13.
But the boy prays and is consoled by the possibility that God must have heard him, must have
been, for a minute, baffled by the idea of sadness and suffering, leaving him five buckets filled
halfway, ready to be of use the next day.

14.
Maybe irony can explain the world. A young man orders a bouquet of roses at the flower shop.
The manager, already struggling in business, promises to give him red ones. The young man picks
them up, gives them to a young woman, talks to her of trivial things. He’s in love with her, but
she’s in love with someone else. The next day, they are both alone and happy, patient with the
routines of the day like flowers slowly peeking into the world. The next week, the manager decides
to close shop, and elsewhere, red roses sprout after a long rain.

15.
Somewhere, a poet at his desk writes a poem about roses, believes everything he says. He gets up,
goes out into the city, walks over gutters, crosses so many streets. Everywhere, only pavement. No
roses to be found.

20
16.
Dear lonely traveler, If you strain hard enough, you will hear a voice pleading to be understood. If
you strain harder, you will hear yourself.

21
After This Rain

Suppose we can live again

In the past and render the most intimate
Memory of our bodies as if they are still
Touching and learning to unhinge
All the gates protecting our livid hearts,
Wouldn’t you say, Wound me,
Wound me again until our blood can fill
The shape of our names? We’d dance
Through the symphony of days as dead leaves
Crackle underneath our feet. Sweet animal,
Let me be honest. Storms arrive
To remind us we’re short enough
To dance in the rain. And as water drains,
Listen to it ask a question, Why
Must I forgive your thirst? Open
And lift your hands, my animal.
Let our pain grow like branches.
And after enduring this rain,
Let them bear too much fruit.

22
Dangle

Tonight, I entered a cathedral

Of desire. I prayed for the teeth of God
To break me apart. For his mouth to tremble
Like a beast whose throat is trampled
By another and who wins nonetheless. I said to him,
I want you to trample my throat every time
I say a prayer. Dear God, why do I count my wounds.
When I was a child, I stood in front of a thicket
And thought of all the women I will never love.
Dear God, I want to contain myself the way hands can
Bear so much of the future. Let me understand
At once why the forest can house the sweetest fruits
And kill them the next second. How far
Can a child run into a forest? Is a question
You refused to answer. Here is a hypothesis:
A child can run halfway into this darkness. He runs
Out of it from then on. I am running still
From so much brokenness. What I want to say
Is when I throw a paper plane into the air,
99% of the probability to catch it with these hands
Is thrown into the thicket. Dear God, I want
To be a fruit. There must be a stilling rapture
In dangling from branches if only to imitate the crows.
If only I had wings. If only I had nectars spilling
From this throat. If only I could be sweet
And bitter like death. Or face death the way
You egg me on with your sweet omen. Amen,
I say to you. Let death spill into this kingdom

23
Like an overflow of harvest for your feast.
I shall spit into every gutter cursing your name.
Understand: Every wish is a seed saved
From the carcass and detritus underneath our feet,
Pushing itself above the soil like a fist
To become something beautiful. What I want
To say is I am a fugitive. Like a fruit looking for the dangle
As it learns to love the sweetness of this earth.

24
Morning

I tally the days of my sorrow

At the back of my head.
I flip every stone in the desert of memory
To drink from every stalk I find.
Like an animal who longs to forget
The hunger engraved in its flesh,
I sit and ask the world to be kind to me
Before it ravages everyone I love.
I profess my misgivings, and I don’t
Expect your forgiveness. Every fire
I lit and left for night to kill, every foot
That marked the edge of every cliff,
All the screaming pleas for help
Which never found the weight
Of words on the page. Yes, I know,
Light will come. Maybe then
It will unfold the skin of fear
On this body. Let these be the words I say
At the hour the walls come for me
From all directions. The minute stone turns
Harder than itself. Or before the last breath
Of the enemy you feed
At the pit of your sad heart
Lifts itself to what you call heaven.
There’s a dream about morning I’ll never forget.
Everyone’s at the party. All the children were running
At the backyard. Every parent who chased
After them couldn’t pin their laughter

25
In the air. And all the trees have stretched
Their arms as one would in a prayer.

26