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]
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