Og

"king of Bashan remained of the remnant of giants..."


Hindi sa una o ikalawang bulalas ng kulog
napupunit ang langit, hindi sa pagkapuwing

ng araw o paghahalas ng buwan kinakalagan
ang tanikala ng alon sa kaniyang libingan.

Narito. Mulat na Lumalagos ang k a w a l a n
at pilit nating inuunawa ang mga hangganan

sa pagitan.

Walang dapat sisishin sa paulit-ulit nating
pagtuklap sa natupok na katawan ng nakalipas,

maging ang mga pagtawid sa marupok na tulay
ng hinaharap. Pagkat sa tuwing nalilingid

ang mga bagay-bagay; sumusunod ang tuon at
sumasalpok sa kariktan na ningas ng mga mata.

Bumubukas ng kusa ang pintuan, inaaninag
ang nawawalang sanggol sa marahang galaw

ng duyan.

9

When you heard a voice behind the door. You
will press your ear to listen and your mood
will change. You will re-arrange the order of
your books on the shelves. You will change
the password in your computer, you will mark
the calendar as if you're targeting something
onto the horizon that is ceaseless; comforting
nothing so stereotypical. I have learned to defuse
your alarms, your delicate routines that made
trails in the mirror, the parable of a window that
once blazed a bird. I am no longer anxious of
you, your hand with my hand joining in prayer.

#1

Ellipses

Over the bed shape, I'm watching a pair of shoes not
walking, telling those familiar places, and faces
I could not name because of so-called beauty,
without repose, each line on the tile-floor confesses
the conspiracy of a point to another, inventing
infinity (that gives form to formlessness) making
themselves so visual, an attraction of waiting.
The door slits, there where clarity of unknown
chained to a chair, a fresh flower at the center table,
the aftershock of something at the window; clear
cloud passes by; I'm somewhere else: here, I re-
member all of these when I was four and now I'm
on my mid-age, I still hear myself not saying anything.

Leviathan

A young boy sits on top of the stairs,
while the late light sink in like ghost.

In front of him, an old owl watching
the satellite to fall in between the roof

and infinite space. Lost pair of slippers
and open gate, inviting a clear grief

holding us in silence every now and then.
We are elicited to this portray, where

crickets need something on their wings
to squeal, where shadows in the dark

lit torches to make them feel warm,
but the cold will not spare them for sure.

Its been a rough night. A head without
body spinning from a tree, is a doll.

What Makes the Wine Sweeter

she stood
there telling me
about the clock.
the circle frame
of it- cast a dim,
white wall.

I looked in her eyes:
tiny bonfires
and storm wind,
the thin smoke
of waiting
crawls

I wanted to bite
her palm. the pink
nerves that bothered
me. the art she makes
out from the leakages
of battery.

beyond these countless
moments and somewhere
behind the rapture of walls,
the light retires; and
firefly is a vehicle.

Demi

A hole sees an eye of the world
the missing angle worn by clouds
clinging from the skirmish in white
to the dotless form of operations
for all the hauntings- slow, restless.

The shattered wind inside the dead elm
whispers a weird season. The burned
bodies of ants lifted by air on the ground
have something to do with this melancholy
that marks the old streets in crossing.

The faces of every passing, returning
the safeness in black, of their shadows,
the weight on their shoulders- the steadiness
of time.

N

I.

can anybody shut this screen
before the spiders come out
and drag the firefly from a chest
of glass
my ever curious eyes
never seen such merciless web
inevitable warp
like a rare flower
pure of risk
caressing
restlessly
my head rings
in monotone

to fervor
as if the rivets
verges and pallets inside
the clockwork will explode
the mechanism of nature
exposed a florescent thigh
in a slit
glowing
in midnight pulse

the lingers continuous
to wear a number in
the habitation of gaze
a delight invests a face
an antidote
the lung that plumbs
pensive sharp strings
mute tube of love
with spiritual worm
cocooned in a fruit-belly

outside the black self
lengthen
the headless aftermath
of leviathan
the sober whir of leaves
a post beside the wailing wall
where a car cemetery bares
the familiar beating
a quiet light of disappearance

i see the shadow holding
the restive door
there is no rain
no gentle knocks
and it cracks me
inert to the core
little by little
i'm shredding
my skin for you
in the last stain
of blue petal
in December

and night falling slow
in vacant corner
with clean shadow
your presence
found
my hiding place
an inch
to burn your ear
with solemn kraken
kisses

the way a bubble lifts our dream
pressing thin clouds for steam
i called your name
like biting arrows
through the air
have you ever wonder
my yonder?

the way i feed the fire
with curled papers
in tormenting cold
i maybe the caster
or your tiny minion
as you glide like god
in acute darkness-
a revelation
a masterpiece
my plasters through an ink
you are the burning angel
the unparalleled words
an occult
to disintegrate

i died in an empty room
that vanished many years ago
the map that taught directions
was missing and left a trace
in my father's optic lens--
clear like yesterday


II.

your black hair revealed
a garden from a breast
the new breathing of everglades
and the arthropods
enchanting

at the center of the whirlpool
i am the ant who misses the swim
my disused weight
makes me float
oh satellite
in bloom

come lit this place with me again
and together we'll forget how fragile we are

by March there might be a shout
in the mist
to cast figures is to ravel
but trust me my love
and you don't have to rove
the identity of fitting
giving whiter shade to fill
our fingers with
a ring

scarcely
i saw the birds stretched the horizon
away from the doom of the night
hand appear from a window
it was sunrise
i haven't slept
the road swells an engine just to blink and dive
followed by
familiar faces
that will soon turn to stone
"let us ride a bicycle
while the sun is not in the wind
and we will roam over that hill
the hill that once took our spirits
and let them speak among the woods
of our innocence

maybe i am hallucinating:
on the day we met
the gift of idle hours
in a broad day silence
my dog returned
after three days lost
the dog did not bark nor hiss
and then he died
i made a grave for him
i look at the roofs all day
as long as it takes to pass
a jet plane marks the atmosphere
like a sea gull browsing the remote isle
it's getting clearer now
the beak
the wings
the pressure of nothing
and i can see myself

i wonder about this bed
the noise of indwelling
no measure
no pace
and acquires to listen
on-going
talks no less for knowing
here to stay
my troll feet tosses to scare
the dead floor

now close the door
all locked-up
your voice
stirs every margin
life resumes
in a dying lampshade
pure dim of care
and retardation
of white
the stillness model at the wall
draws tempest in a void

casting net to your eyes
clean beams by the moon glow
trapped in a window's equation
the passage where i used to hunt
old self
i let you incinerate
this long lifeless home
scars on my heavy skin
severely
aching
longing for your apple-kiss


III.

beyond the floats of cloud
there are dead stars
waiting to tingle our nerves
your soft touch
on my face
to end the battle
in shadows
the shocks
that keep me sane
i am the watcher
alone and under
the calm of heaven break
the particular retribution
in a long hour

the shattered water
the resemblance of the shore
waves that never made to the sand
in high empty skies
the illusions that extend the world
to omnipresence

whatever rattled in the yard
that lifted eyes can count:
three newly house
one owned by a friend
the blistering hair of sunset
far into blankness
and nothing happened
the day is done
but still i'm incomplete
to please the fulcrum of you
full of appeal
your breath of many flowers to my lips
the sanctum
my pilgrimage
to unearthly bliss;
tonight my seed is in your gland
and your milk is in my bone
i took your heart from the altar
and the temple began to rubble

a poignant ceiling
amulet-like-stare and light's barricade
a wider applause of idleness
dancing with your phantom
i am not afraid anymore
on the pointed grass of death
or even in the countless face of a second
the quantum of us
tunneling in a sub-atomic world
still inflicts
the total world without defect
and like the last leaf that shiver
under the icy moon
in between distance
cries a brook
to bring the light foliage on
to much awaited free fall

it went many ages
the thought of a dead elm
guarded by wisp
the terrifying howl in my early years
had put a silent kill
the sill still the same
mimicking the spiraled past
of broken mirrors beside
the medicine cabinet
the seclusion i used to secure
has now swollen

oh your idea about the breeze
the risk we took in doing good
has made the crib full every time we stirred
and the chimney sighing like furnace
as if it has a soul

you see we're everywhere!
equal lay in a silken waves
have made patterns of coral
the fusion in the deep
swerving as it travels through
the seaweed
any moment there will be a burst:
school of fish
gusting in ecstasy
as if they want to give up their gills

out of the open
i am the monster
and you are the epidemic
that triggered my heart
through the network of cravings
to the invisible axis
that holds our faith

now we know what those craters mean
and how the frozen quake holds a certain heat
to unruffle the gap until the water
swells from it
the water from where we see ourselves
my longings that keeps on rooting
way to the volume of thin air
distance is a possibility
to clip you close
when everything is in need of moving

Magus

May mekanismong dumadakip
sa hiraya ng pangangatwiran. Landas na anomang oras
ay maaaring magbukas at magsara.
Sa di maitampok na kalagayan; bumubuwelta
ang lakas ng loob. Masaksihan ang kawalan,
at ang tunay na anyo ng ligalig sa di-kawasang
dulas ng usok sa mata.

Umaangat ang bigat
na bakat ng may lagnat. Pinawalan

ang halimaw na nagkikintal ng tanglaw sa noo,
ang magnanakaw ng ingay sa sirang orasan.
Nabura ang aninag ng mukha. Pilit humihiram
ng kahit konting katinuan; alimuom na kumubkob
sa anino ng pananalig. Langit na nawawaglit

ang mga dahong bumibitaw sa awit
ng hangin. Ang di makitang hangganang
naglalapit sa likod at harap ng salamin.

katta

-------------------------awaken

An Italian literary perspective on ecology: Italo Calvino

Kerstin Pilz
The University of Western Australia

As we approach the close of the millennium, we are witnessing the critical reassessment of the Enlightenment heritage and its exclusive focus on reason and methods of knowledge that have foregrounded order over disorder, simplification and abstraction over complexity. This form of understanding, it is now argued, has tended to exclude nature itself in favour of superimposing on it rigid models of order.Scientists working towards an integrated understanding of life are announcing a fundamental paradigm shift - taking part in all branches of culture - as we are leaving behind the mechanistic worldview of Descartes and Newton in favour of an ecological understanding of life.Ecology focuses on the relationship of the individual with his/her physical environment and views the world as an interconnected and interdependent whole. While the dominant paradigm that has shaped modern Western culture put mind over matter, ecology propounds a unified view of mind, matter and life, where human beings are viewed as part of an a-centred network. The emergence of a "new dialogue with nature," to borrow the subtitle of Prigogine and Stengers' influential book, implies that we return to nature as a blackboard of models of thought that are more complex than our models of reason which, as history has shown, have led to simplification, exclusion and tyrannical control rather than harmony.

The possibility of a new harmony between humanity and nature presupposes the return to holistic forms of knowledge, like the ancient cosmology, which predates the split of culture into distinct branches. In other words, an ecological awareness implies the recovery of a conception of knowledge as a unified field, in which science and literature are complementary forces feeding off each other.

In this article I would like to sketch a portrait of the ways in which the Italian writer Italo Calvino took up this challenge and experimented with ways in which literature could, in his words, return to its original specific vocation as "natural philosophy."

Holistic visions of knowledge

Western thought is characterised by the fragmentation of knowledge which entails the loss of a unifying cultural framework. This can be dated to the beginnings of modernity, starting in the 18th century with the development of experimental science which resulted in the split into two cultures, science and the humanities. Science's move away from treatise writing and the study of classical texts (from Aristotle to Ptolemy) to experimentation and observation of nature has led to the marginalisation of literature in favour of the empirical truths science can deliver. Ecology with its emphasis on integration and holism offers a new role for literature, namely that of cultural unifier. It suggests a return of literature to the status it once had, when written discourse was synonymous with knowledge generally and literature was regarded as a source of knowledge rather than an object of study. For Calvino that means that we must demand that literature provide us with "a cosmic image".

The return to the cosmos is crucial, and, I would argue, indicates a break with the modernist conception of a Copernican universe that had made Reason the new centre of the world and thus reinforced the century-old anthropocentric view of the universe. It is a move towards a postmodernist conception of wholeness that takes its inspiration from classical cosmology, or the study of possible models of the universe that places the cosmos and its functioning at the centre of the universe, recognising humanity as part of the cosmos and not the detached observer of a rational universe. In his book Return to Cosmology (1982), Stephen Toulmin argues that "the world view of Descartes and Newton no longer represents a genuine cosmos" since the introduction of fundamental opposites, such as mind and matter, rationality and causality, subject and object, led to yet another dualism, namely the separation of humanity from nature.

What was lost with the advent of modernity was not only the notion of a cosmos but a genuine cosmology, or a unified understanding of life, as natural philosophy became separated from natural theology in the seventeenth century leading to the specialisation of disciplines. "As a result," Toulmin explains, "it was no longer the professional business of anybody in the sciences to think about 'the Whole'- that is, to deal with those broader questions, about the overall interrelations between things of vastly different kinds, which had been a major concern of earlier cosmologies." One implication of this is the fundamentally interdisciplinary character of the traditional cosmology, for, as Toulmin affirms: although "historically it was predisciplinary, functionally it was transdisciplinary." Calvino's call for literature to supply us with a cosmic image of reality is thus an appeal to literature to return to the role it had before the advent of modernity as 'transdisciplinary' cosmology. It picks up what Calvino sees as a tradition of Italian literature continued from the Middle Ages through the Renaissance but lost in modernity:

This is a deep-rooted vocation in Italian literature, handed down from Dante to Galileo: the notion of the literary work as a map of the world and of the knowable, of writing driven on by a thirst for knowledge that may by turns be theological, speculative, magical, encyclopaedic, or may be concerned with natural philosophy or with transfiguring, visionary observation. It is a tradition that exists in all European literatures, but I would say that in Italian literature it has been dominant in every shape and form, making our literature very different from others, very difficult but at the same time perfectly unique. In the last few centuries this vein has emerged less frequently, and since that time, certainly, our literature has diminished in importance.

The question of anthropomorphism

The cosmos as a unifying site has further implications, as Calvino outlines: "the cosmos does not exist" he argues, "not even for science, it is the horizon of an impersonal knowledge, where our anthropocentric chauvinism can be overcome and a non-anthropomorphic vision may be reached." The Enlightenment had banned anthropomorphism, since, according to Adorno and Horkheimer, it saw the projection of subjectivity onto nature as the cause of myth. The subsequent remapping of the cosmos by modern science resulted in what Max Weber called "the disenchantment of nature," making the cosmos a foreign and inaccessible space, in which humanity had no longer any place. Recent theories have pleaded for the reenchantment of science as a point of departure for a new harmony between human beings and nature, whereby human beings have to be conceived as nature's partner (Michel Serres) and engaged in a mutual dialogue (Prigogine and Stengers). Others, like Augustin Berque, have been cautious to point out that this relationship will have to remain one-sided since nature has neither voice nor subjectivity with which to take up its part in the exchange. This means not only that it will remain silent and fundamentally disadvantaged but also forever indifferent to our needs. Our new awareness of a relationship with nature based on equality is therefore nothing but the paradoxical attempt to escape our inescapable anthropomorphism.

Calvino, an insatiable reader of the romantic poet Giacomo Leopardi who had lamented nature's fundamental indifference in his finest poems, was equally aware of the conflict and addressed it in all of his writings. He attempted the reconciliation of man with the Copernican universe in his 'cosmicomical' tales (Cosmicomics, 1963 and T zero, 1965) which for the most part follow a similar pattern: a scientific statement or hypothesis about the origin of the universe, taken from an article or book by a prominent scientist, is followed by a cosmicomical fable told from the point of view of the omnipresent and amorphous Qfwfq. Qfwfq, eyewitness to the Big Bang confirms the scientific statements by cheerfully interjecting, "Hey, its true, I have been there", and in the fable or short story that follows gives us his account of the origin of the universe. The characters' endless disputes and disagreements on the merits and disadvantages of order over disorder, linearity over non-linearity, determinism over indeterminism which are arguably points of divergence of postmodern science from modern science, constitute the remapping of humanity's Imaginaire which ultimately determines and shapes all branches of culture, as it informs our narratives (including science's narratives of knowledge). Calvino's 'escape' into the cosmos is thus his strongest weapon against what he perceives to be an outdated humanism dominating the Italian cultural scene. It constitutes an attempt at escaping an anthropocentric point of view, facilitated through the discourse of science.

Calvino's solution to the humanist heritage of the Enlightenment is, however, paradoxical: on the one hand he pledges escape from any form of humanist teleology,on the other he 'reinserts' subjectivity into the cosmos by creating with Qfwfq an amorphous yet totally human character:

Anyway, I know that there is no way that I can escape from what is human, even if I do not strain myself to sweat humanity from every pore. The stories I write come into being within a human brain, by means of a combination of signs worked out by the human cultures that have gone before me.

The stories Calvino creates are, similar to folktales, an anthropomorphic mapping of the universe. By humanising the cosmos to the extreme he makes familiar and thus accessible what is not. Inspired by Leopardi whom he credits as a stimulus behind these tales, Calvino proposes a form of narration that conciliates the great romantic poet's lament of the loss of 'illusions,' or the ancients' anthropomorphic understanding of the universe with the advent of Reason:

I tried to do for modern science what primitive people have done with the forces of nature: personify them with figures between the human and animal. These stories are the legends and the myths of the world of science. Science has become more and more removed from the world of images, more and more abstract, so that to enter into it we have to populate it with concrete and visible images.

The formula for his anthropomorphic mapping of the cosmos however comes from the French writer, Raymond Queneau, who had in his poem about the cosmos, Petite cosmogonie portative (1969), marginalised humanity, trying to give a voice to the cosmos itself. Yet as Calvino reminds us in his guide to the poem, Queneau's poem shows that the attempt to escape any form of anthropomorphic representation is an illusion: "Queneau's is still always an anthropomorphic or better an anthropotelic reading of natural history." What makes Queneau's poem an anthropomorphic reading of the cosmos, Calvino explains, is his use of colloquial language, which contrasts starkly with the neutral and seemingly objective language used by science. In this Calvino discerns a philosophical lesson, which we can also recognise in his own Cosmicomiche: "It is from the use of language itself that a philosophical perspective is born: nature becomes humanised, but man does not at all appear enlarged, on the contrary."

By presenting the cosmos in the colourful language of everyday speech, making it the backdrop of domestic scenes, and by populating it with the most ordinary images (for example, a galaxy is compared to an omelette heated in a pan, while the Big Bang is unleashed when a certain signora Ph(i)Nk_o exclaims in an outburst of love: "Oh, if I only had some room, how I'd love to make some noodles for you boys!"), Calvino makes accessible what constitutes the ultimate foreign space. Yet, as one critic has observed, by reducing the enormity of nature to the everyday, Calvino does not attempt to make fun of it, instead he illustrates the limits of our own anthropocentric vision of the world and it is ultimately we who are made to look ridiculous.

Palomar - a Cartesian cogito

A decade after his cosmicomical tales Calvino returns to the paradox of anthropocentrism with a collection of petits poèmes en prose that look at the empirical world through the eyes of a prototypical Cartesian cogito, Mr. Palomar. Palomar complements Qfwfq, the amorphous protagonist of the cosmicomical tales who had looked at the macrocosmos in order to integrate in it the microcosm of human emotions; Palomar instead looks at the microcosm in an attempt to see "the minimal facts of everyday life in a cosmic perspective".Like his ancestor Qfwfq, Mr Palomar is an amorphous being, a pair of eyes, or better a brain with eyes, indeed, he is a post-modern embodiment of Valéry's equally cerebral Monsieur Teste. With Mr Palomar whose name derives from a famous Californian observatory, Calvino investigates the possiblity, or better, impossibility of overcoming the gap between observer and observed, subject and object in order to arrive at some kind of holistic experience. Rather than allowing a glimpse of this seemingly unachievable ideal state, the stories reveal the insufficiency of our Cartesian models of analysis, or as Palomar puts it: "how can you look at something and set your own ego aside? Whose eyes are doing the looking?" And he decides that "To look at itself the world needs the eyes (and the eyeglasses) of Mr Palomar." Palomar's dilemma as described here is of crucial importance to twentieth century science, whose claim to some kind of "spectacles of objectivity" has come under attack this century. As Werner Heisenberg has persuasively argued: "Natural science does not simply describe and explain nature; it is part of the interplay between nature and ourselves; it describes nature as exposed to our method of questioning." Thus both science and literature offer fictions about the relation between the subject and the world, and while, as Calvino noted, it was in fact literature that problematised the observer's subjectivity before science acknowledged its own limitations, literature can adopt the scientific method of minute observation and precise description in an attempt to reassess and possibly renew the relation between human beings and the cosmos.

Palomar's descriptions of nature ranging from a wave, a lawn, the night sky, the whistling of birds to a giraffe etc., resemble, as Gore Vidal has observed, those of "a scientist making ongoing reports on that ongoing experiment" with "a scientist's respect for data." A sense of objective narration is created by the use of the third person and present tense, yet estrangement is achieved precisely through anthropomorphic description in the fashion of the nineteenth century naturalists. The most vivid examples are Signor Palomar's descriptions of animals, for instance in "The loves of the tortoises" or "The gecko's belly," where the description of mating turtles or the belly of a gecko in anthropomorphic terms renders strange precisely these terms leading to bizarre questions such as "what does eros become if there are plates of bone or horny scales in the place of skin." In the three stories that make up the section "Palomar at the zoo," the attempt to interpret animal behaviour from an anthropocentric point of view allows Palomar to perceive "a first daybreak of culture in the long biological night" in the albino gorilla's gesture of clutching a rubber tyre. Meanwhile the display of reptiles in "The order of scaly creatures," a bestiary of antediluvian animals which belong to "the world as it was before man," demonstrates "that the world of man is not eternal and is not unique." The stories illustrate Calvino's 'bet with himself,' begun with the cosmicomical tales, to describe anthropomorphically a universe in which humanity has only a very marginal position.

Mr Palomar is a prototypical modern day human, conditioned into a state of perpetual apprehension and insecurity by the frenetic rhythms and congestions of the modern city which make him prone to the illnesses of modern civilisations such as heart attacks and ulcers. Hence his urgency to find a state of peaceful co-existence with nature, which is constantly interrupted by the urgings of his rational mind that force him to analyse his relationship with the world of nature. In "The sword of the sun" while taking an evening swim he contemplates the gap that exists between the world he observes outside of himself and the one he harbours inside his analytic mind. He envisions his physical self, his "swimming ego" as "immersed in a disembodied world," a world of geometrical shapes that co-exists with another interior world where everything is less clear, where straight lines and vectorial diagrams are replaced by something less tangible, which for want of an exact term he describes as "a lump, a clot, a blockage." It is from this world that springs both the desire to immerse himself in the macroscopic world and become part of the cosmos, and the painful awareness that the world was not created for the human spectator, who, like the perpetually apprehensive Palomar, is left to his own devices to try and make existence meaningful by inventing a relation between the self and the cosmos. Likewise in "Reading a wave" the seemingly soothing activity of observing the surf crashing on the shore becomes a nerve-racking experience when he tries to observe a single wave. A parody of our Cartesian methods of analysis of separating a fragment from the whole, the story plays once again on Heisenberg's indeterminacy principle that prevents us from describing with precision the fluid reality of matter. Palomar's perpetual irritation when confronted with fluid forms is endemic of Calvino's painful awareness that quantum physics poses a challenge to his narrative models which are informed by structural analysis and are based on a combinatorial code that assumes that the world can be compartmentalised into fundamental building blocks. As the physicist Fritjof Capra has put it, at the subatomic level entities dissolve into wave-like probabilities, revealing "a basic oneness of the universe." In other words, the universe is a universe in flux, where the division between subject and object is blurred, making the subject part of the flux as Palomar's failed efforts at mastering a wave demonstrate. Calvino-Palomar's attempts ultimately fail since they are still informed by an ideology of mastery and control as the author's very definition of literature as an instrument of knowledge makes clear: "in my experience, the urge for writing is always connected with the longing for something one would like to possess and master, something that escapes us."

Palomar is a mouthpiece of Calvino's resolve to approach the world by describing and observing it rather than interpreting it. The author's reformulation of knowledge in these terms is similar to Prigogine and Stengers for whom description is a form of communication, a dialogue with nature, which demonstrates that "we are macroscopic beings embedded in the physical world." And although, as we have seen, this dialogue will have to remain anthropotelic, it does not necessarily have to remain one-sided, as it implies attention on our part to our silent partner, recognising the forms and models it offers us rather than imposing our logically perfect models on it. As Calvino had reflected on another occasion, knowledge is a work in progress, an ongoing process of refining our understanding of nature and the empirical world:

But is man the only one who tends to create forms and figures? Doesn't every animal have the same tendency, and every plant and inanimate thing, and thus the whole world, the universe? We could say, then, that man is an instrument the world employs to renew its own image constantly. The forms created by man, being always somehow imperfect and bound to change, guarantee that the world's appearance as we see it is not definitive, but a phase, working toward a future form.

And, I would conclude, these include the forms of relationships we envision ourselves having with the world of nature.

SOL

Warping the Atoms

There's a pure darkness in my room
that sits every time I'm awake,
it doesn't move until my breath turns blue
or at least I started feeding my dog:
skeleton of a bird preserved in the air
like a jealous deity; a toy?
seeing everything in one,
seeing one in everything.

Last night, there was a milk bone and a light bug
on my bed. And I, will not be surprised if I find
her head separated from her body. The risk.
The use of time and all of its uselessness.
I've tried to clip her wings
but my hands never stop from shaking.
"She is dead" the therapist tells me
No, not when her clothes are still warm.

The Astral of the Dead

Worms have stopped leeching blood
in graveyards,
learning the purpose of wings one day
in the ruins of web.
Orbital fears
and new syllable grows,
clean on clones,
new wave of the sun
brushing the nose.
Manta ray fantasy
melting in the deep silence.
It settles through unknown
taking the last of its kind
like a gentle dream of death;
Giving way to the new species
of zombies.

Familiarity

In the meantime a hole
sees everything: the
paper sun shining in
a bag: old secrecy
and blue pen: the tiny
calendar with it's deadline:
strings of gravity: object
at rest without cure. The
controlled matter diverting
its way in the rain.
Warning hours chopped in
the sequence of clouds:
the other reality of not
being here. Not being.
Instead, double dreaming:
an ordinary day, less everything:
just the flight of birds
to clear a vacant face.

After Z

Before solving the puzzle you must mess with it.
The critic sits in the corner with his burning lung.
He listens to the silence — a mousetrap waiting to clear his thoughts.
There is a moist on the aluminum spoon that remembers each word unspoken.
He can pass through the window and learn how the sun takes some years to explode
or how it disappears in a day.

In physics, the neighbor's mom forgot the car key inside her car
the way a fridge left open the whole night. He adjusts his wristwatch just ahead of time:
the procedures have nothing to do with his unwashed clothes, he think of the last episode
of his favorite forensic TV series. He heard someone enters the house, when he turned on
the light it was only himself came home from work.

Burning Chairs

It's quite revealing when there's no one in the house,
------no rushed meal, no face in the mirror.

It's more like unfinished symphony of Schubert playing on,
------the Theatrical sting of clocks and dust merging like gods;

blank of water, the tied up
------for losing; the exit to the entrance.

There are changes;
------that aren't changing.

The ghost stole shadows in an old frame
------and passes through the floor

Where you used to kill time some years ago;
------a grid with no video, no audio.

The memory of someone you know who has a calm feet
------that locked itself dead in a closet:

The interceding stasis between permanents
------and non-permanents.

The trouble in this arrangement is concealed
------till you heard a call from a friend:

One must step forward to watch the house
------from the outside and burn anything that would come out.

A thief in the Mid-day Silence

A fix unfocused sees itself in chance
Of forgetting. Corners
That you called a lifetime.
You're too pure; my reliable resource,
It's just you doing the old things. Not
Big or little. Nothing unusual that is so complicated,
Nothing for us to talk with:

My fish have drowned again in the aquarium. Did you
Feed them too much?

Today I brought you an apple, tomorrow
Maybe a piece of biscuit.

CAVALCADE

Ibang Susi

Pumapasok sa isip ang susi. Inilalatag
ng lantad ang kawalan: gumagala ang salimuot
sa malinis na silid, walang malay, mapaglaro,
mapusok, may bahid ng dugo ang pagtatago.
Sumisilip minsan ang kisap sa isang madilim
na sulok at sa pagdaka'y nawawala pag gumagapang
ang siwang ng pintuan (walang pangalan, walang nakaraan)
Madalas mapako ang isip sa patlang, sa tuldok. Ang simoy
ng hangin sa umaga ang nagkakalas sa di maampat na pakiwari.
Sa sagansan ng nagbagsakang mga puno; tinutuklas ko
ang mga wangis, ang akala, ang lihim sa ilalim
ng makabuluhang pagkawasak. Naghahanap nang mapupulot. Ang
riyalidad ang naglalayo sa atin kung minsan; doon sa di maabot ng tanaw
maaaring nagkita na tayo o di kaya'y naging matalik na magkaibigan.



Bumabalik ako sa aking sarili. Ikaw ang anino
ng anino, malaya, at lubhang nakahihigit
sa mga ninanais kong sabihin; Hindi ikaw ang apoy
ng araw, marahil ikaw ang panatag na lilim sa likod
ng mga bituin, ang naghuhunos ng buwan sa hangganan
ng burol. Sa tuwing malapit ko nang matunton
ang tunay mong kinaroroonan, lumalabas ang ideya ng panibagong susi.
At nasasabi kong di pala ako umaalis sa aking kinalalagyan.

city escape

Sinulid

Tumungtong sa manipis na hangin.
-----Gumulong
-----tulad ng baryang

------------------------------------nahulog,

kidlatan-----upang muling kumilos,
makipagbanggaan sa ikot ng mga payong,
kumawala-----sa buhol-buhol na busina ng mga sasakyan,
makipagkarirahan sa patak ng ulan.

Ang paglutang sa tubig ay bihira lang

Nakakapagod lumangoy-- salubungan ang agos.

Lumulundo ang mga baging patungong langit;
maikli ang tawiran sa iglap na pagsabog.

isolation