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Mike Maniquiz
POETRY, FILIPINO AMERICAN
for Cirilo (and the rest of the fathers
who wrote in English)
What struck us as impossible now figures
prominently
in the showcase of veniality we call living each day.
I’ve written new poems, but nothing about us really,
only the kind you pay the hooded boatman to make you forget.
Sometimes you toss a coin down a well wishing nothing,
just the joy of seeing a real one, a working well, suffices.
It’s anything but for luck–we used it all
up after we, the children, packed up.
I empty my pocket. It’s full of centavos.
If in the course of digging through piles,
I turn to that day in your garden, in the high heat
of summer, just after giving up over a busted radiator,
don’t expect to be the holding device of two gnawed-off ends,
one asking if what they’ve done is right,
the other wondering whether to start afresh.
Remember the heat?
You also wanted to get out.
Everything would have been fine, you said,
if only the weather did not mess things up for us.
Even Hemingway noticed.
How can you write in this heat?
he asked you.
Still fools persevere and muster the spirit
to say grace over the words we are about to eat.
Look, I’ve taken leave
and have never asked to be taken back.
PETALS
I struggle at things that demand calibration,
Like being asked what I meant by
“I have responsibilities.” As though
Suddenly aware of being cheated
Of something memorable,
You stop to pick a flower,
A daisy of all things.
Beyond you, I notice the prairie
Is as soft as your skin.
When the petals leave your fingers
You don’t say a word,
You let them fall like they’re broken
Pieces. We walk on the path
On which liars and sinners have danced,
And if I turned to look,
I’d find these petals on the ground,
The ground that will never find us
Buried side by side.
I subscribe to the logic of oil
And feathers that keep swans afloat.
There is no pretense.
I am not a rock or a wheel.
What my nature is, that is what I show—
I am incomplete.
I am a dirty word.
I am feathers sticking out of a housecat’s mouth.
If you go, I will know what I’ve lost
And gained like a patient
Who absent-mindedly strokes her hair,
And, instead, only finds staples mending her head.
THE SCARECROW
The one grandfather made wore a yellow
Raincoat, its head and arms
Rice sacks stuffed with coconut husks.
At night his hands stitched together
Limbs and made the bamboo cross
On which would hang
This dark doll of harvest.
He raised it at dawn,
Strung tin cans around its amputated wrists,
Placed seeds in its pocket and faced it
To the south. Then he spat on the ground.
Even before the brown grains fattened,
Crows would mock
Its crosshatched face, peck the side
Of its head. I hated how it hung on.
©
Mike Maniquiz 2007.
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