The condor wheels...

The condor wheels…

The condor wheels,

Currents, warm, rise,

Noon pulsates,

Shadows entice,

Stillness, a wing,

Silence beats the air,

Dusk is solace,

Dawn, fair,

Day transforms,

The moon allures,

Clocks chime—brightly!

—love endures,

Time, a dragonfly,

Solitude, a dove,

I am solitude,

You are love.

Originally published in Boston Poetry Magazine (February 5, 2015)

I am solitude, you are love.

Your love is a meal we share…

Your love is a meal we share…

Your love is a meal we share, stopping as events blink by.

We are waiting trains, rushing travelers hop in and out.

Time slows, a luminous animal patrolling the depths.

We visit the bubble of an artisan polishing a vase.

Sitting down, transfixed by a moment of white jade,

We recall lolling on the sand as the outstretched arm

Of a comet flashed our future across a sable sky.

You sip my glass of wine, swirling it toward your lips.

I scoop toward you heaps of fresh rice steaming fragrant clouds.

We gaze at many dishes, teeming fields quilting a fertile valley.

Originally published in Blast Furnace, Volume 4, Issue 4 (December 14, 2014)

You sip my glass of wine...

Vigan

VIGAN

Let us go to the dry land where hundreds of years ago, tobacco leaves broad as parasols hung from the dark rafters of wooden sheds riddled by sunlit rapiers.

Let us visit the town, your hand in mine, touring the passage of time, nodding inwardly toward our own thoughts as if they were pedestrians, as the sun gradually sheathes his sword and dusk heavily casts a shadowy blanket.

Let us enter the house of old stone and weathered wood, greeted at the doorstep by sharp complaints of aching hinges and grousing floorboards, as in the fronting street tiny whirlwinds of dust and gravel and bits of leaves explode like fluttering insect wings.

Let us ascend the gleaming stairs, shuffle off our shoes, one after the other, lean forward above a window overlooking a wide boulevard lined with cobblestones hot as bread and, shutting our eyes to slowly turning fans of radiant heat, inhale sumptuously, our nostrils stung by cooked air like ground pepper.

Let us make our way to the window of the house in the town in the dry land where hundreds of years disappearing, hardy fields flourished like shining children of the day watered by the tireless sun. 

Originally published in Eastlit (December 1, 2014)

Also published in Vigan: the Telenovela (February 8, 2015)

Tampuhan (1895) by Juan Luna