transcendent it was the first time
when it was of faint memory to touch

but voluminously told, exacting itself
like the pretense of the heaviest pages

the curve of your face the entry of light
through momentary indulgence

nerves their city buoys and the pedestrians
salt of skin in intense heat begging for details,

ways to sewerage of mind and previous blunders
and the purest landscapes of feeling,

the underpasses of eyelids where glances hit
first, stalk swiftly – to wait underneath their

shade in the fleeting Maytime sun
coming back with renewed fervor, remembering

that from there, waiting in that margin,
there are things that may only strike a potential

but never learned, memorized, collapsed into
the absolute, and that lostness is imperative

to the finding –
the river of eyes where pilgrims are in transit,

well-constructed like the mausoleum that
keeps its secret of hills and cathedrals

kept unmarred in the silence of your refusal,
pulled out to be nailed taut into origin

the blankness of your face taken as mechanism
of marvel – to whoever god drew lines on your face

and to whoever foolish wanderer would dare traverse
your collapsible bridges, the sonorous depth

of your being when back against the dash
of beating back to senseless origins,

your name similar to the prepared countenance
of Manila, passers-by in awe of your slow Moon

unraveling behind curtains for showerheads,
humming behind, a conversant tune

where not one being ignored and it was true
to the form of first whispers

this whole new world mapped out
made naked to the twisted augur of shadow

reared by light through innocence,
a whole city I know but cannot touch.

In crepuscular tapestry
   telling of mauve night

and the dull color of
  stones intimate

with waves from an
open  sea of laughter

the sound of you
in the hollow of me

      keeping watch over hills,
my body hunting your blue echo.

Who are you this evening?

body    first   we took   on the    evening
   like   it    were   virgins     on   flay

we    owe everything   in  praise
   of    moonlight

saying    the   ****   of word
  meaning   it   full   in the   sudden heat
     of   ephemeral   light

once    and   always
  at    once    your   world     became
    a tiny    cage   for that   little hummingbird   heart

and you    wafting
   in    the   wind   like    a cloud
    of       farewell   from   the exhaust
of     transitions


redefining    you    with   intent   stare
     was     searching     for  myself
from    heavings    of      tired     fusuma;
          hefting    out   a    mound   of
equal   parts    divine    and
       sullied       undisguised
yet     only     silence   retained   its   poise
      of     mystery    nothing
I      could   understand

a    hand    in
     hand      is    nothing but  the   instant
merge    and   separation
    and  that    the coming
out     of     words,    a   tabulation
    of    abject    loves

simply    you,   a  splitting    image
     of   a thing   refusing
to   be held   with   one    hand
     on    my face   and   the
    other,     fluttering   away

from
there is nothing to fall against this evening.
the sound pace divides lavish moon
in half, and inside a glass,
in clenched circles.

what slipped away glazed
this fruit with old glint: patent of territorial
anguish.

speeding right on by this evening,
the lift of morning borrowed from sweat.
I am tugged at
by a moving thing

sundered there, seeing whose anonymous
  back sways with flaxen hair
laughing freely into the wind
   and gone with it

to
everything brought to the edge
I listen to metonymies:

want* for running into
fear for holding a hand, a part of something
   now in union

light for the clearing of the path
  cluttered by feelingfulness

and pry open their meanings,
back into the fitting measure of waiting
as the slab of Sun lies like a dozing beast
on the streets where we surface
like the sound of falling

feet strong despite changing winds
  when mantling the living rivers
  of gradually dissipating lives

running away
even when no one was looking
we are headed to where
   we found ourselves
occupying spaces.

plenitude steps taken in those
    DMs. my hands in the tense wind

are two hounds in a ***-lock.
somnambulate if you may, in the pretense of this
   grotesquerie. sing to me, you might, lax in tune
and foreboding by consent.

on the floor now, aslant, like two dogs
   waiting in servitude,
  the detritus of shedding – outside to no windows,
I perceive an elongated white of moon.

you must have hurt the world
with your darling feet.
carrying the night, deciphered from above,
whose distance is this that switches
to impact?

from the look of your face in the drone
   of sleep,
I doubt my presence

but when the radio of dream soon dies
and your breath ****** out of you
like a vacated city,

the undulant breath, a fair warning
and myself simply, an aftermath.

Why this house? This house that walks without frame? Only air strides
circumventing the dome. The permeable atmosphere
flows freely shaking water down my arms,
          pulp by pulp, fragment by fragment,
consolations for tippling music streaming in the ears.
Blowing arias – intone of regret, or the loss of beautiful things.
Preferring silence over sanguine narratives. How are we to assuage yearning?
   I heard someone say, “The ideal is unattainable.” – strange, holding
the small of one’s back and lament the narrow ends of the world.
   Strange the flight of birds, the hum of buses past Quezon City.
It would drone that you do not know her – and that she is never somebody
  else’s – that is dearth consoled. Your palm indents delineate not fate
but the steady distances of things close to contact, eluding tragedies.
                          Why this house, and why you?
I have no blueprint of your home. I know not what festoons the balustrades.
   Your rue for the absence of a balcony. A panel over earthenware I suppose,
or partitions to separate dreams from stilled things impaled to the wall.
   I presume there are photographs of you in every corner
to remind you   of your gathered storms.
                         I know not the smell of your home, but I have your
nameless fragrance on my shirt wedged, ambulating with me through the halls of
    where I chase moments like cirrus stirring in a somersault of summer.
  Make use of  bowls with
      evening water  and flush the specter down like how you would, cold water
into throat from a night of weeping. Somewhere there,
    the China will remind me of your elliptical face in
                the intensity of leaving. Your eyes
the windows for birds humming a music I do not hear.   I have been to too many neighborhoods,
I have seen unfinished structures foretold by obliged scaffolds holding together
                     a would-be home. Why this house? There are only shadows intimate on
the floor. The sudden burst of impossibilities watered down, attenuated by
            piercing glances through the thickest of nights black with remorse.
The palpable silence gyrates and the diameters of the world are too close
     to break in sidereal circles.
Why this house?   Because you are in it, and outside,
    through the thick quietude, underneath the paling moonlight,
                         you pretend you see nobody.

I once bore witness to no soggy corner, a seedy cinema, or a vile discotheque
  when out in the open, the somnolent air on face smashing the distance
  often times misappropriated as meaning, or desire – that we hold no choice
  to circumstance and acquiesce: I have become consequently obsequious
as in April’s proper warmth swallows the coldness of metal and mostly words;

it was when nights are spent without maps – roads and their meanings,
    separated by lines – washed with the squalid metropolitan living,
down from the urban thresh to the empyrean glower of a slow moon beginning
  to ignite in someone else’s but mine only and nobody else

aches and persistent meanings, a hand reopening
   a long-forgotten dusk –  painted anew with a chance never off-tangent
   but always at the cynosure of things

   this glass with rondure of your face, the valve of shower
   your hands or simply the droning sound of driving homeward
  
      that I cannot escape, a voice leaning in, saying something
    in the calm wind.