what would take you away from place – a slipshod
   route of caprice, or was it, this silence in front
   of a pool, ripple after ripple, still the silence
   I have learned to love?

to have faced north and swallowed the Sun
  meant the desire for it.

spanning the freefall from a tall drop,
threadbare net of hands ready for the catch – unlearning
    whom to fall on, what else is there to be part of but lacking?

between now, this oceanic expanse, is a need
  for letting loose, a part of once only and never whole,
  unlearning what must not be held now, your eyes they

do not see, but entirely space  to clear everything
  and put my heart in.

Now it all comes back:

in pursuit of you from the basis of this armistice, when in the swelter of this afternoon
I wish you realer than anything imagined,
                 in confidence   that I may   arrive at a   hunted  answer.

But the question, when hurled, broke into the wet back of mound’s infinite silence,
   like a dog with its paw leaving dog-signatures on the bedspread,

at twilight, flowers shift from grace to melancholy, rail of stars in sight now,

I amongst the darkness, waiting – wishing you again underneath the dome
   of this immense night,

prying amongst stones their language of truthfulness: Have I not loved enough?

You feel stories are always unsolicited. You do not want them.
You want to feel the agony of the moment – all the more the electricity of it. A moment mottled by
rain this ordinary Thursday afternoon, or the dust eloping in the wind as we drove past 50 in the middle
of the night, you telling me I do not clean my car thoroughly, like that of a lady’s. You feel stories pose
no importance. Say, at the edge of our seats or at the jagged lip of a cliff – you would dare say jump,
alone, unwound, unfettered, resolute, obvious and available in truancy, out of incalculable fear of
existing – you took the plunge and claimed it’s all the same. Apertures frantic with dazed visions of
fondness. Vertical leap, cutting through the vague sky. Keeping some sense of freedom, yet we are not
as free as we think. You do not want a story. You do not buy its thrills. You chortle at the idea of lasting things because they have hands that are clenched and frenzied. They brand. They are territorial. You are no territory. You are an island, adrift somewhere, breathing on its own in between penumbras of want
and coasts of dread.  You feel characters do not change scripts. They change how you say things. Say, when he told you were needed, and I told you that you insist your forceful importance – you felt the need
to dab into the air and spire through the thickness of the dark, flamboyant with the color of freedom, you said, pale as a dove, I am free. Finally, the man might have left somewhere without you knowing it, and just as you are unclenching your wings, you project your pace into the sky like an unseen margin in the invisibility of all invisibilities – it is impossible to look away. You felt stories are not needed. You wanted experience. The end of a dull knife, the sound of a .45 shot into the sky as the police circle the filthy streets of Quezon City. You in your Chuck Taylors, running, looking for some tough nook to hide in – omen of another rain in sight. You remembered when you first bathed in rain and laughed a laugh so impossible with high notes and shrills – you laughed away like you were not coming back, because there is no need for a story. Now left to wondering in the vastness of the room before me, was it something
to be believed? A broken orchestra enters with its surrendering music and everything is ended. I fell asleep, still dreaming of running away.

much that I rue this place,
you are this night’s bleak behemoth –
your full volume of absence
displaces the air.

where darkness asserts its terrors,
the heart knows no clearing;
stroke slow at first say, accuracy
  of all knives absorbed or when you
said remember, remember – supreme over
this tower of silence, like the last of your life
before you slid into easy sleep – drowning,

nothing can drown you, I say, this afternoon,
pulling at the sea, both of us, separate,
  your moving in all places,
as if pushing me further into the taciturn water.

my love, love of all loves, is the moon
   nobody knows. I’ve found her voice
the sweetest taste. In the stolen throbbing
room, I bask in her absence.

there is not much of me like you,
  or I, and in a glassed dream you flung
aside and strode in vestal swiftness.

I can no more taste your truth.
time tells your monsoon, and underneath
the steady weather, your light hands me,
   a bell – a bell I have no use for.

Moon missing now, in the depth of sleep’s
ravenings – a revelry was it, or a passing train?
gnawing sound at the very heart of nothing,
my love, love of all loves, is the moon
nobody knows, my tenderness of silence,
  and with stars eloquently leaving signatures,
the available anguish dropping all else
   in the knifed horizon.

hear    me now as i say
  pilgrimed is the image
  unloosen
   yourself   into the wind
  as i *****
      for some
  sense of
     placeness in this
 vaudeville

      no more are
 the birds that
     sing and way past us
 already seconds
     in waning
    is the same permeable blue
tracking    up
   our curved  spines
and when      weakened
    falling at
     last

as multiple
    cities do -
i see   a line
      for  a stream uncollected,
 as      rain
     over     genuflected
  hills      will.

you are in the middle of things,
insisting importance – you would feel
shivering in the distant blue
of another girdled spark and there,
in the not-so-distant sky,
I reach for damp perimeters

and have your face conclusive
with whiteness, sure of its glare,
  crossing the frangipani outside
  my home; silence leapt borders
and now an incident. uninterrupted.
resolute. absolved.

although so suddenly moving away
kiting around and perhaps death
will deal its part when love’s done
with its tedious labor – and it will all be

moments of bliss, two people renaming
necessary haunts, laughing
  in the dense air, keeping an ear for
the spring of yourself.