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I am no longer posting to the Nightjar Logbook. If you go to my current website,OKIR, you will find links to my current poetry blogs.
8/16/03. 7:45am
HOME ON THE RANGE
where impulse flies the line, going
grasps minutes, hopi beads coyote running
wiley, wild heart heated vroooooomm
in desert languish flowers why why tracking tracked
on the break / front era
damned
voices thorny ones hallowed
hollowed out a house in thorns
hollow a home
hollow a voice for speaking, for many things names
a place / where might've been a place
where in the desert
where under every kind of moon
you'd think there would be a place
where you could think
where
why
8/15/03. 12:32pm
BARLEY QUEEN
identities pass by what i was will be
could've had been is almost faking it
between hours between computer fixes (personas)
dishes drip over the sink
in the fold out of the trough
sugar barley queen straw doll
backed by marching band
seems a safer life than flight
lettered and stamped
not even a photograph {however} some she tells
in the long eras before waking
pre-histories folkish bonfires theomachy
once a story
screed over you now some (sum)
traces words dub voice-over
"time" before i go
to the next thing
7/21/03. 11:37pm
FLYTING DAYS
there's a break in the night
wider a milk glass emptied
medicinal link
fletcher deals the shaft
gone to foreign marks afield
flyting days
speak for yourself a marrying
kind memory bungles and bruises
lyric flesh
i might by singing see the thing
bluish by light and a capful
of sugar skull owns
foreknowledge of the practiced hand
pale vein where the fretwork
worries it
7/21/03. 2:07pm
WHITE LILY VORTEX
owning up to the day a freeze frame
caught on the turn hands poised escape into a word
black hole of a letter sounds a white lily vortex
burden of cuts crush thick stalks
a family matter chords and curettage as if a thorough
scrubbing might --
wound an ocean
strip another layer of desire
off the billboard
fall where the silent tiles
clatter before breakage
always a love song bareknuckle
raw throat fills with leaves
where the green aches
6/25/03. 5:p.m.
THOUGHT ENGINE
Slant on the edge of a heat wave, fed some inner compulsion to stand aside, dead thought shuttling out more and more cranks, more drafts; why can't it ever come over to a shameless state where you are flying an updraft and opening hands like a feather woman in a nightgown? Walang hiya, means what -- without shame? -- you hussy. There you go, there you were, counting stitches forever it seems, trying to get beyond the count, dropping stitches, even, in your slow acetylene feast. And now it's a hot one, and you need to haul something out of the 20th century -- maybe the whole machinery, clanking and stamping, cogs in their forward eyeless pursuit, diagrams of shafts and pulleys, turnkeys and screws, to steady you, make you feel real? There's a newspaper boy on the corner, and he's shouting out the news, and it's a big one; it's heavy and it's got a pulley and a dynamo in it; there's an engine there just for you.
1/4/03. 3:19a.m., 1/5/03 8:52a.m., 1/8/03 8:40p.m.
UKELELE MOON
Gustav Mahler died in 1911. He saw himself as an outsider. "I am thrice homeless,” he wrote, “as a native of Bohemia in Austria, as an Austrian among Germans, and as a Jew throughout the world. Everywhere an intruder, never welcomed." His music is polyphonic, bursting with emotion. He is inspired by the cacophony of the carnival fairground. My mother was born in 1911, in Fort Stotsenberg, now the abandoned Clark Air Force Base in Iba, Zambales, in the shadow of the volcano.
This was the year that Moses Browning developed the M-1911 Colt 45, to kill intransigent Filipino "Moros" in Mindanao. Flips running amok. In 1911, my father was a brown boy frolicking in the surf of Santa Cruz beach, on the northern coast of Mindanao. He'd never heard of Gustav Mahler. But he could play “Cocktails for Two” and “Maria Elena” on the ukelele. I see them now, those boys, as I saw them last year, with their bamboo spears. Diving, and surfacing with a grin. Spurting water at each other. Pissing freely in the sea. The warm clear waters lapping, the jellyfish and sharks keeping their distance, for awhile. Nostalgia is state of mind indulged in by exiles and tourists alike. It’s a form of time travel.
In 1911, a group of Buffalo Soldiers rested in Sydney, before shipping off to the Philippines to chase down Filipinos. Some of these soldiers will eventually defect from their ranks, marry Filipinas, and raise offspring in the Islands. My mother’s father joined the Philippine Constabulary, part of the 9th cavalry, a Buffalo Soldier regiment. But all he really wanted to do was play the clarinet. He and his brother joined the regiment band, led by a handsome black man named Lieutenant Loving. The band played so well that they were sent to perform at several international expositions in Panama, San Francisco and Chicago. They played at the inauguration of President Taft. Eventually my grandfather abandoned his wife, children, and his country, and settled in Junction City, Kansas, home of the 9th Cavalry.
In 1911, Marie Curie was awarded the Nobel Prize for isolating radium. She spent so much time with this luminous material that it eventually killed her. I was raised in Santa Cruz, California, a town founded by Spanish missionaries. The town is perched on the rim of Monterey Bay, just off one of the deepest underwater canyons in the world, the Monterey Trench. My father’s father fished the waters off of Santa Cruz Beach, in northern Mindanao. A large cross overlooks one entrance to that beach. The locals say that the reason the Japanese did not invade that area is because of that cross. I can't imagine Marie Curie dabbling her feet in the clear water of a tropical shore.
I have a memory -- like a postcard -- of myself up to my neck in that Mindanao surf, occasionally dipping down into its salty depths to scoop up turban shells and coral; this was a few miles away from where Rizal was exiled in Dapitan, before his execution by firing squad in 1896. (How small he looks in that notorious, touched-up photograph: in a crisp suit and bowler(?) hat, the soldiers aiming for the back of his head). As usual, he made a pedagogical and charitable project out of his somewhat benevolent prison in Dapitan, studying and classifying animals and plants in the area (mailing samples off to his friend and colleague, Blumentritt, in Leitmeritz), building a school, and performing experimental cataract surgery. He even sculpted a 3-D map of Mindanao, so that the local citizens might have a clearer concept of their island in relation to the emergent Republic, and other countries of the world. Rizal, ever the overachiever, nationalist and martyr.
There is a small bay down the path from his hut, where he watches the catamarans, the fishermen and sea-gypsies. I watch the sun set through the coconut trees on the beach at Dapitan, after wandering through Rizal’s compound, which in itself is a small, canopied rainforest. At sunset, the bay and its greenery exudes a humid and languid beauty almost unbearable (it was perhaps not exceptional to anyone else around me). As we stroll about, I tell Rizal about the wonders of laser eye surgery, apologizing for my lack of detail; after all, I learned about it from watching info-mercials on TV. "And what is 'TV?,'" he asks. No scientist, I tell him it's a way of being in two places at once.
Trying to change the subject (but then realizing it's the same), I mention that the Chilean surrealist, Roberto Matta, will be born on November 11, 1911. His paintings and drawings seem at once liquid and air; he depicts forms in flux, transformed by time, so that we see past, present and future simultaneously. Machinery melts, becomes a smudge of black; flesh glows, transforms into nebulae and/or fish. Death and regeneration, light and darkness, flow one into the other. Rizal's countenance darkens, and I imagine he's thinking of all that he'll miss after his execution. "...and there'll be a world war," I blurt out, awkwardly, "...and later, the atom bomb." But that's not what Rizal was thinking; suddenly, a doubt had formed in his mind about the validity of his project to collect and classify as many Philippine insects and plants as possible.
Matta died last November. In 1911, Piet Vlag published The Masses in New York, and brought Max Eastman in to edit it. My father wanted a mural of palm trees and surf on his bedroom wall; there was once a time when I thought that was tacky. Kitsch. Perhaps he wanted to wake up in the morning, believing, for just an instant, that he was back in Mindanao. In 1911, the first Filipino workers appeared in Alaska to work in the fisheries and on the fishing boats. They thought they were prepared for the cold. They weren't.
On arriving in Seattle from California, an Alaskero
is confronted with these propositions:
If I join the C.I.O., I cannot go ot [sic] Alaska be-
cause the packers refuse to negotiate with them.
If I join the A.F. of L., I cannot go to Alaska
because the Maritime Federation of the Pacific and
the C.I.O. will go on strike.
Then: If I cannot go to Alaska, I cannot go back
to California, because:
I am broke.
I cannot stay here in Seattle because there is
no work.
"An Alaskero's Dilemma," by Anonymous
The Filipino Pioneer, 5/16/38
Two decades later (more or less), my father takes a steamer to Seattle, and from there he is recruited to work for the Ketchikan Packing Company. Between stints in Alaska, he travels up and down the West coast (often hitching rides on boxcars), and even to the Deep South, as a migrant laborer and sometime musician and band member. All he really wants to do is sing and play the guitar and ukelele.
Life was just a dream
By a silver stream
Underneath the Ukelele Moon
Love light in your eyes
It was paradise
Underneath the Ukelele Moon
Many a month, Many a night
Many a day since then
Drifted apart, still in my heart
I love you
Now I wonder when
We will meet again
Underneath the Ukelele Moon
He joins the union, and then quits, after the Bloody Thursday riots in San Francisco. He never sees his parents again, nor his sisters. During and after the war, he spends several decades of his life on ships: hospital ships, victory ships, merchant ships. One day, his supply ship anchors, among other vessels, miles away from a small atoll named Eniwetok, where in 1952 he is one among many goggled and trembling seamen to watch the first ever explosion of a hydrogen bomb, 500 times stronger than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. Its orange fireball is over three miles wide. The island and coral reef upon which it explodes disappears into another dimension. He feels the heat of the flash prickle the hair on his skin, and thinks to himself that there is no music, no song to convey that feeling, so strange and new, and yet so old.
Ukelele Moon by Carmen Lombardo, 1930.
1/13/03 5:59 a.m., 6:47 p.m., 2/3/03 1:05pm
morning's first grey steps.
shuffling upright and into a day.
garbage truck grounds
subterranean grits honk a mean
bleat to raise the blood;
and so the engines burn cold
there is oiling of turnstiles
rocking of hinges, cold drip of green
fluids clock the motion of bodies, traffic
i remember this gravity from a ways
past, when the sun coming up
was a dear remainder
a sickle of crust left dry from plastic baggie nights
and drastic players
fear fraying the corners from Arthur
Brown's froze "hellfire"
(that was a god, a forethought, and a hound;
and that was a toothsome
bite too), a dread delirious year, i recall --
what i remember of it.
2/1/03 8:56 p.m.
Enter Caliban with a Burden of Wood. A Noise of Thunder Heard.
"forward," he said, "keep moving,"
and so forward into word, into world you go, caliban,
with fortitude and martial confidence
although in fact i go
with backward hooks
into the crawlspace of my cranium, where my books
lay open-faced like sandwiches. And full of phrenological
forebodings, I touch my head,
tenderly worry my hair, worry the synapses
until sparks sputter:
"onward," "covering all points,"
go on, go on,
"to what?" I ask, slipping into the confessional
and drag back, like a priest
to the roots of things, as if by digging
in heels, i might plant myself.
2/2/03 11:35 a.m.
TURNKEY
And then if the metaphors are warning you, there is a pause and a break.
In the sentencing; blithe like this. Incomplete to forward going. Leaving
the open. Quite for sexual pleasure this. Why the question if the day imprints
leaves upon the road, a face, your stubble, to touch? Why even the blue course
of veins upon your hands, unbearable throat, coarse lily? Questions like this
always pursue fortune if asked. Pacing over the keys, and that first key turned
in me was a question too. I was taut upon a string. Don't you know? I was taught.
But if a dialogue concurs I would do anything. And the waiting skims the hours.
The hours the hours. Black water ready to fade like alcohol on my lip. I carry
a flask of lambanog. Quick to the pink flesh of the bamboo heart. With a sweet
smell like innocence. Drips into the flask like a drink of warm blood. I make myself
ready to taste a sliver, eat errata, murder fate.
GARISH RED
Tottering it comes like this. I mean like THIS, this ant crawling upon my forearm.
What I want is crash; what it demands is a terror like mars creaking in the jaws of its
sextile. And a garish red for velvet and all things holy burning in a privy can. What I
can't bear and what I can't fathom are the bones of my teeth settling for dust.
And Dust catching like a hook in my throat. But it comes rolling all day, tossed and
blooded like bandages and shit. I mean the past. I mean ropes and baling wire,
and knitting needles. Poe pays his indulgences upon the bank and upon the shore,
ripped as as any drunk headed for the pavement, and groaning for beauty. Beauty
is a bear. Barroquismo is plaster for a hundred bulls. The best defense I think:
bring on the ravens and the burning chairs.
2/15/03 3:30 p.m.
little or nothing and so tired to say
and burning in a little flame
in a little hole
in the heart
and trying to open the oven
and trying to find a bellows
trying to enter that sorry safe
where in an earlier vial
there was a little acid of hope
in the sparkle of asphalt ways and old plays
before the parades and the marching and Stumble
and before the glamour of romance
tweaked my dripping umbrella
closed.
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