Andy’s PGP (Pretty Good Poetry)

Filling her compact & delicious body
with chicken páprika, she glanced at me
twice.
Fainting with interest, I hungered back
and only the fact of her husband & four other people
kept me from springing on her

or falling at her little feet and crying
'You are the hottest one for years of night
Henry's dazed eyes
have enjoyed, Brilliance.' I advanced upon
(despairing) my spumoni.—Sir Bones: is stuffed,
de world, wif feeding girls.

—Black hair, complexion Latin, jewelled eyes
downcast . . . The slob beside her     feasts . . . What wonders is
she sitting on, over there?
The restaurant buzzes.  She might as well be on Mars.
Where did it all go wrong? There ought to be a law against Henry.
—Mr. Bones: there is.

We’ve lived the life of an unbridled boy 
Mastering the higgledy-piggledy metro, 

Tapping the fast-moving window,
Loving the a cappella names 

Of the heralded stations:
Saint-Paul, Bastille, Gare de Lyon—

*

The life of a downtrodden clochard,  
Sly, indigent alley crone, 

Still wrestling to recover 
A long-deterred tune:  

Chevalier, dauphin, Parisian charmer,
Don’t you know I’m blue without your wink?

*

The life of a pendant, park-facing willow, 
Oh sweet, avuncular life—

*

Incarnation of a curling swan—

*

The life of an insouciant schoolgirl 
Boulevard-prancing then skipping

In the candle-pale voile of her lark-
Light Corpus Christi dress—

*

Life of a heartfelt nun whispering novenas
And bidding God’s blessèd day adieu—

*

The taciturn, time-and-again life 
Of a ringlet-haired racehorse

On a raucous kids’ carousel:
Its red-gold, undignified Sundays—  

*

Fat life of a tantalized basilica tomcat
Chasing a fly-by-night sparrow in the pews—

*

The jubilant life of a sweetheart, answering 
Yes, oh yes, I will,

Mon amour, trésor,
You can toss your hat now into the air—

We dress my daughter in amarillo, not butter
or sunlight or mirasol, maybe an Easter yellow,
maybe a Dia de los muertos yellow, a baby chick
yellow, it doesn’t matter. She flickers
around the house all bare-foot.  She takes you
by the hand and makes you play
La Suavecita on repeat, her hair in brown
bouncy pig-tails. All day. She watches 
your mouth, the way you say tambores,
the way you say cumbia. She won’t stop smiling. 

When she laughs I hear my mother. I am 
back in her house, all bare-foot, dancing 
to the same song. 

My mother dresses in a teal bata, not Miami
or peacock or Tiffany Blue, maybe an Easter teal,
maybe a Dia de los muertos teal, a robin egg 
teal, it doesn’t matter. She flitters
around the house. She takes me
by the hand and teaches me how to spring
my arms, how to move my hips,
how to follow the beat already in my legs.
She tells me,
ay mijo, one day, las muchachas
will want to spend the night with you
on the dance floor. Find those feather feet. 
Carry a smile and laugh, mijo laugh. 
I ask to play the song again and run
to rewind the cassette tape. All day.
My mother is all baila, baila,
all brown curls of bobbing hair
abriendo sus brazos the moment
I learn how to spin her in
our shot-gun house.  She won’t stop smiling.

My mother loves the color yellow.
There is a sing, a flow around inside.
My daughter ooooos the color teal.

When they lay eyes on each other, they watch
each others’ mouths, see just who smiles first.
I’m just here, waiting to see who wants to dance
—si no la invito, me invita ella.

^{for Jack Hirschman (1933-2021)}

The words always came running out of your mouth
Tumbling, galloping
Pushing against one another as they took the final turn
The last hundred meters
Where form is lost 
& everyone becomes a futurist
Sacred words split into syllables & break apart
Yours never had wings affixed to them
Only the hammer & sickle 
Harnessed with gumshoe & printing press
Long gray hair alighting from your form
& that gait you had
As if you’d been riding motorcycles all night long
Bowlegged, rickety even 
Probably from kicking fascists in your sleep 
& the other death-headed sorts
You had the sparkle, loud & lavish laughter
Bellowing even
A clamor to stoke awake the fires inside
& push against the fulcrum of the dreadful state
In time, overtaken by the glow & tether of your arcanes
Where life mingled with apparitions 
It’s how you made memory & the present inseparable
Obsecrating all those pages turned 
Dog-eared & brittle after a stretch
To lay words before us, like crumbs
Four thousand pages later
Leaving a richer trail
I remember the raddled years
When you lived like a pauper
Grinning wide & showing off your crooked teeth
More beautiful than any others
The final words I whispered to you
That was wonderful 
Are still ringing in your ears
Though vibrating waves of compression
& rarefactions are dust now
Just in case, let me say it again
That was wonderful

^{for Oray}

We sat Indian style, & sang our pledge
to Audubon, painted birds on every wall,
& heard mirage when our teachers said
mural. We stole soccer balls from French
exchange, spiked them on the walkway
& yelled touchdown. My friend, where
are you now? We tripped over tree roots
racing to the playground, walked the sea
of wood chips to the plastic ship’s eye
& wheel. We bartered Super Donuts for
extra cartons of chocolate milk, played
duck, duck, duck, duucck, duuuuccckkk
goose. We vamoosed around a sunken
circle of laughter. We were hedgehogs,
were road runners & sombrero mice.
We were bullets, the Flash & every Green
Lantern; the Black ones, the White ones,
the alien ones too.

A boy, prettier than me, who loved me because
my vocabulary and because my orange pills, once asked me
to translate my father’s English.

This poem wants me to translate it too.
Idiot poem, idiot hands for writing it

an accent isn’t sound.
Only those to whom it seems alien
would flatten an accent to sound.

My poem grew up here, sitting in this American chair
staring out at this lifeless American snow. 

Black grass dying up out of this snow,
through a rabbit’s

long tracks, like a ghost
sitting upright
saying oh.

But even that’s a lie.

Just black grass, blue snow.
I can’t write this

without trying to make it
beautiful. Submission, resistance, surrender.

On first
inspecting Adam, the devil entered his lips,

Watch: the devil enters Adam’s lips
crawls through his throat through his guts
to finally emerge out his anus.

He’s all hollow! the devil giggles.
He knows his job will be easy, a human just one long desperation
to be filled.

My father’s white undershirt peeking out
through his collar. My father’s hand slicing skin, gristle,
from a chicken carcass I hold still against the cutting board.

Sometimes he bites his bottom lip to suppress
what must be
rage. It must be rage

because it makes no sound. My vast
terror at what I can’t hear,

at my ignorance, is untranslatable.
My father speaks in perfect English.

For now, we speak only in brooms:
         sweeping sand across the teeth 

of concrete slabs, we brush and repeat 
         each stone syllable of the clearing

where our great grandparents are buried. 

Some words for memory are always here, 
         sounded out by the ant feet 

hefting sand grit and glitter homes, fan-light
         over the blue tongues of plastic flowers— 

the weeds will try to cover all the other ways 
         of saying history. 

But our pronunciation begins with the clearing we make in our bodies first:

where the broom handle widens the oh’s 
         in the mouth of our hands, 

how we shake open the throat 
         to settle each pile of leaves before burning them.

Trust the body to open in our language
         with the rhythm of weight—

one hand pushing sand, 
         the other pulling syllables

in one last sway 
         as we close the gate of the malaʻe 

so the trees can better hiss-hush at the edge of the ancestor 
         speaking in all our names.

Mountains, a moment’s earth-waves rising and hollowing; the earth too’s an ephemerid; the stars—
Short-lived as grass the stars quicken in the nebula and dry in their summer, they spiral
Blind up space, scattered black seeds of a future; nothing lives long, the whole sky’s
Recurrences tick the seconds of the hours of the ages of the gulf before birth, and the gulf
After death is like dated: to labor eighty years in a notch of eternity is nothing too tiresome,
Enormous repose after, enormous repose before, the flash of activity.
Surely you never have dreamed the incredible depths were prologue and epilogue merely
To the surface play in the sun, the instant of life, what is called life? I fancy
That silence is the thing, this noise a found word for it; interjection, a jump of the breath at that silence;
Stars burn, grass grows, men breathe: as a man finding treasure says ‘Ah!’ but the treasure’s the essence;
Before the man spoke it was there, and after he has spoken he gathers it, inexhaustible treasure.

^{translated by H. D.}

Birds from Parnassus,
swift
you dart
from the loftiest peaks;
you hover, dip,
you sway and perch
undaunted on the gold-set cornice;
you eagle,
god’s majestic legate,
who tear, who strike
song-birds in mid-flight,
my arrow whistles toward you,
swift
be off;

ah drift,
ah drift
so soft, so light,
your scarlet foot so deftly placed
to waft you neatly
to the pavement,
swan, swan
and do you really think
your song
that tunes the harp of Helios,
will save you
from the arrow-flight?
turn back,
back
to the lake of Delos;

lest all the song notes
pause and break
across a blood-stained throat
gone songless,
turn back,
back
ere it be too late,
to wave-swept Delos.

Alas, and still another,
what?
you’d place your mean nest
in the cornice?
sing, sing
my arrow-string,
tell to the thief
that plaits its house
for fledglings
in the god’s own house,
that still the Alpheus
whispers sweet
to lure
the birdlets to the place,
that still the Isthmus
shines with forests;
on the white statues
must be found
no straw nor litter
of bird-down,
Phœbos must have his portal fair;

and yet, O birds,
though this my labour
is set,
though this my task is clear,
though I must slay you,
I, god’s servant,
I who take here
my bread and life
and sweep the temple,
still I swear
that I would save you,
birds or spirits,
winged songs
that tell to men god’s will;

still, still
the Alpheus whispers clear
to lure the bird-folk
to its waters,
ah still
the Isthmus
blossoms fair;
lest all the song notes
pause and break
across a blood-stained throat
gone songless,
turn back,
back
ere it be too late,
to wave-swept Delos.

If you hit thirty-nine without marrying,
our grandmother will tell
of the schizophrenic aunt in Manila
stirring instant coffee in a padded boot.
There are gingery candies our grandmother
reserves for such occasions of candor.
There is the allergy bracelet whose twirl
around her wrist she slows with a free hand.
“Listen,” she says, but her attention
is always tuned to talk shows.
Steam roars from a cast iron pot in the kitchen.

The first woman they brought to you at twenty-eight,
at the end of your dissertation defense,
had a bluish mole by her temple
that twitched when she talked.
The second said, over a plate of boiled peanuts
in your parents’ kitchen: “I always have these dreams?
of the world? casually ending?” It didn’t work with her.
There were inhospitalities in the bedroom,
her queasiness at the stretch marks tallied on your thigh.
Relatives from other provinces praised
the beauty of such women. Mostly, you found them
laboring in pantsuits at cosmetics companies.
None could play banduria. None could sing kundiman.

But the TV was always on. Since the summer of 1986,
it had been, another withering voice
you hear and pay your wifeless attention.

If you hit thirty-nine without marrying,
you will stop caring about your gaping pores,
your overbite, your flat nose. You will see
the candied ginger crawling sugared across silk roses,
across the tabletop tiled with photographs
of the schizophrenic aunt, like a murky golem,
smashing every decaf-stained mug in the house,
leaving clay trails. She hears Jesus only in her left ear,
remembers Manila like a Kandinsky: lines, half-circles,
squares, and lines. “That’s what will happen one day”
—our grandmother, brandishing ripped nylons,
cataracts, and bent back, says—“to you.”

When you, a student, marched on Malacañang Palace
before the raids, the disappearances, and Imelda’s shoes,
time had already begun its folding
and now it sits in a drawer,
the neck too small, the wool distasteful, piled and unwieldy.

When Auntie Sinta watches her teleseryes,
she does not sit. She stares in space.
Her housecoat, worn and thinning, shifts.
She twists unruly hairs back into place.

Lana Turner has collapsed!
I was trotting along and suddenly
it started raining and snowing
and you said it was hailing
but hailing hits you on the head
hard so it was really snowing and
raining and I was in such a hurry
to meet you but the traffic
was acting exactly like the sky
and suddenly I see a headline
LANA TURNER HAS COLLAPSED!
there is no snow in Hollywood
there is no rain in California
I have been to lots of parties
and acted perfectly disgraceful
but I never actually collapsed
oh Lana Turner we love you get up

my ancestors rose and cheered.
From their ancient graves,

pairs of arms rose to make the wave.
Every burial site, a stadium and,

for every one of his at-bats
Mayon Volcano spat a puff of smoke

visible for miles. Children in T-shirts
with the number 50, hand-scrawled by Sharpies

would run into the streets and clang
on metal pans calling all to feast

and when Benny’s cleats dug into the box,
the little cloud of dust rising from his spikes

would drift across continents, into the living room
of every Filipino, issuing a sneeze

which would be followed by a blessing.
The diaspora, a flood of blessings,

watching the orange, blue, and white uniforms
pixelated into millions of screens.

Tens of thousands of nurses held their breaths
when they looked up between shifts

and saw him rest the bat on his shoulder
staring down the pitcher. When Benny Agbayani

was a Met, whole families, once torn apart
by distance held each other close, wrapped

together tightly in the embrace of phone cords,
the web of telephone lines crisscrossing the nation.

Each long distance call the shimmering pulse of a wrist
bracing for the recoil of the bat making contact.

When Benny fielded fly balls we’d all look
into the sun for the speck of something—

something to ease us into the heartbeat
of Americana where it was always

summer and the lawn markings
formed grids visible from space.

When Benny Agbayani was a Met we thought
the organ’s roar was for us and the syncopated applause

put us into a rhythm in tune to our hearts.
When Benny Agbayani put his mitt to the ground

to stop a daisy cutter, millions of us put our ears
to the earth to hear the rumblings

of what we hoped would be thousands of footsteps,
following his path. But instead they were galloping

towards home. We’d raise the brim of our caps
and nod our chins at a cool breeze

or the smell of fryer oil. And when Shea
sang in one voice “B-B-B-Benny and the Mets”

we stood and put our hands to our hearts.
We rocked back and forth on our heels

watching the strike zone get smaller
and smaller. Watched as the sun made

our shadows grow and we waited until the roster
made room for us in the show, now and in the ever after.