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I have met them in dark alleys, limping and one-armed; I have seen them playing cards under a single light-bulb and tried to join in, but they refused me rudely, knowing I would only let them win. I have seen them in the foyers of theaters, coming back late from the interval long after the others have taken their seats, and in deserted shopping malls late at night, peering at things they can never buy, and I have found them wandering in a wood where I too have wandered. This morning I caught one; small and stupid, too slow to get away, it was only a promise I had made to myself once and then forgot, but it screamed and kicked at me and ran to join the others, who looked at me with reproach in their long, sad faces. When I drew near them, they scurried away, even though they will sleep in my yard tonight. I hate them for their ingratitude, I who have kept countless promises, as dead now as Shakespeare’s children. “You bastards,” I scream, “you have to love me—I gave you life!”

The world weeps. There are no tears To be found. It is deemed a miracle. The president appears on screens In villages and towns, in cities in jungles And jungles still affectionately called cities. He appears on screens and reads a story. Whose story is he reading and why? What lessons are to be learned from this story About a time that has not arrived, will not arrive, is here? Time of fire and images of fire climbing toward the sun Time of precious and semi-precious liquids Time of a man and a woman doused in ink Rolling across streams and down valleys Trying to leave some string of words behind.

Nuing-kuiten my father’s friend was a lion sorcerer and walked on feet of hair. People saw his spoor and said: “The sorcerer has visited us. He is the one who treads on hair. This big animal prowling was Nuing-kuiten.” He used to travel by night— he did not want to be seen for people might shoot at him and he might maul someone. At night he could go unseen, after other lion sorcerers who slink into our dwellings and drag out men. The sorcerer lived with us hunting in a lion’s form until an ox fell prey to him. Then the Boers rode out and shot my father’s friend, but he fought those people off and came home to tell father how Boers had wounded him. He thought father did not know he was wounded in his lion form. Soon he would have to go for he lay in extreme pain. If only he could take father and teach him his magic and songs, father would walk in his craft, sing his songs, and remember him. He died, and my father sang: “Men broke the string for me and made my dwelling like this. Men broke the string for me and now my dwelling is strange to me. My dwelling stands empty because the string has broken, and now my dwelling is a hardship for me.”

Tonight, I am in search of clues on how to be a man, not a man like my father, who traded his motorcycle for a job in the plane yards after my mother left. Before my father tried telling me wrestling was fake, we watched men scrap with brass knuckles and bull ropes. Back then, a dude could get his jaw broke calling the wrong guy a fake. Lou Thesz was a bona fide grappler, stretching men with that toehold facelock, snapping men’s elbows to protect his championship belt. My grandfather saw him lose the title to Bronko Nagurski, celebrated footballer who stomped men into the turf on his way to the end zone. Before my father died, he insisted my grandfather never saw that match, that men always invent things when they have something genuine to say. Today, everyone knows that fight was fixed. Tonight, I am thinking about all those shapes Lou Thesz could twist out of a man’s skeleton, and how some nights that just isn’t enough.

1. Benigno Aquino Jr. International Airport The adobe-brown terminal looms like a sleeping carabao caked with mud— you come up with fifty words to describe the different shades of green you saw rushing up from the ground, you scratch your neck, feel the grime and sweat from San Francisco or L.A. on your nape, you look out your window seat search for a plaque or a stain of blood— this is the tarmac where he was shot. (For a better view, go to Ayala Avenue in Makati. In front of the Bank of the Philippine Islands and the Insular Life Building is the statue with the stairs and the dove on his shoulder. While you're there, look for the statues of Lapu Lapu and Tandang Sora among the Ipil-ipil trees on Makati Avenue.) You pass through a fluorescent-white curtain of warm air as you descend into the unloading tube— a smile from an airline attendant, the long walk to the Immigration booth, Balikbayan sir?Welcome home. a stamp for six months on your U.S. passport, another ten dollar bill between its pages for the Customs people up ahead, Balikbayan? Do you have anything to declare, pasalubong, expensive gifts for the relatives? Thank you sir! a porter in a red shirt takes your luggage to the street level, asks for five dollars, the faces of a hundred people pressed behind a bamboo fence stare as you board a Golden or Metro taxi cab. You inhale the humid air, sweat is now running down your face. 2. E. de los Santos Avenue The Jeepnies are engorged with eight or ten passengers, each jeepney speeding and stopping with their fiesta of sounds, of colors, the bodies inside breathing carbon monoxide. You take the overpass into Makati— to the right is the long tan wall topped with barbed-wire hiding the luxury homes of Dasmarinas Village, to the left is San Lorenzo Village where you'll find the San Lorenzo Pre-school. Go to the house in Zulueta Circle, this is where the poet of Like The Molave once lived. His widow's name is Cora. On the corner of Edsa and Buendia, among the street vendors selling copies of Woman's Day, Manila Bulletin, or Marlboro and Winston cigarettes, you might see a girl without a left arm tapping on windows of stopped cars pointing to her mouth, asking for money. Every other year, before the monsoon rains, it's the same arm that's cut off just above the elbow, a different young face running up to cars in the same intersection. 3. Camp Crame and Camp Aguinaldo You pass Camp Crame where Ninoy Aquino, Jose Maria Sison, the poet Mila D. Aguilar, and countless others were "detained" under Marcos. The positive wire attached to the penis, the negative to the scrotum. This is also the place where more than a million people said "no" to the Dictator. You may still hear stories about the tear gas, the armored personnel vehicles, the ordinary people who would not move out of the way. They say that for three days the electricity to the whole city was turned off but the people still fought for freedom, sang songs to each other around bonfires, made love by candle light.

I like to think of your silence as the love letters you will not write me, as two sax solos from two ages across a stage, learning the languages of kissing with your eyes closed. I like to think of you as a god to whom I no longer pray, as a god I aspire to. I like the opening of your joined palms, which is like an urn where my ashes find a home. The music of your lashes; the silent way your body wears out mine. Mostly, I like to think of you at night when a black screen of shining dust shines from your mines to the edge of my skin, where you are a lamp of flutters. I remember the spectral lashes–marigold, tamarind, secret thing between your thighs, of closed kissing eyes. At night, the possibility of you is a heavy sculpture of heavy bronze at the side of my bed, a god. And I pray you into life. Into flesh.

That dusty bubble gum, once ubiquitous as starlings, is no more, my love. Whistling dinosaurs now populate only animation studios, the furious actions of angels causing their breasts to flop out in mannerist frescos flake away as sleet holds us in its teeth. And the bus-station's old urinals go under the grindstone and the youthful spelunkers graduate into the wrinkle-causing sun. The sea seemingly a constant to the naked eye is one long goodbye, perpetually the tide recedes, beaches dotted with debris. Unto each is given a finite number of addresses, ditties to dart the heart to its moments of sorrow and swoon. The sword's hilt glints, the daffodils bow down, all is temporary as a perfect haircut, a kitten in the lap, yet sitting here with you, my darling, waiting for a tuna melt and side of slaw seems all eternity I'll ever need and all eternity needs of me.

I The bronze General Grant riding a bronze horse in Lincoln Park Shrivels in the sun by day when the motor cars whirr by in long processions going somewhere to keep apppointment for dinner and matineés and buying and selling Though in the dusk and nightfall when high waves are piling On the slabs of the promenade along the lake shore near by I have seen the general dare the combers come closer And make to ride his bronze horse out into the hoofs and guns of the storm. II I cross Lincoln Park on a winter night when the snow is falling. Lincoln in bronze stands among the white lines of snow, his bronze forehead meeting soft echoes of the newsies crying forty thousand men are dead along the Yser, his bronze ears listening to the mumbled roar of the city at his bronze feet. A lithe Indian on a bronze pony, Shakespeare seated with long legs in bronze, Garibaldi in a bronze cape, they hold places in the cold, lonely snow to-night on their pedestals and so they will hold them past midnight and into the dawn.

Seated once by a brook, watching a child Chiefly that paddled, I was thus beguiled. Mellow the blackbird sang and sharp the thrush Not far off in the oak and hazel brush, Unseen. There was a scent like honeycomb From mugwort dull. And down upon the dome Of the stone the cart-horse kicks against so oft A butterfly alighted. From aloft He took the heat of the sun, and from below. On the hot stone he perched contented so, As if never a cart would pass again That way; as if I were the last of men And he the first of insects to have earth And sun together and to know their worth. I was divided between him and the gleam, The motion, and the voices, of the stream, The waters running frizzled over gravel, That never vanish and for ever travel. A grey flycatcher silent on a fence And I sat as if we had been there since The horseman and the horse lying beneath The fir-tree-covered barrow on the heath, The horseman and the horse with silver shoes, Galloped the downs last. All that I could lose I lost. And then the child’s voice raised the dead. “No one’s been here before” was what she said And what I felt, yet never should have found A word for, while I gathered sight and sound.

You might make a choice between what descends with these tiles lined before you, or arcing forward through a history that is constant against us. A bridge to block out the dawn. Or monoxide that passes like breath. My breath. I know all about what’s underground, and I keep my searches for the invisible there. In the park above, you’ve got your bike locked and the chain cut. The stubborn part doesn’t say anything, doesn’t need to to start marching home, ugly block, block of shouting, block syrupy with flies. I would like to hear about it, but I am backed into an argument myself on a coil of cool fall breeze, backed through seasons into the past, home or near it, in the moment when I’m as right as I’ll ever be bled into I’ll be this right forever. There’s no out available for this character, just a decade producing the present, warm, and then warmer around him. It was as if I hadn’t seen the harbor, didn’t want to admit it by doing so now. Something like a pile of books falls over inside me or the room I’m in breaks off from the house, slides almost out of view. All things didn’t happen or did. You might’ve routed a highway so it crashes through the seventh floor of a skyscraper, and the moment for that passes by us still. You can live like a column of light pours over you, but that’s not all you’ll see.