Eugene Gloria

After Octavio Paz What’s most human must drive an arrow to the heart. Ghosts, too, must abide by this directive & remain transparent, going about their business in old houses. Before I was an I, I longed to be ethereal. Sprouting wings at will & gliding through cul-de-sacs and malls around the valley. My hands, too, would gradually disappear followed by my arms, then neck & head until my whole body was slight as allergen. Before I was an I, I spoke an old language that would return on drowsy afternoons. Therefore I struggled to say the simplest sentences. So much so that the maligned semicolon became an ardent ally, an island of pause and the deep breath. The comma, too, bless its tiny soul, was the crumb which the god of small favors multiplied tenfold for my morning pie. Before I was an I, knowledge clung to me like burrs & hunger guided my ship like the barefoot light on the sleeping land & sea.

Always the sky keeps expanding. Wide as America’s brave margins, wide as my loneliness in the Middle West. I lean against a dust cloud behind us, the glory sinking into a muted timberline. I am drunk with longing. The wind is singing— my drunken friend, the wind, hurls sweet curses at my face. We have learned to love this road, which lies down like pythons, refuses to forgive our excesses, refuses to consider us kin. Our driver’s sign overhead reads,Jesus is my co-pilot. Jesus who crossed the city gates of his ancestors on a road carpeted by palms. Our goodtime driver must know this— he drives with abandon, despite our fragile cargo: scholars and accountants, prophets and exiles all the same to him. The road, which suggests things, is tired of ceremony. It lies down to sleep like the snow. Lie down TallMountain, lie down Serafin Syquia, lie down Li-Young, lie down Divakaruni, lie down Eman Lacaba, lie down pilgrims of the open road. Shameless, we gather our light jackets in balls. We rest our heads, our faces upturned to a squall of stars. I near the end, my soul recites. O loneliness, my body responds. This empty road is a house where no one lives. What strange fire we bring when we come to this house.

That night the moon over New Hampshire wore a face I knew in high school of a pudgy boy whose mother was a singer and whose sister was once trapped in a burning building. When she was a girl, my sister and 17 of her classmates could not leave school because the janitor ran amok. The moonlight on the lake glides like Persian slippers wingtipping on the surface of the water. And the road with its arms around the lake is silent and American. In Thai,Sasithon stands for full moon, a name for a woman who once saw a pair of hands on the dashboard of my car. Not hers, but of another who died a violent death. In the whir of static between Top Forty and twang, I listened to the news report of Pol Pot’s capture. And like a man whose bowl of soup has grown too cold to eat, I realized that I had overdriven— missed the road I was supposed to turn into. In a false memory, I look back at the burning building that claimed my classmate’s sister. I see her moonface veiled in blue— blue as a flame of a lit match telling me the road I missed on the map. I could pull over and rest my eyes. I could sleep like an entire race of bones underneath the tall grasses where a man hacks and hacks at something in the heat. Once in a while he might stop to examine the pattern of a tattered fabric suspended on the tip of his machete, and try to remember his wife.

You feed us milkfish stew and long grain rice, make us eat blood soup with chili peppers, and frown at us when we lose our appetite. I remember when I was young and you told me of that monsoon: the Japanese Occupation— stories of a time before you met my father, when you learned the language of an occupied city in order to feed your family. You were the pretty one at seventeen, your skin, white as milkfish. The pretty ones, you said, were always given more food— the Japanese soldiers sentried above the loft where you worked dropped sweet yams, and you caught them by the billow of your skirt. I remember you in sepia-brown photographs as a mestiza who equated liberation with Hershey bars and beige nylons from American GIs— and the season of the monsoon as dark as hunger was not about suffering but what you knew of beauty.