Translation

We thought nothing of it, he says, though some came so close to where we slept. I try to see him as a boy, back in the Philippines, waking to the sound of machine guns. His family would spend their morning spreading a paste over the sores of the house’s thick walls. He tells how he touched points where bullets entered, his fingers, he says, disappeared into the holes, as if inside there existed a space where everything from this world could vanish. Here we could place the memory of my sister, his daughter, who died after a car wreck. Wedge her into the smoky path & cover her in sunlight. The family next door is raking leaves in the yard. A father scolds his children for jumping into large piles he arranged into a crescent moon. We cannot hear them from inside, but I feel they are frightened as he grabs both of them around the waist & spins. I wait for the ending to my father’s story, but he is too busy smiling, as if enjoying the silence of bullets frozen there in his mind.