I. The Province
I was taught the value of the organic here.
This is where I became cloyed with
water buffalo shit and paddy mud as a child.
This is where wood smoke and diesel exhaust
became the permanent perfume of memory
Imprints not erased by time or history
inundating my dreams, my thoughts, my words.
I am still that child walking in a monsoon rain
who talked to the lizards on the ceiling.
II. Metro Manila
In Manila, I am lost in the vision of brownness,
in the density of bodies as they press near.
History is not linear; it is wandering
through crowds and listening to a language
that your tongue once spoke but is now
like an old friend that you once knew and loved,
whom circumstances have swept away.
Your paths may meet but your hands will
not touch in the same familiar way.
The friendship is remembered but not the same.
III. Dagupan
Twelve midnight in the karaoke bar,
the bakla sing "Strangers in the Night"
in high-pitched voices, facial hair showing
through rouge and powder.
They sing off-key but with great feeling.
The four Australians are loud,
complaining about their accommodations,
laughing at the waiters who repeat
their orders more than once in broken English.
I am with my cousins who speak softly
and who have never been up past eleven.
They wear blue jeans in eighty degree weather
with a hundred percent humidity.
I am the only one in shorts, and the only one
wanting to tell those Australians to shut up.
They're not the only ones who speak English here.
IV. Urdaneta
Two white women film the crowded scene
of vendors, pedestrians, slow-moving traffic,
and I sit in the weighing stall where rice and beans
are measured out and bagged in canvas,
my uncle shouting orders, my cousins helping out.
The women turn their lens upon us,
upon me, thinking what they see is typical,
and I say aloud to that lens
"I am not what you think I am"
though the statement is lost in the rumbling
and honking of passing vehicles, in the shouting
and buzzing voices, which are also foreign to my ear.
V. Back Alleyways
Here is the smell of dead fish and excrement,
and the sidecar of the tricycle bounces on
the unpaved road, full of gravel and potholes.
The women here sit with stunned faces,
smoking cigarettes, letting their children
run in traffic, looking past the dust and smoke.
They do not fan themselves though
the heat is high and the sun is out.
They sit in anticipation of nothing.
They sit and age as the weather changes,
as the mud collects at their bare feet.
VI. Villasis
The children pick guavas for me
and pick off the ants and polish
the guavas with their spit and shirts,
and we eat them while sitting
on the floor of that once grand house,
pictures of the dead watching from the walls.
A breeze blows in the smell of rain
The mosquitoes are feasting on our feet.
Looking out through that open window
we see the vast greenness of grasses.
Lurking in the distance are the
mountains' purple shadows.
We go to the window and taste the
tainted raindrops blown upon our tongues.