Once more with feeling: The world is just awesome!

Yes, yes, I am late, but I don't have TV (most of the time). I have been immersing myself in all the geek channels, and I've just discovered this:

I love, love, love Discovery Channel's "The world is just awesome" campaign. Brings out the E(nvitonmental) S(cience) major in me. I'm sorry, I'm sorry, but it's true! Deal with it. Hahaha.

"I love egyptian kings."

"I love the whole world!"

I love Bear Grylls.

I love Mike Rowe.

I love the Mythbusters.

I love Nat Geo, too.

I hate Animal Planet.

I wish I had cable TV.

I used to say, especially after I began to explore writing and the arts and (a little bit) regretting my science background, that BS stood for two things. I don't believe that now. After all, if science isn't the antithesis of bullshit, I don't know what is.

Sing it with me, "I love the whole world!" Boom de ya ya. Boom de ya ya.

A Letter Home

These paper walls

Someone had told me, was because Japan was prone

To earthquakes, and people had to deal

With shattering, the fall.

And how apt, I think now

These white sheets, the raised fibers

Like scars, the learned lessons.

The green of the tatami like leaves on the floor,

Except always fresh.

The whisper of sliding doors—

You remember. We couldn’t sleep once, Mang Jun going crazy, yelling at his TV. I knelt at the window to peek through the curtains but all I could see was a shifting blue light.

Our leaving like a sigh leaving

Our tired bodies before sleep.

Sometimes I dream about who lives now

In our old house. Here, spring to autumn

Everything is a-falling—

Sometimes I dream of how that light would flicker on his face, becoming green, yellow, blue. He is quiet then, in my dream, but the light shifts his expressions: pain, loneliness, the sigh, the anger.

Dead flowers, dead leaves.

Or how it could be empty

Light and shadow walking through its walls

All the silences between.

Those walls! I suddenly remember

The white-wash, the concrete cold and silent.

Those walls our country understands;

Sturdy like anything

That carries weight.

Response

Perhaps because I have been unknowingly baptized into the Catholic faith recently*, these are all about response. Mine, anyway.


Light, or years later
aaaaaaaEs en corto el amor, y es tan largo el olvido.
aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa-- Pablo Neruda

Forgetting is only so long, Pablo
as it takes to forget.

Yet, if I regret my silence then
would you, that last sad poem?
and if this should have kept us
nights begrudging the stars their company,
the wind its infidelity--

What now, but certainty
of love and lament, their brevity,
and the fact of distance
between sight and star?
(Look now, how cold they are.)

Let the wind blow where it can feed
Time will take only the time it needs.


That Secret
aaaaaaaHow do they do it, those who make love
aaaaaaawith out love?
aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa--Sharon Olds

Sex I've had, and more often good
But love I've held at arms' length.
My elbows unlock, I wish they would
That I might hold and be held if it meant
Even better sex, like the stories could
Tell--that is, if truth were their bent.
But older now, I can only conclude
These books, they've lied to us women.

Still a drink or two, of wine, I think
Will get me, at least, to your bed.
There's no need for the dance, or romance--
Some sheila (Or was it Sharon?)
Claimed the chase as pure religion--
Sex without love: I take what I can get
So don't worry about my rep.
That secret's out, and shouldn't be kept.


-----------------------------------------------------------
*
I was at Easter Mass, for the first time, last Sunday. I had no idea there would be a renewal of the the baptismal vows. Honestly, it felt like a mass wedding, with everyone saying I do all at the same time. And who was to know that the girl on the third pew has never (and I mean never) been baptized in the Catholic faith? in any faith for that matter? Well, that secret's out now.

I could've walked away, I know. But welcome is welcome. And it felt right, on both sides. I just feel silly, thinking all the people in the Church that day were my, well, kinakapatid or something. Haha.

And perhaps because the only place the holy water hit was my left hand, I can stop feeling guilty about wanting to write, and write about, all these things. Poetry, after all, is not a luxury, as another Lorde once said.

Weight without gravity

aaa1
There is no weight without gravity.
But matter and weight have come
To mean the same things:

What keeps our feet on the ground, what pulls
At clouds to return to sea, why we fear
The fall.

We have assigned them, too
To other things: meaning
and burden.

Weight no longer belongs to the body.

aaa2
My mother's weight keeps her pinned
To this hospital bed, chained
By our fears, by all she has to fight.

She is her body now more than ever.
The pressure of her hand in mine
A collection of mere molecules--

Matter acted upon by gravity.
And I waver at the edge of You and
This is not you, I tell her.

The weight of our worry pulls the water from her eyes.

aaa3
I do not fear the words dead, weight.
The part of my mother I wait to waken
Weighs nothing and means all.