You remind me of Banna

(for mang ariel, now, a citizen of the world)

This infinite ache under the covers
This December visit when mornings are lazy
And it constantly teases me with damp hands
On my damper cheeks.

You remind me of Banna; my town fair-dawned
More alive because you longed of wood-pigeon’s
Mushroom picking season that as remotely
Savage and raw as foreign, sure, frost
On your treasure-chest of vast idioms.
Yet, even I, call this visit only in meanings
I too is slipping strange and stranger
Too is my blood in perspiring, trying rebirth
Even as I live closer to this wanted earth.

I ache most when reeds are quivering
On the fallen stalks of October mornings
I smell of the carabao dung
Impacted on the tail whipped on my trousers.
When September dawn woke me up
The laughing river calls me to the shrimp basket trap;
Smile at the balmy infant morning infested
With breakfast smoke dancing overdone surtidos;
Drive the goat to the stubbles of new light
That bristles shrill calm to drive
The spike against the unity of dewdrops.

These are lengthened musings;
The thrill of chasing beetles on sticky burned-soil
Still dangerous with sugarcane stems,
Or catching them flailing from their birthholes;
Find the fungus-balls on its milky roots
Under the fingers of dalipawen trees.
I recognize the May nights by sheer scent
Of wetted dry damortis unpicked fruits
Hanging on tussles like curled embryos.

Lashed my pabawer among the saplings
Young as the streams that feed the lake with mud
In the ambush of my eager slip-knots tied on stakes
I gather the bloody red look of the bannatiran thrashing
With mercy on pulsating afternoons.
Strike the stream waters three times in superstition
With my fingers expectant of school lunch
After driving the fish-hook peg on soft loamy bluffs
The bait-frog angrily vacillating with the wavelets
To attract the mudfish from its sticky lair.

My back burns in seeding the moist bed
Or gathering the chicken dung decayed with care
To mix it with water in kerosene cans for the planting,
I smell the air of pruned tomato seedlings asking for rebirth
Mixed in threaded fumes of my father’s La Campana;
Floating sexily-belted rice seedlings on blue ditches
Lifting them on mini-cataracts that draw crystal breaths
Or conquering the flood of ooze beneath my feet;
Masters the bamboo harrow teething mud’s breast.

Away from these,
You call these bleeding the psyche, manong
Removal from these native placenta; I too
These are my condemned past in feasting
These, too, are my future failings and walls
Banna is in the mind unfolding like one gayubano bud
Only in my distant hibernatings.
When one picks life among sages of rocks
Often we keep life’s meat in a grain of seed somewhere.