TWO POEMS
overview effect
for E.
Our feet have touched the soil of the moon, and what grandeur!
Like rational angels, our toes anoint
the madness of impossibility with our self-assuredness,
claiming even lifelessness as our own.
Terrible crushing vacuum that is everywhere all around us, always:
Ours.
We gobble up this Universal Maw, canopy of emptiness
encrusted with elsewhere lights wrestled into serving our manifest destinies,
our godhood.
And yet we only need turn.
We only need look back through impossible stone windows,
withstanding the bearing down of the insatiable hunger
of Nothingness, and see:
not the Maw,
nor what godhood,
but the
Miracle of Us:
floating against a curtain of unknowns
slowly unfurling by sifting through
what we know of each other, making music or poetry or love;
seeing the streets of home dwindle through a fogged up
plane window, tracing heart over breath;
seeing the same streets some years later, applause ringing through the cabin;
retracing memories with each turn of a photo album,
the shapes our fingers make on our backs,
our histories.
It is the miracle of gazing unfocused through our bedroom window,
warm light landing on my face,
lying there, until turning to look at your face,
a miracle, pleasant Sunday light a gauze,
your face a planet full of life.
Mirror of Chitin (May 31)
A trail of ants marks the boundary of my crossing
and one of them regards me with its feelers,
to which I respond by regarding it with mine:
Do you move in faster time
see me, an unmoving titan,
a sudden eclipsing of your day-to-day,
this week's groceries held in your jaw,
jostling against your enterprising neighbors
thinking this cool shade is just what the doctor ordered
and I can't wait to shed this skin, hang it on our coat rack
and tell honey I'm home;
Do you hear our breathing
made ragged by what he said is a moderate trail,
slight pulses on your tiny feet
or is it more like
primordial rumblings of deep-seated promises like
the ones he made in December (it's November now)
felt through accretions of millennia of dust and of stuff
baggage of bygone eras made compact by
trudgings of a thousand thousand feet--
like valentine's day cards getting buried
forgotten in desk drawers older than us;
Do you share my marvel
at the redness of these looming whorls of rock
painted by an unmoving titan of my own,
or at their stillness even as they rise and crash
like Moses' wall of sea water
cloven by some god's power;
Do you think
these stones move like waves
for one who regards me as I regard you
moving quicksilver against these abiding rocks;
Do you share my fear
as we traverse these stones
spidering terrain with our delicate limbs
that a wicked god would sunder its hold on these crags
altering eternity in no time at all
alchemizing their material state
boulder to froth
breaking apart solidity like
a baker cracking an egg
and us whipped up like sauce?
Kevin is a queer Filipinx immigrant writing in Las Vegas. He teaches at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, where he graduated with an MA in English Literature.