1. Fruit Salad
Newly recovered from a fever, my wife
Is back in the kitchen. Nurturer,
Nourisher, stoker of the hearth fires
Of our stomach, she is assembling
The ingredients of a simple fare, a fruit salad.
Crisp papaya cubes, not quite ripe, pale green
Turning subtly orange and red at the edges.
Banana, creamy yellow, each round slice
Marked with a perfect star in the middle.
Diced ripe mango, nuggets, of the richest gold,
And macapuno, freshly scraped, in soft milky ribbons.
Then a handful of raisins, a sprinkling
Of nuts for contrast in taste and texture. All gently mixed, folded, chilled.
It never ceases to amaze me, every time,
This magical act of hers, how in her quick
Sure hand the commonplace turns into something
Special, a nourishment of startling shapes, startling colors.
She seems happy now, though a week ago she was not.
It is all a matter of delicate balance.
You take life in all its various weathers,
In equal measure, happy and sad,
The way you eat a delicious fruit salad:
In spoonful after grateful spoonful,
The green with the golden, the soft with the hard.#
2. The Sorrow of Distances
To Jamila
I rehearse the Cebuano words
For cities, mountains, oceans, continents—
what stand between us now,
the lonely distances that the heart,
nightly, when the nights go out,
must journey in its long weary way home.
I imagine what can no longer be—
you across this kitchen table,
intently picking seeds from your grapes,
a half-moon glowing beneath your banged hair. Suddenly my tuna sandwich turns soggy.
I clear the table. I blow my nose.
I turn the radio on. I let the hot water run.
How I miss you. There: in its terrible simplicity.
This love I hold for you—daughter, friend.
I tell myself: only a year more. A year.
And then the familiar whirlwind of your arms,
the bright leap of your laughter.
Will you still be there for me?
Or will you have grown beyond my reach?
Standing
in the doorway,
demure
as a lady,
solemn
as a caryatid
bearing
the burden
of a new world,
your wrists
weighed
Down
By the bracelets of the years?#
3. Short Time
Jaime An Lim
I am haunted by the sadness of men
hanging out at night
in all the parks and alleys of the world.
They wait and meander
weighing
measuring
the safer distance
between dread
and desire.
Every face a catalog of possibilities,
every look a whole vocabulary of need.
Tonight, you are the dream
who walks in my waking sleep,
who bears miraculously
the shape voice motion of remembered love.
How can I resist the reckless
Leap from the world
of furtive brushes
and tunnelling headlights
to this room, no less anonymous,
of thin walls, thinning mattresses
where we grapple and thrash
like beached sea creatures
breathing the dry unfamiliar air?
When you stand to go, I ease myself
into the hollow your body leaves.
I press the faint smell of you to my face
O Christ, were I loving you
drinking your blood, eating your flesh!
But the morning betrays nothing.
The chair in the corner stands mute,
the mirror repeats your absence.
When the curtains are flung back
to let the harsh light in,
the bed looms empty.
I am finally all I have.#
