Three Poems: Water, Water, and Water

These past few months I was able to write poems with a water theme. The first one is about things people find at sea. The second one is about the lack of it. The third is about a certain insecurity. Enjoy!


Calatagan

The tide receded with the sun
and revealed the navel of the shore
where we found the scraps of dreams
our childhood had been looking for.

I took a liking to the waves
surrendering further to the pull
of a faint full moon in a late afternoon,
dragging the fishnets perilously
to deeper waters. Their laughter,
drowning but never painful, something
i as a child would have wallowed in -
alone in the ebb, unafraid of the taunts,
comprehending what the waves say to the sands
in a language only they can understand.

Isabel squirmed at the sea slugs
thrusting through the seaweeds.
We feigned not noticing her hands
cautiously fan out between her thighs.
Light piercing through clear water,
her reflection fragmented into puddles,
she quietly gathers the dead
starfishes where they have scattered.
Nobody but the sea can remind her
what she doesn't want to remember.

You finally saw the line of glimmer
glowing with seawater on the scallop skins
throwing you back at the time your fingers
fit the holes of bullet shells.
The shimmer that you wanted then
made itself ready for your hands
spanning wider, much bigger, more
voracious, grasping memories
like rainbows marooned in the sky
after the rain: there but never there.



Drought

The water turned itself to heat
leaving the land flaking to dust.
He wonders how the crops will grow
emerald and robust
when the brown color of burning
has crawled its way from the tips
of leaves down to the stem,
the demarcation of struggling
to survive has become smaller
and smaller as summer progresses.

Resolute he will never be
broken and seeking refuge
in an onomatopeic, scalding city
subjugated to a career
having the sunloved backs of his palms
parallel to the ground.
He prays for something biblical
to redirect a river's flow
and quench the acres of dried
desertifying land.

But the river itself is thirsty
having lost its being a river -
So he ponders displacing to somewhere
water is still water.
Then again, there's nowhere to go
when the heat, cloudless and unyielding,
burning slowly whatever it touches,
bearing the heavy belly of its air
over the earth, borderless as the wind,
smugly blows around his archipelago.




Pictures of Fishes

Here's what I snapped
discreetly from the pond:

a koi
tattooed from birth
with what looks like
a citrus orange
map of China
accidentally spilt
on its silver skin.

Here's what you caught
with a white flash:

the name
of a flowerhorn
painted as if
with horsehair brush
permanently on its blood
-red scales.

You tell me your desire
to compare skies
and horizons in different
parts of the world;

I tell you my disillusions
of having people
not know my name.

Let's trade.