Rainer Maria Rilke

i. Death: the night following

She does not surrender. She has not forgotten
what her father once said: when there are fireflies, spirits roam,
before the dead's remains are cushioned by dirt, leaves, petals,
before they are watered by wails and crosses.
Spirits stand still, even the Book says forty days.
They sit on twigs, between.

Light in the shape of fins swims in the night, and waits
for the moment she catches its flicker, its body,
scales of blue fire and flesh.
But she waits for spirits, a chance to see them when the wind
is caught between leaves. Papa, she calls. Come back.
In any form: a glimmer, a vision, the smell of air and cigars,
of his morning skin.

Papa, sit with me. Tell me the story of the moon.

Trees add shadow, clouds darkness. Everything is heavy here.
Irreversible. Except this flame that continues to burn wings,
so delicately waxes firefly after firefly,
then molds them into a sculpture of ashen parts.

ii. Life: the day preceding

The candlewax ripples like a pond on a drizzle, then it blurs, hardens. If tears can do the same, the next time they come will be worth waiting for. Nobody here waits anymore (what you always said), not even trees. Water doesn't come so often, and never in its best form, rain. When the bullets kissed your pores, you wondered about that moment: the last jump of blood out of your skin, the pinch of breath. You lay there, talked to trees until this woman found you. She brought with her the smell of sulphur. Always that smell when someone is anointed and confessed. You whisper to her and for once never ask the name of a woman you have just met. You smell like a candle? Light opens in the sky. There is a house of spirits above us. Candles on stairs, on marble treads. She places your head on her middle. Is that a pillow? A child, she responds, on her ninth month. Inside all of us, there has always been a child. Yours has been killed many times. Even she can tell by the way she looks at you. But she doesn't ask who you are-a rebel, a convict, a lover? This is the pinnacle of your ninth life: your ears on her mound where life kicks within, then the final thoughts-a name, a name for a child who will one day bring rain.

In the late 18th century, Spain, in an effort to build the Philippine economy, transformed rice fields into sugarcane plantations.

In 1796, Nathaniel Bowditch, an American, brought back 400 tons of sugar to the U.S., marking the first significant contact between the U.S and the Philippines.

In the 1990s, the Philippines, a traditionally rice-growing land, imports rice from its neighboring countries.

1/Circa 1796

Every day, I hear the chopping of canes, these tall, thin growth of thorny leaves we have never seen before. The wind sounds different here. The water in the ground doesn't speak. These canes are always drinking water. I am astounded by how quickly rice fields are replaced by these walls that never sway. Rice stalks always bow with the wind at the sight of women singing. You can't see the next person beside you; you can only hear his axe and the drip of his sweat. I am always chewing canes, no wonder ants crawl on my legs, smelling the sugar in my blood. The harvest of canes showers like arrows around us. In a few weeks, there will be another parade of canes on our shoulders, weighing down the many years we have lived here, a trail of slow-walking shadows, footprints deepening each hour, toward ships waiting at the shore. Centuries are mapped on our backs, lines perhaps of the many names we have handed down the years: my father died here, his brothers died here, all fallen, backs bent, and blood, as sweet as what buried them. Sugar sweetens with each body that falls. Everybody falls. Where this sugar will go, we will never know. We don't eat sugar here; rice doesn't taste the same with sugar. Sugar sweetens with every rice field that is burned.

2/Circa 1996

Amid noise of cement trucks,
soil is bulldozed into a new road.
The sugarcanes have dried,
like me, thinning even.
I was once the stalk you chewed,
pulp fed to thirst, after a long day,
the hours in my long hair,
the softness between rough teeth.

Watch these footprints dry up in mud;
listen to them crack, split-
even my own do as I walk away.
The sun is with me again,
and the child
whose thirst is like yours.
But in spite of open eyes, I dream
about you again:

back bent in the field, stabbing skin of canes,
awaiting the approach of my feet:
the music of dry bark, a baby on my back,
the scent of a basket of rice and fish.
The baby was wailing then like he does now.
He has always been thirsty,
always yelling my name, his first word,
your last-

A truckload of canes drove beside you.
The trucker didn't look in the mirror,
at my open mouth,
the basket's tumble in the air.
He would never know
I still think about it now, seeing again
and again-sugarcanes sliding over,
burying you with leaves.

WHITE FLOWERS

Always, the beginning is in the wetting
of the thread at its tip.
It won't take long-and she knows-
to make necklaces of white flowers.
A wired bulb swings above her,
splashing shadows of arms, hair
and flowers in buckets.

She sits at the mirror and revels
in another day of yelling:
the stretching of words for flowers
hanging around her neck,wrists,
the wide leaps amid loud honking buses
and mouths, and the narrow ones over puddles,
the balance of an umbrella if it rains
while wiping her forehead with her hand,
the quick count of change
between the drivers' shouts and whistles.

The rain of hours drifts through her dress.
She breathes in mounds of scent beside her.
The reed-mat ceiling slowly drips.
She counts the drips as she exhales,
tongues her lips to begin.