Poetry from The Literary Review

Portrait of a Cordillera Elder

JOHN LABELLA

perhaps of a room
we deduce from the way shadows
crowd his ears and spill
on his shoulders in fine diagonals

like a blanket
the boy wraps itself with,
sheltered for once
from the monsoon rain at dusk,
the baked earth turning
into mud.

Angled toward the window,
judging from the way
his eyes seem to span distance
in a downward sweep.

We are made to think
of valleys, the tug of waiting
for someone to ascend
the slope, slipping then rising,
a son's return.

Yet what remains of stones
or birds shaped by sight,
the light pressure of a mouth
the sun of years on skin?

What does it mean for us,
to marvel at how flesh
and identity can be traced
to the barest marks of
shade and line?

How the whiteness
gleams within and around
the borders of the face,
and signifies the uncontainable
light

Bantayan

JOHN LABELLA

Three yards away
A child waves her yellow
shirt before plunging
into the tide that, rising
and falling, bounds
at all times this pause.

Bantayan: a place to
watch from, for observing
our habitat, the changes,
summoning vigilance
when mean becomes
what we choose.

A ship's black hull
About four miles offshore
is a mere dot, a slow
intrusion on this level blue.
even this we must note
along with the rest.

All that the senses hold
without urgency,
that the still self cradles
within, whether loss
wavers in the distance
or draws near.

Seeing

JOHN LABELLA

in an earthly garden
calmed only by the dark.
And the flesh called iris,
called retina, the flesh
of every name

flashing spectrums
to which we are blind,
we deem incapable
of truth.

The brute extending
self, however unaware
of his own groping
through the filaments
and soft lenses,
is enviable

when he orders his
perceptions with a sigh
and does not speak,
and remains who he is
in seeing.

An instance
where there is nothing
more, as when water
drips from a white sill
seen from a lawn.

Noon flare and withered
leaf, one ripening in
the long held moment
of the errant eye.

Scales of Light

JOHN LABELLA

The grown-ups wanted to
see the place where within
two years, they said,
a tourist's haven would
rise with coconuts.

I was already dry, spent
from thrashing in a previous
beach, all puffed up,
scratching the sand that dug
into my scalp,

and the tide had begun
to ebb already,
though the unstirred air
and titled light
rendered the shallows
unfathomable.

But I drifted away
from the kind of talk
I would soon have to learn,
and spread my shirt on
a rock, standing
in a sea that reached only

halfway up my calves,
then lay down, pushing off
to float . . . Sea grass
tickling my back, the sense
of being dissolved

checked briefly by skin,
feeling how it wrapped me,
by body aligned
to the horizon, caught
between scales of light.