Tula. Chris Santiago

      its ancestor under his arm

      in a bolt of jute & the boxcar dark. He was young

      & bound for the provinces, fleeing

      with his bride the rifled

      capital, the Arisaka Type 99, its stock

      chrysanthemum-stamped, the blade

      jabbed half-jokingly into my grandmother’s

      stomach: swollen the private thought

      not with limbs but a stash.

      Dowry; doubloons; maybe

      even meat. In the clatter & sway

      the hen held its tongue, producing

      eggs but no epiphanies

      although the flesh of its forebears had delighted

      the palates of missionaries, good-

      intentioned Baptists in the wake of cholera

      & reconcentration: nation builders; tenderfoots;

      virgins still wet with honeysuckle & whitewash.

      Who brought among other things home

      economics, so that fifty years later my mother

      would have to corner

      & seize it. Wring its wattled links.

      Pluck it & gut it & waste

      nothing.

       Tula

      An immigrant’s son

      I have ears like the blind.

      Music comes easily;

      night frightens me.

      Home late from the hospital, she comes to my door—

      I fake sleep.

      She sings a soothing song

      in the language I never learned:

      prayers against rain.

      Catalog of mythic birds.

      As many names for music

      as English has for theft.

      Using them I invent

      a country with only two citizens.

      The word I choose for mother

      sounds like the one for dream.

       Notation

      Her singing—sight-reading—while we

      were supposed to be sleeping.

      Dad downtown in a tower

      & thrum of the graveyard shift.

      Her piano: even pianissimo

      throbbed the snow-muffled rambler.

      Hymns that taught what the word is: a spell

      for collapsing distances. And folk songs,

      her forte, a rep rehearsed for classmates

      who sometimes passed through:

      they’d belt them out together,

      flower prints crowding the upright.

      Afterward cackling in her language:

      uncrackable, although I thought I caught

      the upshot: why here, in this white cold

      & quiet? As if winter could cure a childhood

      of cholera & typhoons. Her hand:

      she transcribed my favorite melodies

      as capitals on scrap paper. I hadn’t learned

      notation, but the keys I could solve, a code

      checked against the ear. My brother too

      & the cousins who came for holidays,

      some of them born in Manila:

      I asked them all to string

      songs into letters, caravans

      braving the whiteout. Everyone played;

      some even understood Tagalog.

      Later not one of us could speak.

       Tula

      Music comes easily:

      on notepads I puzzle out

      birds’ microtonal scales, the tala

      in which the song thrush improvises: I untangle

      the incomplete anagrams of the 11

      Umbric urn rills.

      My whistles are so accurate the birds

      love me: they come to die in the shallow water

      of my e, and e, and e.

       Tula

      One night I am my grandfather.

      It’s summer; no wind.

      My daughter has found

      work & love in another world.

      The pictures of her son look

      almost white.

      Her political brother’s in prison. The youngest

      floats

      facedown in a river.

      It’s a season of abduction.

      God is under house arrest.

      Doors hang open.

      The day before, I saw a man so heavy with blood

      his soul couldn’t rise out of his body.

      I should send word I’m dying but

      no one can move, not even

      to wipe the sweat from their eyes.

      Noon, not a sound: even the songbirds

      are under martial law.

       Counting in Tagalog

       isa

      you say

      each sound back to me

      gliding up under ash & sycamore

       dalawa

      a game echolalia

      I’m trying to make up

      for lost time

      [not time exactly but music]

      [not your loss but mine]