W H AT W E C A N S E E O F T H E S K Y a zine
words
Gian Lao
design
Toni Potenciano
photos
Petra Gana
table of contents
The Found Hotel of Hong Kong 鵜 Cormorants Hey, Oath I dreamt that no one died Forgetfulness Forgetfulness (B-side) Camouflage What We Can See Of The Sky
THE FOUND HOTEL OF HONG KONG After Jack Gilbert and Tony Hoagland
On the study table I think about which dead poet to plagiarize next. I have 22 minutes to check out. Now isn’t that an allegory for the life I have versus the life I always wanted? My mind is both on the ferry to the office and here, looking out the window. Distance fucks with us. God letting everything happen at the same time fucks with us. But I fuck with that. There’s a reason why I can only write from distance. Though that’s a lie. I can only write from absence. If there’s one thing I’ve taught my writing to do, it is to keep me close to all things. Memory too. Sometimes I feel like I am not a human being, just a bag of atoms. We are all bags, maybe. Neutrons pulled into whatever comes into orbit. I am not afraid of dying. I am afraid of dying young
or old or indebted. But I am young and old and indebted to a cosmos that parachuted me into a gated enclave in Manila. No payment will ever be enough. People I could be friends with are dying every day. I will never know which stars in the universe imploded first. Maybe enough is not enough. Maybe enough is okay. Absence only becomes distance once it is distant enough.
éľœ
There are cormorants in the dark now splashing their beaks into the water.
There are boats in a river in Gifu in the pitch black of 9 p.m.,
bodies on the concrete banks watching work get done. Not every moment
of silence can mean something. Not every noise is meaningless.
Not every distance is a bird on a tree behind the only church in the city,
a bird you know not by species, but by song. Not everyone asks what it sings of
but we do, and I am only thinking of the three kinds of tea in our house,
the lone glow on the far mountain and the politics of midnight in this city.
It is raining and the sky is full of invisible clouds, rain
the only proof of what covers the stars. I used to be an entire sea
away. But now I am proximate like the Venetian blinds, the steaming
kettle. I thought of this body only as a heart with a pickaxe,
pickaxing its way into a greater, warmer center. A heart that discovered
maybe something, but only kept quiet, built a house in the wilderness.
What happens if it discovers only a silence there too?
What happens if my body is but a ribcage? What happens if I was looking all along
not at the ocean, but at the farthest versions of you?
CORMORANTS
中目黒 , 2018
OATH
St. Francis of Assisi lived in the birdcage of the club in Shibuya and the wind sang an enka song into the streets. The people’s faces were almost passwords to get home. The buildings too. The set of stairs. The highway. The bike rack that seems to be the axis as the sun rotates into morning. My friend saw David Beckham dancing. I don’t get it. Does that make him vulnerable? Or does that mean immortality for all of us? What does morning look like from the sun? And what does it matter? David Beckham was there wholesome and unbothered. Tattooed saint, animal, bird without eyes. The glass door almost letting out a song of praise. The city almost an autograph. Ourselves on the brink of scattering into morning.
I DREAMT THAT NO ONE DIED—
that souls only play Trip to Jerusalem, settle in distant cities, resemble who they used to be with zero chance of chancing upon a loved one in a grocery. Yet somehow I was in an airport bar with my grandfather, a Serb with a Chinese soul and anchors and masts tattooed and camouflaged under the shrubbery of his forearm. My phone was translating everything, even the tattoos. Though in that universe my screen only reflected a brutal vocabulary. Beer. Grenades. Cymbals. Severed ears. Stillness under the cover of café windows. Sometimes people are not trying to say anything. I don’t know where I learned that. I don’t remember the last piece of advice he gave me and which ones came during a sleepless period. Nevertheless, his Serbian incarnation says Јутро је паметније од вечери. There can’t be too many ellipses splattered in the sky. My drawers are overflowing with receipts where I’ve written all his words. We are always talking, he says. Though I am always looking for proof: the scent of an old beer, a certain timbre of laughter, a shape of sky I will know only when the time comes.
FORGETFULNESS (B-SIDE) I believe in God when the parishioners are singing outside my window. Only the sun is the time limit. We look for cosmic equivalences for a star’s death. In our mind God brings an old dog to the vet’s table and tries not to look. Don’t you think that doctors are God’s veterinarians?
Is the Earth still? Is the sun revolving around our bodies and is God looking now? How we turn each other into Ptolemy. How the yarn ball of history unravels under the indifferent daylight. How you tell me to wait. How I wait.
How I watch under the crack of the door, waiting for shadow. Meanwhile, all the books in the bookshelves of the world of this room become only about Ra and Amaterasu and those afternoons I couldn’t fall asleep. Does the gravity at your center constantly pull you into yourself or does it keep you from dissolving into a billion photons? How could yellow be only a color? Are we all metaphorical when we fall far enough into each other? If you could give gravity a scent, what would you give it? If you say dahlias then I will say you smell of dahlias. You can smell like whatever you want. There was someone singing outside. There was someone who reminded us that no one was watching. And then there was light.
CAMOUFLAGE
Black dog on black sand and the glow of lights outside the bars emerging like stars. We could have been anyone. Maybe even forget what we no longer have to hide from each other. Enoshima floating like a symbol in the distance. The crows finding home in the night time. They remind me of the portions of myself inhabiting the sky above Buddha. Only you can understand that, but I can’t be the only one who has felt, at times, like an entire sky. Some days. Some days you get to name a city before it sinks into evening. We could be on the train back and motionless. The planet the one in motion. Not us. Everything is older and tired of our relentless belonging. Outside, there is only November. You can almost hear the world move.
WHAT WE C A N S E E OF THE SK Y
WHAT WE C A N S E E OF THE SK Y
Those might be constellations
in the folds of my boss’s fist
Or an arrangement of fingers,
a symbol— by the way
is a fist a new shape or an old one?
Does it resist or oppress or betray
only a longing
for the simplicity of duels?
Either way I suspect I might still be human
even in a room without windows. All my life I’ve
watched the time pass without knowing I was watching. I’ve learned to look at a room and say: If only
there were a sparrow,
a ray of sunlight,
a few more avatars
of the impossible.
My soul meanders
Or so it says
Either way, I’ve done my due
diligence.
The motion of the gulls
in what we can see of the sky,
the drift of clouds
the grace of the woman who looks at me and
blinks clocks announcing our passage, entering the radio frequencies that codify
what we can hear of the music.
My prayers are only psalms.
I’d like to know
God
the universe
is too large
to contain in a poem.
I’d like to listen to the music
of cab drivers who tell me God Bless
even if I don’t believe in God.
Even if I want to.
I’d like only an afternoon to sit across
woman sipping tea, blinking
making the time pass.
special thanks to
Pepito Go-Oco, for his Japanese translation of Cormorants; Miho Ito, for her beautiful calligraphy; And A Half, for nurturing individual creative work; Benjamin Abesamis, for his support and advice.