What We Can See of the Sky

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.

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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.