Beginnings by Michael Brownstein

BEGINNINGS

 

You know everything has its own inherent qualities. Mine are to be deep and hard to cross.

                                    —King of the Ocean to King Rama in Phi Kah Phi Lam

 

FIRST

 

I have the strangest dreamslide.

Images slip like smiles through landscapes

of fence and caressed brush.

I never imagined a line of hose could stretch so far

or that I could run as fast as the spray of water.

 

Everywhere is a story sky

and the Tree of Life misplaced in the Garden of Eve

comes to seed as stock root reinventing itself after the picking,

comes to fruit like the head of Bathala after the burying.

 

Look to the herb bunched with yellowed fingers.

Study the face of the coconut.

Find the slits in the bamboo.

Seek out the crevices in rock and cave.

 

And the tears of the lonely giant

drip into wings, feather into birds,

fly to the bamboo in the first valley

attracted to each other, attracted to quiet song.

They have not yet found voice to sing,

but they are hungry for it, finding softness

in the hardest of bamboo.

Malakes and Maganda

slide to wholeness.

As a gift to freedom, the first People

give to the birds the first songs. So it is and

so it is for later and later.

 

Everything has order,

the luck of Kannon and the Elephant God,

the blue mist of the Weaver Maid.

Bathala looks like us.

 

SECOND

 

this crossing of stars

a slicing of moon

the one friend of Bathala

someone else I will never meet.

 

THIRD

 

I’m thinking we’re thinking we’re someone else.