THE FIRE, AROUND WHICH WE ALL GATHER

1.

We bring her tobacco when she calls shrill bird trill carried upon air as though her voice were a body’s warm rib cage we could wrap our arms around tight. We drop our weaving, we leave our kitchens. Elders once brought her tobacco rolled and bound with hemp; now we bring bulk carton Marlboros. Once, spirits fresh in glass jars; now Spanish brandy, limes, guava, and yams in baskets, salted fish in bundles. Now she is old but this firelight glows upon the face of a woman whose skin is sunned and taut; in her wide eyes we see sharp Lawin gaze, in her eyes we see sky. Her dancing wrist bones so delicate, as if fine fingers have known no field nor farmwork.

 

She has taken a blade to her own hair, once hung thick to her waistline, now falling in her eyes in jagged tresses, now exposing earlobes and neckline, her rough woven white blouse, its polished bone clasp undone, exposing one shoulder. She is young in the night’s firelight though we dare not call her maiden. Our mothers say she snares others’ husbands. Our grandmothers whisper her father a bird of prey. Our fathers lament she is the one they could not marry for she would not have them. She scoffed at offerings from the hunt, from the river, whose warm humid nights filled with serenade. Raising one index finger to her lips in a shhh, she confesses she has many times swooned to the verses of lovers under slivers of moon, ribbons of stars arranged into hunter and bow. Smoke curls from her lips, her eyes are closing, the diwata has arrived.

2.

Poet, yes. A conjurer of words, some have said, for I am the keeper of our words. I birth them and care for them, and when these words grow strong, a bridge. Just like that, a bridge. Those who come to listen to my stories, they fall into waking dream, hovering between the very earth upon which they stand, and the place where the spirits dwell.

 

Story, yes, for that is what poets make, story into song. We interpret what the birds say, what the spirits of the wind speak. They step into my dreams. They come to me in firelight, when I bathe in the river, and when I bed my lovers. They tell me things no human voice has spoken, secrets hidden in mountain caves, steel and blackened stone, the noise of machines. But the birds, yes, the birds, they tell me the sky.

 

And what of the sky, sighs the wind, for if not for me, you could not know her touch.

3.

And then she is the star maiden. And now she is the first woman, baring her breasts to feed a poisoned land. And he is the first man, father of black soil, bamboo blossom windstorm pestilence stone and confession. And she opens her body, the place from which all word grows. And he enters. And he enters. And he enters.

 

The whites of his eyes when he discovers she is a wolf, who is a woman, who is the prism in his throat. The immediacy. This wanting.

 

And from the wind’s whirls we would call her silken breath, she brings a feast of word. Tree branches bend, she pulls them to her. And then she is a window, a vessel, a fork in the road, a fragrance lifting from tangerine skin. The rustle of a single page, the stillness of ocean before a typhoon. And then she is the fire, around which we all gather. And ever is she lover and beloved.

 

The whites of his eyes when he discovers she is a shark, who is a woman, who is his gravity. The immediacy. This wanting.