Factory of Souls

It takes just two people to bring the world

to ruin. So goes the history of love.

At the end of the day we tally the casualties

of war, victory for the one who gets wounded

the least. You say it’s time for a change

but I don’t know to what end, change being

just the skin of some incandescent creature

whose grotesque beauty is what we adore,

whom some people call love, whom we

venerate because it consumes us, slim pickings

for its huge soul. My people say, don’t look

or you’ll go blind. You say the end was always

just around the bend. I say all we have

is unconditional surrender to the future.

So unreliable is the past that I feel compelled

to leave unmourned the blind, relentless loves

that may have scorched into our hearts

the way the saints accepted stigmata. My people say,

look back or lose your way. Or, walk backwards,

if you can. So I found myself on a bus to New York City

to lose myself completely. Past Hunters Point

we hit the factory of souls—a thousand tombstones

from which a silk-like canopy of smoke rose to meet

God knows what—a spacious emptiness, the end.

I’ve heard the world’s never going to end.

I’ve heard it will go on and on, and we will be

as nebulous as Nebuchadnezzar, our live

not worth a footnote, our grandest schemes

no more than feeble whispers, all memory

shifting like the continental plates. In the future,

all science will finally come around; genetic

engineering, I’ve been told, will be all the rage,

and we will be a super race in a world

infallibly perfected, where trains run on time,

love never dies, and hope can be purchased

by the pound. It’s called immortalization

of the cell lines. We will choose what will survive.

Our destiny made lucid, we will find the world

contemplating itself, like the young Narcissus,

one hand about to touch the pool, his body

lurched towards that marvelous reflection.

I suppose we’ve always felt compelled

to desensitize our failures. My people say,

to go unnoticed, you play dead. I myself

may have chosen to forget a face, a name,

some cruel word uttered carelessly, but not,

after all the harm is done, intending any pain.

And many others may have chosen to forget me.

It works both ways. My people say, nasa huli

ang pagsisi: regret is the final emotion.

It’s what you see when you look back.

It’s what’s no longer there.

Source: Zero Gravity (Alice James Books, 1999)