Translation

We thought nothing of it, he says,

though some came so close to where we slept.

I try to see him as a boy,

back in the Philippines, waking

to the sound of machine guns.

His family would spend their morning

spreading a paste over the sores

of the house’s thick walls.

He tells how he touched

points where bullets entered,

his fingers, he says, disappeared into the holes,

as if inside there existed a space

where everything from this world could vanish.

Here we could place the memory of my sister,

his daughter, who died after a car wreck.

Wedge her into the smoky path

& cover her in sunlight.

The family next door is raking leaves in the yard.

A father scolds his children for jumping

into large piles he arranged into a crescent moon.

We cannot hear them from inside,

but I feel they are frightened as he grabs both of them

around the waist & spins.

I wait for the ending to my father’s story,

but he is too busy smiling, as if enjoying the silence

of bullets frozen there in his mind.

Source: Birthmark (Southern Illinois University Press, 2004)