Utang Na Loob

It is the last day of the year and I am resolved

to write you the poem I owe you, the one we said

we’d write for the other the last time we met

well before The Before Times in the town

where they filmed Murder, She Wrote.

We walked through succulent gardens, heath, heather,

rhododendron, and dahlia, all prospering in July heat,

to reach a room carved into the side of a cliff.

Inside: a gray whale-hip replica, a window overlooking

an ocean crevasse, and a scrappy display of various lichen,

a catalog of their names barely readable beneath cloudy glass.

Poets, we began to read them aloud—blistered navel, firedot,

giant shield, reindeer, witch’s hair—such delight in taxonomy!

For years since we’ve taken turns remembering—

ah, I still owe you that lichen poem!  Doesn’t that prompt feel

so long ago? Finding delight, writing poems—

lately as hard as the consensus of what we all owe one another.

Last week, I hosted a second year of Christmas Zoom:

my cousin’s kid quarantined in a separate square,

while my other cousin said everyone should just try

to get it and spread it so we can all get back to normal

to which my cousin whose son had been alone

in the basement for ten days waved his two middle fingers

at the camera and disappeared from the frame

and I laughed because of all the wine I drank

to be on that call and said, Merry Christmas, everyone!

Every day I think of Gayia and Ged, their Zoom memorials

coordinated across time in Manila, Nashville, LA, and Honolulu,

how my ates would be absolutely alive had they the medicine

that half the people in this country refuse, how six million

people across the world are dead and then I remember I owe you

a poem about lichens. They seem like single organisms but really

are two: a fungus, an alga—layered and inseparable.

Whether their relationship is mutualistic or parasitic, scientists

disagree. Whatever side you’re on, it’s true that lichens absorb

everything in their environment into their structure.

You are where you are. The last time I saw you, I met your sons.

We walked along the rocky shore that met the ocean

and regarded with care all the life we saw, your sons naming

mussel, limpet, anemone, starfish, barnacle—all crammed

in their cold water, all waiting for the tide to come in.