A Different Ballgame

Yesterday I woke up feeling giddy at the idea of hearing a good band play live later that night and finally fulfilling my promise to take a friend to Conspiracy. But last night just spun out of my supposed game plan.

Nek and I arrived to a garish streamer mocking at us: Jimmy Bondoc. !!!!!!@#!$%^&*()!!!!!!!! We stayed though, thinking we could just tune him out anyway. And I’m really glad we did because Vim Nadera introduced us to this really interesting Finnish-Filipino guy Jukka (pronounced as Yoo-kah), who oriented us about the Moonrise filmfest and their environmental org. Dumaguete people also came in unexpectedly, and the evening turned out as a mini-reunion of sorts for us as well.

Times like these remind me of the first time I seriously played a softball game. On the home plate with the bat gripped tight I pictured a fly ball going off somewhere behind the shortstop, landing a few feet short of the fielder’s easy reach. I knew my battle tactics by heart—until I hit a ground ball and the scene changed into something I didn’t expect. Just imagine the panic over that which you suddenly lose control over, and then later realizing that the game wouldn’t stop to wait for you. Time to get a move on.

***

Poem Of Night

1
I move my hand over
slopes, falls, lumps of sight,
Lashes barely able to be touched,
Lips that give way so easily
it's a shock to feel underneath them

The bones smile.

Muffled a little, barely cloaked,
Zygoma, maxillary, turbinate.

2
I put my hand
On the side of your face,
You lean your head a little
Into my hand--and so,
I know you're a dormouse
Taken up in winter sleep,
A lonely, stunned weight.

3
A cheekbone,
A curved piece of brow,
A pale eyelid
Float in the dark,
And now I make out
An eye, dark,
Wormed with far-off, unaccountable lights.

4
Hardly touching, I hold
What I can only think of
As some deepest of memories in my arms,
Not mine, but as if the life in me
Were slowly remembering what it is.

You lie here now in your physicalness,
This beautiful degree of reality.

5
And now the day, raft that breaks up, comes on.

I think of a few bones
Floating on a river at night,
The starlight blowing in a place on the water,
The river leaning like a wave towards the emptiness.

(Galway Kinnell)