Double Vision

A friend once brought me a poetry anthology from a Filipino poet after she had been to the Philippines. She said she almost kept it for herself. I'm glad she gave it up.

Double Vision
by Carlomar Arcangel Daoana

I admire the mind's various
say on things:
the night is washed
by rain and angels,
stars grind in their ordeal
of fractured light, landscapes swing
with the song of cicadas.

How the mind goes after them--
architectures of air,
gossamer wings, ghosts
made out of pure ideas--
chasing them.

But I prefer the physical
fact of this world,
the heft and hardness of it,
the corrugated surfaces,
the upturned earth.

That's why when I held
my lover's palm to my face,
I thought of the network
of veins circulating blood
to this area, the wrist
like a small beating heart,
all tending their emergencies
in only to prove
the undeniability
of my presence.

Such is the unconditional
tenderness, the body
trained to inhabit completely--
sometimes out of love,
sometimes out of cruelty--
the given moment because,
unlike the mind,
it can never regenerate itself,
can never look back.