by Eric Gamalinda

Rain in New Jersey devouring the landscape
like those mythic dragons of another time,
another country. The train window frames it

like ink scrolls of brooding masters,
and now the shingle-roofed towns unroll
one after the other, panoramas

of domestic assurances, warm rooms,
nights with beer and TV. I’m only looking in,
and fictive homes are turning on their lamps,

and I remember mother taking me on the train
out of Manila–I was four or five, and we sat
at the station and she said you could hear it coming,

first the thunder and then the charged heat
and full stop to stillness. We were running away
but never too far nor too long, because each time

there was nowhere far enough to go.
Her face was purple with bruises, which she hid
with paste the color of early sky. In a day or two

father would be weeping in her arms,
then we’d be home watching TV. Here you feel
the pull of perpetual motion, the blunt gunmetal

of the tracks and the empty stations, the fierce
rush towards and away from absence.
In Eliseo Subiela’s Hombre Mirando al Sudeste

an alien has chosen to come to an asylum
to study the earth, and wonders why so much beauty
leaves us emptier, more solitary. And when he finds

no answers, he dies like humans do,
numb with morphine, unable to dissect
the filaments of love. Mother and I always came back

on the same train: the same fake leather seats,
the smell of condiments and rotten produce,
the landscape unreeling backwards. Thirty years later

I am still watching tracks, I try not to look back
too much, I believe beauty is a hint of storm
but it could be anything, the way the alien found it

everywhere, in Beethoven or a frozen brain–
dawn, the perfect ink of it, the nervous arrival
of familiars, and the stillness recurring without fail.

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