poetry

Legazpi City: Sestina of the Stranger
by Marne Kilates

I come home to your streets in the thriving trade
Of daylight, and lose myself in your memory of merchants.
The haste with which you now move I more or less expect.
Exchange is ever brisk like the language we now speak:
Tumult of motors and the voices of strangers,
A proud vocabulary in which sense diminishes.

Sunsets I remember, you debts: Is this how day diminishes?
Is it what you’ve been teaching me all these years: the trade
I never learned before I left: the studied distance of strangers.
We bargain with the profit and the loss, like merchants.
We cannot account for days. As I speak
The name of each street, what is there to expect

But astonishment and grief? What is there to expect
In the new and the replaced, the renovated, the diminished,
The gone-to-seed? The men grow older as they speak
In that noodle restaurant where they ply the trade
Of their lost politics; in that row of banks that lure merchants,
Turning left to the slums. The young, like me, are strangers.

All the way north, past the train terminal, strangers
Pass the time in nightclubs and pubs. The hotel expects
Them before midnight: rundown and dim, shabby merchant
Of rest, looking over the sweep of dirty beach. Diminished
By the sunset, the hemmed-in, ramshackle quarter trades
In the loose change of neglect: words whores and stevedores speak.

Among them, forgotten in grime and shadow, speaks
The kneeling figure of a headless hero, unheeded stranger
From the past, ignored by eyes dulled in the confused trade
Of the present. Further down, facing the Pacific, the wharf expects
Storm and ship from other cities and islands, life diminished
Or augmented in the constant coming and going of merchants.

Here, under the Volcano, outside the usual ambit of merchants,
The sea laps and laughs among the knee-joints of the pier, speaks
To the Sunday angler or the man from the hovel, to diminish
Hungers, for time or the growing emptiness of old men and strangers.
Ships unload lard and liquor from their distended bellies, expect
Copra and hemp in return, in a routine forgotten by the world’s trade.

Here let us, strangers both, unexpecting to meet, speak
Undiminished in the smell of frying shellfish, amend profit and loss,
And trade under the the makeshift awnings our memories of merchants.

1986; rev. July 2, 2002

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