THE GALLEONS 1 Her story is a part of something larger, it is a part of history. No, her story is an illumination of history, a matchstick lit in the black seam of time. Or, no, her story is separate from the whole, as distinct as each person is distinct from the stream of people that led to the one and leads past the one. Or, her story is surrounded by history, the ambient spaciousness of which she is the momentary foreground. Maybe history is a net through which just about everything passes, and the pieces of her story are particles caught in the interstices. Or, her story is a contradiction, something ordinary that has no part in history at all, if history is about what is included, what is made important. History is the galleon in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, in the middle of the sixteenth century, swaying like a drunk who will take six months to finally reach his house. She is on another ship, centuries later, on a journey eastward that will take weeks across the same ocean. The war is over, though her husband is still in his officer's uniform, small but confident among the tall white officers. Her hair is marcelled like a movie star's waves, though she has been too sick with the water's motion to know that anyone sees her. Her daughter is two, the blur of need at the center of each day's incessant rocking. Here is a ship, an ocean. Here is a figure, her story a few words in the blue void. *** THE GALLEONS 5 We didn't want to be noticed, so we put charcoal on our faces. I listen to the hours of tape, of the two of us at the dining table. All the girls, looking like dirt. / My father was always drinking Questions about the town, her parents, the names of people or with women, my mother had to take care of the business. / that only she could now remember. The images, I imagined, My sister broke her back when she was a child, she grew up scrolling in her mind, and translated into the answers she gave. into a hunchback. She died very young. / They set up a dance Sometimes pausing, not because she couldn't recall, but didn't at the municipal tennis courts to celebrate the end of the war, want to recall badly, the pause a kind of gap between what she and he was there, in his US uniform. / He always insisted that knew and what the words could do. The two things a voice we sit at the front, but when I was by myself on the bus I sat can say when it is saying one thing, the things that suddenly somewhere in the middle. I didn't want trouble. / I was around return when you are speaking, like pockets of color coming to fifty-five when I had my first real job, working as the security life in your mind: I listen to her with my skin and my eyes, at Macy's. / I always liked to read. I wanted to go to college my ears. I had had the notion that asking her about her life like my sisters, but I got married. / You know that wedding might add something to what I thought of as my art, as though dress in the picture, we had to borrow it from our neighbor. / her past and her love could be vectors of use. But I started to I liked Japan when he was stationed there. It was so clean. realize that what I actually needed to know, I would have Then Norfolk. Richmond. / I was so sick on the ship, I can't to conjure for myself, because what we know most deeply remember much. Your mama just kept running all around. we guard best, even as she spoke, laughed, passed the glow It was a navy ship. / My mother's name is Canuta Sacay and of each story to me, like a document I could have in hand my father's name is Enrique Omega. My grandparents were but could not understand. I put the tape away, felt for years farmers outside Ormoc. / I was born in Ormoc, December 8, that it was enough, the responsibility done. Our conversation 1924 or 25. / This was the apartment we lived in in Maryland. stopped when my aunt came to take her out for some errands. That's Junior there in the picture. And there's your mama. Chatter, chairs moved around, then noises that are just noises. *** UDFJ-39546284 In bunraku , when you are watching bunraku , there is that sweet moment in your mind when you stop noticing the three puppeteers hovering around each puppet like earnest ghosts and begin to follow the story being told by the puppets. The chanter sitting off to the side voices the love, connivance, outrage, and eventual reconciliation at the heart of each play, though often what reconciliation actually meant was everyone banished, broken, or dead. The seeing and non-seeing that make humans humans: I'm thinking now of the placid English estates where the servants had to face the wall whenever anyone of importance was near, where workers had to cut the lawns with scissors in candlelight at night, to save the master the trouble of seeing and hearing all that effort. What the mind does with this kind of information is probably the knot within the post- in what we call post-modernism , knowing all we know now about the cruelty that made modernism modernism. In the Philippines, growing up among servants, I loved the servants the same way I loved my parents, with helplessness and tyranny. Walking in the exhibit of the black artist's paintings of young black men in brocaded tableaus, I am absorbed by their beauty as much as I am by finding out that the intricate backgrounds were outsourced to painters in Beijing, taking part in the functional ambiguity between one kind of labor and another. I guess all this matters only as much as you want it to matter, the mind making its focal adjustments between foreground and context, present and past, as well as it can. For example, this morning my sister sent me a photograph of my grandmother's hands. Sitting outside in her wheelchair, taking in the gold sunshine, my grandmother had her hands folded in her lap, and I looked at them until I had to stop. This is foreground. For context, today I learned that the farthest galaxy we know of, located by scientists in 2011, is 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 miles away. It goes by the name of UDFj-39546284, for reasons that I haven't yet looked up. In the photograph you can see online, the galaxy looks like the dusty stuff in the corner of a windowpane, something you could look at sometimes, something that is nothing, and has nothing to do with what you know about distance and time. *** THE BLINK REFLEX I have this notion that if you live long enough, there are three or four great stories that you will have in your life. A story of a journey or a transformation. A story of love, which will likely mean the loss of love, a story of loss. And a story of spiritual illumination, which, for many, will probably be the moment of death itself, the story untellable, its beginning and middle and end collapsing with its teller into a disappearing conclusion. I have believed long enough in my notion to know that it is a romantic notion, that it erodes each time I realize that the shard and not the whole comprises a life, the image and not the narrative. Otherwise, there's no reason why all I remember of the airplane I took as a child from one country to another is the moist towelette packet we were given with our meal, the wonder and absurdity of it. Or that, in love, high in a tree in the dark, and high, he and I sat in the rain-damp branches and ate 7-11 donuts. Or this, this piece of a story that isn't even mine, that isn't even a story but a glance of an experience, of the friend who held the stray dog after it was struck by a car. Not knowing whether the dog was dead, my friend called a friend who worked for a vet. Poke the dog in the eye, this friend said. Because if the animal no longer has a blink reflex, it probably means the animal is dead. Decades after college, when you could do such a thing, I typed his name into a search engine to find out what became of the 18-year-old boy from the tree. Like dozens of old keys in a drawer, so many of the wrong people with the right name. The child dead from leukemia, with a school gym named for him. The wrestler who had a perfectly square jaw, like a cartoon police detective in a fedora. When I arrived at a page that was certainly about him, I no longer knew the face but I recognized the life that he had had. He had transferred to another college, gone to film school, and become a producer of TV documentaries. A film about fishermen, the harsh fishing season in Alaska. A film about Abraham Lincoln and a film about the last days of Adolf Hitler. A film about the Sherpas who go up and down the Himalayas. Excerpted from The Galleons: Poems by Rick Barot All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
