Kilometer 3, Binuangan

This is how I remember. Wood planks
nailed to wood planks to make an opening,
And Love slipping into simpler planes
Fragments on the drying ground in the after-rain
The kamias fruit scattering green remains
and a red drapery of flowers in an afterthought
A calling out, “Neneng! Neneng!”
And the wide paved stairs still unplaced
na un memoria of a childhood barefooted race
We paused at the silhouette of fire from a tree of flames
Uncertain if the ground was paved for the leaving
Or was it so we can more certainly return home?
Still I leave for the door with one foot left inside
Clumsily straddling the geographical lines
of identities based on unstable metaphors
until I soon ran out of boundaries
and then I learn regardless of space
how microscopic our joys; And a leap
will never startle us again as they did before
in the flowered black sofa; Elsewhere, there was
elsewhere. But once upon a time, besides this in the ahora
wood planks nailed to wood make an opening
and a creaking to the sound of amaro singing
in a sequence of space and occurrence and absence
the mangga and star-apple, the mahogany and the balayong
el capilla or the prodding from a long gone abuela
el agua which flows like moving glass in the rio
Flordeliza’s orchids, the papaya tree and the perrito
it’s been four years almost and two summers ago
I am almost learning Sebuano