Jose Luis Pablo

Two Poems

Cutting the Tree

After the storm, my father and I investigate the scraping that had haunted the house while the typhoon lashed Manila for days. The culprit was the rambutan tree that had dared extend its trunk past its prison plot. Shouting an apology to the duwendes out in the blank air, we shake it first and the leaves fall as the rain’s afterthought. The thick body bends toward us for a few inches, then recoils to sound a gong against the galvanized sheets. My father asks me to fetch the saw and rope. 

My father is pleased because my hands are no longer idle, after making the week my sabbath. I am a version of a carpenter; I transform the wood. Soon this house will be like the fruit-bearing tree, and the work will reside in the minds of their creators. 

The Bible says the body is a temple, there is shelter for the spirit. / The body, it worships in labor. / The house, the body of a home. / O temple, our tenuous tenement, make yourself known. Can you stand as the Earth spins to a new age?

We build around what we want to remember. I am dodging the hail of fruit resembling sea creatures. 

Essence of the tree flying as sawdust,

Sudden and gift-like  

Our own version of first snow

Eternal garden

Creation’s End

Some stories are a circle, 
like this island.
We emerged from the universe

to forge our own in steam of want,
a rumbling cataclysm of will.
Aloft on an alien current or cosmic soup, 

we reached volcanic oceans and ridges,
then wiped off the dew-turned-rheum 
to witness each other.

Remember the behemoth cartilage,
the evolution of our 
finned hands.

Eventually the centuries will take notice.

Now sunlight is tricked when it falls here —
a basin that tips the blessing 
from brim to brim.

When night comes, 
we’ll seek the patches 
of missing suns and find 

instead our twin shadows 
overtaking. The end is another 
ridge on this ring of fire.

We are not afraid to join the cliffs 
steeped with coral. What will be left 
will be ossified to fossil and flake.

See how we can still rejoice 
when moments are rendered amber.
Our creation evidences that memory 

can withstand burning
and this story is a circle, 
like this island.

But for now, may we be content on its curve.