CRANE SHOT

Hieroglyph
by Eric Gamalinda

We shall say then that steel hands
fashioned the city from pebblewash
and stone, and we succumbed--
that's it--surrendered to its framework,
but the choice was not our own.

But we are crazed by simpler things;
pulse of wind, a bleeding moon.
And this tryst of fictions,
this fictive trance, might as well be,
shall we say, a choreography of chance.

Centuries later they will gawk
at anonymous relics scheming
sainthood--Time's true heretics.
Meanwhile, when you laugh,
I am distracted by your sensuous throat:
no one will ever know that, or the wind
that rustles southward from your fingertips.

Or the night we were suprised by rain
and slept, imagining arms,
till the morning threatened moss on our teeth.

The rain will pry our history,
rendered impersonal by contiguous negligence,
from gravel, the roots of trees, these things,
that listen to our babbling, but do not care.

I should imagine we are already
somewhere there, human in the salamander
fire, half-broken, but persisting
with the opiate vision in our minds.

There will be ghosts among the walls,
perhaps a phantom of some fantasy, its hands
held up against the light, or the parched
ends of a poem to surprise a curious
archaeologist; or your voice,
almost electric, almost like healing water.
:D salamat sa kopya ng isang napakagandang tula, at sa lahat
***Fig 1. [refer to orginal illustration] hahaha.
[:D]