salvaged poem

Reflections on a damp evening in a distant land

You exhibit a translucency
On nights such as these:

Tonight, as smoke
Descends on stars,

When the moon
Is a sliver of nectar
On a dew-spattered plain,

Rumors of exits
Stain monsoons

And seep through mists
Obscuring mountains.

In these dim nights of
Inchoate sadness, you are
Real: wafts of sunlight
Streaked with dust-motes; livid, like the glare
Of languid afternoons. Without you, the night
Acquires a solitary luminescence
As with transience, or rage

or silence.

Unsettling, how the recall of your face

blazes like braziers

On nights such as these.

*ca. 2000. dug this up from the archives of an old moldy notebook. i rededicate this to erika salang, whose valiant story continues to humble us and remind us of the whys and hows.