from “M of the Southern Downpours,” by Alton Melvar M Dapanas

EPILOGUE 

It was a year of downpours, a year of Mercury in endless retrograde. Behind you, C.M. Recto Avenue, a concrete terrain of stupor, your past life rescued as gray semitones. The road goes away from here. Your birth chart says this is your reversal year of some planetary node, two years before your Saturn return. The tarot card reader on YouTube predicts you will have intense sex this weekend. Close the blinds and kill the birds. Tell me about your hookup, I might have to ask you, like any friend would be obliged, was it the Optics professor from your Discord voice channel, the movie geek you met on Telegram, or your equally depressed fuck buddy from Viber? Except that I never would. I will instead repeat my fading echo against your radio silence, see the man but not the light, mirror yours with mine, proportioned to share their graves.

Rain had more than once outdistanced the night, unimpeded, fell in your side of our city. La Niña, end of the southwest monsoon, as the weather bureau insists like some new convert’s passion. You bypassed on the quiet, slipped through its sieves, a million little drizzles against tarmac, water once thought to make sound. But your body told me in a dream it’s never been afraid of anything. So the brutal torrent freefalls on the road leading to Bukidnon, careening upwards like the vein above your collarbone, color of the earthborn, when you’re trying to make a point, or those in your right forearm, highlighting the asphalt’s onyx. I shovel the color into our faces, I shovel our faces into our faces. I must forewarn you that this Lunar Eclipse in your Moon sign will be unsettling. I should caution you about the Gemini in your astrological house of karma and endings. I tell you these things because I love you.

Townspeople went about bumping their heads in sleep. The queues hose outside Gaisano Mall and the bus stop after Cugman River, a new day, another false tenet, another vain tempo away from darkness to see daylight, to see what would happen. How dare I, laureate of loss, reckon I left gaping holes: we know this. How dare I, ruminant of ruins, confuse distance with oblivion: we know this. Elsewhere, at the very end of Sayre highway, in a car of a Tinder date whose name resembles yours—so what’s there to be faithful to?—I renegotiate myself as thoroughfare, scavenger of restraint, bailiwick of delirium. Today is Sunday. This landscape alters into a lurid haunt. The town is empty.  

Your lean torso, a hemisphere on its own, blurs the dusk into phone screen into daybreak into panorama. Everything I see, this urban imaginary, empties into grass blades running the length of road cracks, or an egg shell white wall of a motel, once a quarantine facility, stake your claim before something smears up the paint. In the looming darkness, what remains of sundown, like reeds flitting their way through the crevices of the flyover above, through the gaps of its railings below, the field is empty, sloshed with gold. Has it been told that what’s long gone could still linger? Isn’t grief an inordinate response to loss? Yes and yes, the same answers, dear poet. We are things that shouldn’t touch. And so, I leave no trail, not even footprints in the slush of ourselves, like mist. Tonight, you marvel at the street lights as you pass them by, heading east, hoisted to the safety of home. Tonight, I seek the shade of alleyways, dissolve into the wreckage of this nightfall. 

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Lines in bold are taken from Richard Siken’s War of the Foxes (2015).