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  1. HOMO VIATOR

    We shall not cease from exploration/And the end of all our exploring/Will be to arrive where we started/And know the place for the first time.—T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets, Little Gidding

    Sunrise on a highway ridge baffles us.
    This could be sundown elsewhere by the bay
    in Poro Point, a merging of origins, east or west,
    a cycle of living and dying on the reef,
    a coming and going on the harbour of fishing boats
    and war machines, a pot of stirred calm and tempest
    really, where remembering and forgetting are sides
    of the same coin—memories made, buried, raised,
    extinguished or lived again in a string of moments
    that defines the journey of a man as symbol
    of a moving object, wandering back and forth,
    from nothing to something, something to nothing,
    a Brahman-Atman, Alpha-Omega, being-non-being,
    body-mind and soul all in one simple brownbag
    of wonder and questions. Quite like that silly
    white-tailed squirrel wandering, wondering,
    where it last buried a nut or a memory of one,
    as its quaint prompter of an imitation of life,
    a movement here, a movement there, all
    really meaning a stillness of finding where
    the end is one’s beginning and also his end,
    a circle at last where the hole defines
    life’s next of kin. One arrives home to ask:
    Is anybody home?

    —ALBERT B. CASUGA
    Mississauga, Ont., 02-15-11


  2. Landscape, with Fake Butterflies and Sick Child

    “Now if it be true that the living come from the dead,
    then our souls must exist in the other world, for if not,
    how could they have been born again?” ~ Socrates

    Here’s sunrise, a stain on the western ridge:
    errant strip of color someone has stirred,
    some buried memory. In the distance,
    a long whistle which means a train is gliding
    into the station, its zipper pulling away–
    tracks from trees, trees from the oily
    hemline of hills. Late stars flicker, pin
    lights in a dim shop window. Just hours
    ago, I wandered the aisles of an all-night
    drugstore: in the toy section, old-fashioned
    mason jars underneath whose lids thin wires
    were bent and rigged to painted tin
    butterflies. Pressed, the raised button
    on the cover triggered convulsions along the line.
    Sound of crinkled foil, sound of wings against
    mesh screens. Even the soul could not live
    in this simulacrum of air. All night I saw
    blue and yellow outlines scissor through
    the curtains. All night I tended the jangly pulse
    at the base of my sleeping daughter’s throat.

    ~ Luisa A. Igloria
    02 15 2011


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