to love makes one solitary
found poetry written by my humanities teacher back in los baños. how fitting.
Separation
Alessandra Trinidad
It is the season for moths.
As I sip black coffee and read Virginia Woolf, flying shadows
brush past a page, and past a line as timeless
as an old broken clock so that with Mrs. Dalloway,
I think: "To love makes one solitary.” I stare at the book,
think of the distance we kindle.
To dreaming moths, the bulb, perhaps, is a fluorescent
cocoon towards which they flutter to escape
the hour awakening to Bakakeng Norte’s
insomniac rhythms: stray barking dogs,
a jeepney’s fading roar, the hum of a street lamp
burning solely for your silhouette.
Outside my window, the full moon spills its porcelain
glare as if to say that between us and the evening sky
awaits a warm cup of radiance - around this rim,
stars burn as intensely as nocturnal insects burn
for a desired but dangerous illumination. In spite of the wind
or shivering pine trees, the moths still arrive, you see,
with their faith in a single glow, a luminous fist raised
against your voice cold in the night: “I am drifting,”
much later you confess above the oceanic static.
Only after we lose our connection do my eyes
sweep the floor to rest on the dying moths - the nearly extinct
lovers of light, the fragile propellers. Like damaged wings,
my hands in mourning migrate to my eclipsed face - now a place
filled deep with shadows, now a country lost in the flaming dark.
Separation
Alessandra Trinidad
It is the season for moths.
As I sip black coffee and read Virginia Woolf, flying shadows
brush past a page, and past a line as timeless
as an old broken clock so that with Mrs. Dalloway,
I think: "To love makes one solitary.” I stare at the book,
think of the distance we kindle.
To dreaming moths, the bulb, perhaps, is a fluorescent
cocoon towards which they flutter to escape
the hour awakening to Bakakeng Norte’s
insomniac rhythms: stray barking dogs,
a jeepney’s fading roar, the hum of a street lamp
burning solely for your silhouette.
Outside my window, the full moon spills its porcelain
glare as if to say that between us and the evening sky
awaits a warm cup of radiance - around this rim,
stars burn as intensely as nocturnal insects burn
for a desired but dangerous illumination. In spite of the wind
or shivering pine trees, the moths still arrive, you see,
with their faith in a single glow, a luminous fist raised
against your voice cold in the night: “I am drifting,”
much later you confess above the oceanic static.
Only after we lose our connection do my eyes
sweep the floor to rest on the dying moths - the nearly extinct
lovers of light, the fragile propellers. Like damaged wings,
my hands in mourning migrate to my eclipsed face - now a place
filled deep with shadows, now a country lost in the flaming dark.