Craig Santos Perez

[an unfinished dwelling]

—there’s water
below us

 

 

—carefully staged

 

 

shadows—

 

 

 

 

—an unfinished dwelling bound
by skin—as if
could contain us—

you say,

 

[counting our possessions]

We learn how to swim in this place:
conjugate of ‘water,’ ‘birch,’

‘refuse.’ We approach the river
and touch its tendons; maybe

we’ll find something else entirely,
whose exact nature unfurls ‘wing’

and ‘fin,’ ‘eggshell’ and ‘cocoon.’
Someone calls our name. We continue,

nearly holding the ground. You say, “the fish appear
on the banks all at once because they were

killed all at once.” Maybe we’ll pass
from dust to the perceivable

to the obtained. As if the world became perilous

forever; as if 'this' was made necessary

‘for the lack of.’ Counting our ‘possessions,’
we’re told to proceed on our own.

 

 

[to name all that we remember]

Curvature makes this possible: our eyes
and what our eyes see when there’s no sun.
We describe all our things one at a time—

‘small bruises,’ ‘fire in a cage,’ ‘hymns’—having known
in a small number of muscles, we’ll eventually arrive
at the wrong house. We hold things made of glass

at the edge of a freight denied entrance. A ‘distance’
in the distance gives the appearance of ‘sieve.’
You say, “no structure shelters meaning.”

Would you break ‘sky’
into pieces of ‘want’ to name all that we remember?
You say, “our skin and the light are identical

fears.” Our eyes struggle to make decisions in darkness,
as if to forget completely was only the other side of ‘ocean.’
You say, “words show evidence of how we are made to see.”

 

[surfacing for air]

First, the arriving: ‘air
is air, thing is thing.’
You point to a broken mirror
and say, “whatever we lose,
it’s always ourselves we find.”
We watch the tide
at poise, tide at wounding—
like all songs
that become less and less
forgiving. Is this
what you mean when you say,
“our skin weds as we speak”?
Like you, I want to imagine
the heart is a ‘continent’
surfacing for air—
tell me, what does ‘driftwood’ know
about geography that we
haven’t learned?

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Craig Santos Perez, a native Chamorro from the Pacific Island of Guahån (Guam), has lived in California since 1995. He is the co-founder of Achiote Press and author of several chapbooks, including all with ocean views (Overhere Press, 2007) and preterrain (Corollary Press, 2008). His book, from unincorporated territory, is forthcoming from Tinfish in 2008. His poetry, essays, reviews, and translations have appeared in New American Writing, Pleiades, The Denver Quarterly, Jacket, Sentence, and Rain Taxi, among others. He's currently a Ph.D. candidate in Comparative Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley.