Tim Gilmore

 

Panama Montage

              November 27--

I must be less
of a small man,
for the world is whole and wide,
and I
am not big enough
to be big enough.
I will be great now,
and lie in bed with exploding hands
and sleep the small sleep
required of me.

              December 26--

And yet I say I,
and yet I remain small
as if it is allowed of me,
as if I think I
were here for the world
or the world for me.
I cannot be
but a stranger in your city.
For whose city is any city?
Nothing belongs to me,
and if I can only know this,
I can belong.

Neither of us could sleep,
but I could hold you and hold you.
I could hold you,
but could not give you rest.
All night,
your body jerked and shook.
Most selfless woman,
you are stung most
by self,
warmer and stronger and taller
than history,
unwittingly unweakened
by bearing iron,
so self-aware
you blind yourself to you,
so beautiful
you cannot sleep.

Now you are gone into your morning,
and I am gone into my morning.
The live marrow of a strong living
is pocked with the lacunae of breakdowns.
I am as strong as I have ever been,
and you are stronger.

We leave here day after tomorrow.
I am ready.
You are more ready than you know.

There is never anything to be but other.
Nothing exists for us.
We are always visitors to a strange place,
and so we belong
and so we are always home.

          New Years, Panama City, RP

Hard and sharp as a broken elbow
are lives made to fit in rooms
no bigger than beds and meals
apprehended from highway trashcans.
We have pumped the world full of garbage.
It is our natural state.
Some of us can afford to pretend otherwise.

To those of you who cannot,
I am no bigger than your bedroom
that begins in the crowded
and crumbled street and ends
a body fall away.
I wish I knew what to do here.
There is nothing I can presume.
I want to help you,
but your needs and your wants
must knot and deny and adapt themselves
far more than the blindness
of my shallow and selfish caring
can ever pretend to know.
The splintered doorway
to your bed by the street,
shadowless, casts shadows
larger than I ever want to be.
How do I befriend you?
And how do I befriend you selflessly?

           Because

Because I am small.
I am small
and not nearly large enough
to know how small I am.
So I tell myself,
"You are small,
you are small,"
and yet maintain these facile desires
that this strange, contorting city
that ties my tongue behind its back
can possibly want to know me.
Who am I to this city?
Who am I to this city when it suffers?
I am small,
I am small.
and I must be so much less.

           Flashback

Language presumes and projects.
Two people awakened at dawn
and moved into the struggling streets where
everyone spoke a separate language.
They asked directions,
they gave advice,
they said, "I love you,"
but no one mouth spoke one
lingua franca with any other.
Even then they found their own ways
to presume and project
in lieu of communication.
All understanding substituted
desperately for itself.
I remembered what it was to be them,
and remembering shook me to the core.

          Transubstantiation

And now we are back home,
and you are back home from home,
this home from that home.
You told me home is a then
as much as a there.
You could take me there,
but you couldn't take me then.

You have made me believe
once again
that two human beings can relate,
can extend from the subjective,
that lives touch,
and still
we are from different worlds.

You brought me to your template
(the metaphor is yours--
my best lines I have stolen from you),
and we walked its bougainvillea and
highrise-lined highways,
its pirate-sacked ruins,
and we made love in the skyline
of Ciudad de Panama.

Then I put out my eyes.
I failed to see you
when you looked most beautiful,
and can think of no worse crime.

I didn't see you that night,
and I, but I, yet I
now look at your childhood photos,
at the drawings on your walls,
sketches of your womb country,
at the brightly patterned handicrafts
of Panama's interior Indians,
and I see every memory you showed me before,
I hear every word you spoke before,
I receive everything you shared before,
every nuanced nuance,
and even though I saw them clearly and colorfully then,
I see them now for the first time.

Because we must focus before we focus.
Because we must know what we see
before we know what we see.
Because we hear the language when
we know what we hear.
Because we see the obvious
only when it's obvious.

But I no longer accept these most obvious obstacles.

Because of you,
I renounce my impotent solipsism.
Because of you,
I know that what is shared
makes the exchange.
Because of you,
I believe that touching bodies touch.
Because of you,
parallel lines
converge.
We are one another's spiritual
and bodily host,
and I believe in our transubstantiation.

I see you this moment.
I see you.
Not even your beauty will blind me.
I am small enough
to be ready
to be great for you.
You deserve me being
everything you deserve.

You could take me there,
but you couldn't take me then,
because you can't go then now.
But before our trip,
you dreamed of places you didn't remember,
and when we got there,
you saw them through the windows of a dozen taxis.
And this home in your beating blood,
so sequestered from our wanderings on foot
through the old neighborhood beneath the jungle
you will infuse into every new moment,
just as every new moment,
as you told me,
is a new moment.

And you are Ancon Hill
and the neighborhood called the Fishbowl,
and you are the bowl of ceviche
the plate of patacones,
and the pitcher of Cerveza Panama,
and you are the parrots in the city trees
and high tide at the ruins,
the skyscrapers in the water
and the Bridge of the Americas,
the tree you climbed
where you figured out fractions,
and the little girl in the photograph,
on the beach with her dog Prince.
And because you took me home with you,
you still take me home with you.

          So

I want to give you
not a there and then you can't go back to,
but a there and then to come to,
home infused with home,
a synthesis of home,
that home
and this home
become simply home.

I am and I will be
small enough to be great enough
to give you everything you deserve,
and it will not even
break my back to do it.