Live Encounters Poetry & Writing Volume Two November-December 2024
How It Is Here, poems by David Oliveira.
How It Is Here
Someone asks about weather—common question, not unexpected.
Here, it’s the throes of the rainy season, but it’s also morning
and hours from any rain. An easy breeze riffles through trees.
Thursday is high clouds and welcome cool shade.
Because rains come each day, landscapes dress
in a hundred hues of green; everything that blooms, blooms.
After midsummer’s day, hot temperatures soften. Life takes a breath.
Sure, sometimes parts of the year invite heated complaint.
Just like a quick turn of seasons, weather can be tough.
Later, when rain comes, you go outside to walk in it,
reveling in sky’s blessing, in Earth’s endless largesse.
The kindness of being here does not come cheap.
It requires sacrifices on behalf of those for whom you care
and beneficence to those you meet on the uneven road ahead.
The ultimate price exacted is the body.
You know rough seasons. It’s not possible to be human
and not be scarred by lashes and cuts to your fragile flesh.
Each person arrives to where they come, at first, oblivious.
That place turns out to be loved or hated or roundly ignored,
depending on experiences, disposition, and inclination for travel.
In whatever place a person settles, well-being requires others,
something that must be pursued with blinded optimism,
oblivious of the odds for snowballs in sultry weather.
Polishing the Philosopher’s Stone
It’s nearly 7, and I overslept this morning.
That doesn’t happen often, even on nights I have
trouble sleeping, head swirling in world sorrows.
My four granddaughters line up at the door
to get money for school, each in uniform,
each a smiling facet of the other’s beauty.
They are sent off with hand kisses,
silent hopes for a future desperate for hope.
I resolve to make something of my day
(less taxing than making something of myself),
skipping the usual check on the day’s news
to go for a walk in the neighborhood.
I’m socially awkward, separated from neighbors
by lifelong shyness and inability to learn more
than a toddler’s vocabulary of their language.
We smile at each other and because their
culture is ancient and generous, I am forgiven.
To get to the road I must step on the spot
where my husband burned, where I will burn.
This isn’t something I allow myself to think often
or I would never make it out of the yard.
Walking through the village, I’m in awe
to be in this singular place with these people,
so different from where I come,
and yet, not all that different.
Here, people live in the present tense,
working through one day to be present
for the next, and not troubled
about more or less than that.
Important questions are pursuits
for the leisure class, none of whom have
settled in the shade of any trees along this road.
These are beleaguered stretches of days,
maybe no more troubled, no more challenging
than any other stretch of days, except these
fall on us, so they hit especially hard.
If the golden light of fortune shines over us,
we will overcome these hardships, as have
millions of ancestors who gave rise to us.
Their resilience points to our survival.
I am an American grandfather, sending
four granddaughters to English class
because I haven’t learned their language.
When the granddaughters return from school,
I ask them to stand by me on the balcony,
to look at the Mekong, how the river’s blood
moves as a constant flow of water.
I can’t tell them what they will only learn
after the world breaks their hearts,
but the entirety of knowing lies before them,
spoken in the undulating syllables
washing stones away to time.
For eons, sages have said that
no one ever sees the same river twice,
not twice in one lifetime,
not twice in all lifetimes.
Lone Man Walks a Long, Long Road
He didn’t get here on the strength of intellect.
He doesn’t even know where here is.
Nothing ever came to him out of a plan
but pain, some of his making, to be sure,
as he stumbled through every step
from childhood until now, with no sense
of direction, a mind free of strategies.
Without trying, he grew to his age overnight,
an age called old in every jurisdiction he knew,
and not a thing he could do about that.
His story isn’t unusual, nor is it complicated.
It is most common, in fact. Simplicity itself.
He’s sure each day doesn’t have to be important,
so he goes about unimportant business,
letting sunlight wrap him in blankets of warmth,
listening to Earth’s music sweep through the air.
He felt these were important enough.
Having completed his tasks, not knowing
where to go next or why, he did as many others.
He waited for someone to tell him.
This wait can sometimes be short, though
mostly, it’s very, very long. This day, it was short.
As luck would have it, his teacher found him quickly,
waiting beside the self-same road he had picked.
Before sending him off, the teacher cautioned
to keep to the right and not leave rubbish behind.
In homage to the many who passed here before,
he kept to the right and cleared the trash as he went.
© David Oliveira
David Oliveira is an American poet, originally from California, living in Cambodia for 22 years. He is retired from teaching, academia, and IT. Along the way, he has been a publisher, editor, and poetry advocate. He has published three full length poetry collections, the most recent being Still Life with Coffee (Brandenburg Press, 2022). He is included in several important anthologies, among them California Poetry: From the Gold Rush to the Present (Santa Clara University/Heyday Books, 2004); The Gávea-Brown Book of Portuguese American Poetry (Brown University, 2012); and How Much Earth: The Fresno Poets (Heyday Books, 2001), which he co-edited with poets Christopher Buckley and M.L. Williams. He lives and writes on the banks of the Mekong River near Phnom Penh.
Lovely to see these wonderful poems here, David.