My mother smoked a cigarette with the lighted end

inside her mouth. I would watch her as she sat

on a stool doing the day’s wash. She blew

a constant stream of smoke from the left side of her lips,

while her hands made soap suds billow and burst.

In our village not known for unusual things, it was

short of a miracle, the ember not dying

in her mouth and her palate not getting burned.

Style is the perfection of design, a habit

of usage that strives after elegance,
by which a language is renewed to bridge

desire and idiom, not to singe the text that pushes

into the air but to clarify the warm edges.

Fine rhythm, no spittle adrift or, if a landscape,

no embellishments to spoil the perspective.

Nature rendered into a convincing craft makes

tension bloom from puffs and billows as in

a night song rain drips from branches over a lagoon.

It’s not survival that is the leitmotif, but a solitude
in working out a peace of mind or a pattern

of units above the dense imagery, so that

to suffer is to suffer wherever the place,

to love always has an ending. What is forever

but a chance encounter with the sublime

while the here and now, immersed in soapy water,

is erasable, therefore improvable.

Mother did not have to choose. To be where one suffers

is to suffer everywhere, so to get somewhere

you must construct a fable of pain to soothe the ache.
Mother would spit the cigarette on the grass and start

a new one. The art is in getting used to it,

its essentials and fringes, its common moves

toward meaning that unclutters the mind,

fire’s danger considered. When the breathing normalized

there might be a tune in her head or a frenzy

in her hands, every squeeze on clothes a validation

of her history, the ragtag ghost army of it,

the soap that stings the eyes and washes away the tears

of cold neglect. Style is not about freedom.


The poem first appeared in Things Happen. Poems 2012

(University of Santo Tomas Publishing, 2014).