This place where wily warehousemen and clerks

traded pots and pans for ermine and marten

This place—Voilà un diamant du Canada—

quartz crystals exhibited back home

This place—the land God gave Cain—

rocky shores now slowly sinking into the sea

This invented America, this illusory kingdom

This place took her.
Her bones lie in hard ground in Vancouver

with kababayan whose markers define her boundaries.

She bought this piece of property.

Truly Canadian now: Daughter of the Soil.
Something made more out of mere discovery.

Something made attractive so as to justify

that transpacific adventure to conquer new territory

where she danced, loved, founded a community.

Life continuum. No ubi sunt, no exiled lament, no loss, no ruin

but siþ  
transforming that displaced Visayan girl who said—
        I’m ninety.

        They’re all dead there now.

        I have nothing to return to. —-
as we sat over tea and muffins at her kitchen table.
                     ……….
Despite purple skies and golden sand, mother,

you’re not here in Onay Beach in your natal Samar.

The water gasps in and out like the heartbroken woman

whose hanged body gave this name—diin ba ang may nag-onay—

is this where she destroyed herself?

You rejected her.

Empty seashells prick my feet.

At the edge, in the open ending, a mollusk had built

an equiangular spiral, gnomonic, marvellous,

growth curves elegantly expanded shaped by its lifespan,

not a circular spiral for that would have suffocated it

like rope around one’s neck.