Time Dissolving Between Us

For Nasudi, a daughter left to fend for herself while her father was away looking for ways to scratch out a life elsewhere

The months are centuries of waiting,

constant, feverish, relentless.

Two long distance calls per day

Are not sufficient to break the barriers

Between distant spaces defined by my absence

In your ever-present waiting 

For the dependable phone to ring

A hello, and then a goodbye

You do not want to say

The way you refuse to put down 

The machine first to declare

Another victory of Time dissolving between us.

It is not so, and the seeded signs of pretense

From my own end is the same impostor

Of a poet writing prosaic claims about a world

Made up of decent, wise words.  

With the small fingers of a last born to guide you

Which month is going to close the gap

Between my sending the box with the gifts

Of dolls and dearly written small notes

On Post-Its to mark who owns the books

Of laughter and lingering loneliness

You rattle off the possibilities of airplanes

Coming in earlier than usual as a matter

Of belief. And then of course the verdict:

Christmas you are never around

New Year you are never to be found

While we all light candles with their light

We let the firecrackers drive away the worries

Of the year that comes too soon. 

You could have joined the rest of the family party

To pick me up with my sense of missing everyone

At the appointed time of return.

But the swine flu scared your mother's wits

And declared that staying home is God's grace.

I miss the Jollibee burger steak at the airport,

You protest, as you always do for the last six years

Even as you fight for your right

To be the first to wrap your skinny hand

On your father's tired neck.

At all the Skype sessions are the promises to keep:

You be good, you be good, in God's name,

You will be great. I take that to include myself.

The hours stretch so long when the centuries

Of absence dissolves into minutes. 

Even the airline food, served with hesitation

As well as regret, does not taste as good

As a young daughter's dream of a burger steak.

You land, if only to freeze time, in the two months

That you warm your heart to the old place.

But you are poised to leave, as is the case

And in the faraway places of your dreams

You can only utter the prayer of relief,

The one that comes soon to mark 

The end of absences, the beginnings of presence.

A Solver Agcaoili

Marikina/June 2/09