Countries I Have Visited

Indispensable

From NYTimes on the web, article at http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/17/opinion/29cohen.html:

Never before have U.S. fortunes been so tied to the world’s. Americans see that. When your mortgage is packaged into some ingenious security that’s sold to a German bank before the scheme unravels and you lose your house, the globe looks smaller.

No, "Americans" don't see that.  Would it be wise for "Americans" to see that?

With some 30 percent of the revenue of U.S. corporations coming from overseas, and the Chinese buying American debt, and more than seven million people naturalized in the past decade, it’s harder to separate America’s fate from that of others. Isolationism is not merely wrong, it’s impossible.

Really?  Is not "America" the "indispensable nation", as former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright has declared?  Does it not seem like the world's economies (or economy) relies on an intimate interdependence?

With Both Hands

In the small spaces of this room
between the furniture's worn wood and my shame to be,
between the cotidian things and the extraordinary need to love
I save a corner of prayer for your memory.
Water, rain, scurries down like tears from a heavenly god
One moment belongs to all, one at a time, and slowly evanesce into that infinitesimal point in a rear view, one we have long since left behind.
An embrace is as warm as your presence, and when you're by my side
A new day dawns with the aftertaste of treason and self-defeat
my fingers still ask for forgiveness and they long for sight anew
a familiar and lonesome song
a road or page on which to walk or write,
and find my heart making a home, a refuge, with both hands, build dignity with bricks of humility, something inexplicably foreign that will make forgetting sweet again
Whosoever inhabits that sweet stubborn nest.

Copyright 2007 Eduardo De Leon

eternal light

There she stood
not too far a distance
yet not too near
she stood as her hair danced about her
all I could do was watch her
she started to walk away
i imagined her walking in slow motion
but she moved too fast
she was already not she
she, walking, was not the same as she was standing
walking away, becoming smaller, farther
she walked with a friend, down the stairs
was I already not me?
She was someone else, was she ever she?
As she descended the stairs I caught the last glimpses of her
slowly and at once too quickly
she was gone
The moment she stood, eternal, ephemeral, beauteous
in that moment something changed.
She became all shes,
I became none at all.
She was all that I have loved,
she was the only one.
I didn't seem to exist or matter, while she seemed never to have been mine.
A fire burned in my chest, my mouth was watering
I felt revulsed by what I was witnessing, that change,
and I could not stop taking it all in.
Every last drop of her, every last light
until the darkness or the horizon swallowed her
extinguishing brightness.
Until again she meets me for the first time
and then again walks away
we are eternal vessels
she is eternal light.

© Eduardo De Leon 2008