Naming the Trees by Eric Gamalinda

Naming the Trees
Eric Gamalinda

The jacaranda in bloom
is changing the landscape of Los Angeles
like a tagger-in-reverse: one
who says, Enough of desecration.
Time for quiet grandeur: Make room.

And everything falls into place,
moved by devices even now still difficult
to understand. Summer is another country,
people are happier there, they mark time
not by seasons but by the ease

with which these petals nosedive
to the pavement. If we could assemble
the world as effortlessly, there would be
no need for words. Inexplicable.
But this is how we survive.

You’ve seen them come and go,
the beautiful, flaming ones.
In this city whose streets
no longer confuse you, renewal comes
as a matter of choice. Although

it is impossible to ascertain
its exact coordinates, home is that place
you are continually born into,
that you leave with no regret,
that grows smaller each time you return.

                                       For Carlos Angeles

MARGINALIA

1.
Day 5 of The Sealey Challenge. Today’s offering is Zero Gravity by Eric Gamalinda.

2.
I’ve loved this book for as long as I can remember. Eric Gamalinda’s writing transports me—the way he uses images as a way to convey both space and time, and the way he talks about time as if these, too, are specific moments in my own life that call forth wistfulness and a tinge of some unnamed sorrow.

3.
The poet grapples with the experience of leaving home, of being independent of what has rooted you for most of your life—and then also of missing it, but coming to the realisation that the home you knew no longer exists in the same way as you have carried it in your mind. He writes about being a stranger in new places, while also wondering if he can be the same person that he was in his homeland.

4.
He takes notice of the mundane and finds beauty in them as only someone who hasn’t been here before can—with a sense of wonder and curiosity, and a defiance not to remain tethered to everything you have ever known.

5.
There, too, is a pursuit of remembering—of memory as a return: does this hurt me? Does this liberate me? What does it mean to have my present be ruptured by my past, to have the Now carry the weight of Then? What is the work of memory versus the work of forgetting? Is nostalgia a bridge to regret?

6.
In all these poems, I think about the act of leaving and remembering as creating a sense of dual estrangement—where you eventually get to versus where you come from. Is memory a place, and have we anchors? Are we all eventually lost?