Information Age Blues

A photo, says Diane Arbus, is a secret
about a secret. The more it tells you
the less you know. Eloquence, she says, is only
the trick of explaining a trick by a further
trick. Any gorgeous language is then curtains
behind curtains, and any voice I hear carries
another voice inside. Some facts, like aircraft
safety cards, are for your protection. Others
ambush in elegance, like when I was twelve
years old and web searched history

of the Philippines. All too familiar
a telling by now: nosy brown child
hunts for information and returns
with only blood. For my next trick
I’ll hurt myself on the dropped vase
of memory, whether that of my own
or of the land from which I came.
Because I am a chismosa, impossible
knowledges chew at the noon of me:

However long it takes to fall asleep
inside a flame or run the circumference
of moonlight as its blue crown lifts

behind you or to know another person.
Or does anyone know how to be alive
without getting naked, how to burn

from alive to just alive enough, or what
on earth is darker than the fact
of a country’s birthing. And when can I

see you again. And what is the matter
with me. If I could make those private rows
a site of public knowledge. The world goes
on collecting secrets, each one a rose,

a shoe, a stone. If I could know what shades
of knowing should be kept from me
forever. Now I wake as the cicadas wake
and like to slouch brazenly, living by the narrows
of the margins I have made. Their gossips spur
my gossips. Their knowledge marionettes
my own. Like them I grapple in these rooms
without even a trick of light.