Once again I searched your name
in a map I kept in my wallet
for years.
            I evened out creases with my palm
            and calculated your distance
            with my fingers.

Yesterday, I thought I heard your voice
complaining about the heat,
but it was only I realizing
            I was much older now
            than the day you died.
            How much longer before the monsoon?

Remember how winds emptied
in Caramoran? Remember how typhoons
are named? Remember
            how we tracked the numbers
            as the weight of air matched
            the barometer of our reticence?

We practiced the signals early and often,
orphans before our fathers died.
Number one and we weighed down
            roofs. Number two and we prayed
            to saints. Number three
            and we huddled in silence.

We signed our last confession
at dawn when the roof was blown
into the sky, but in the morning
            the house remained a splinter
            from where we waved at neighbors
            sorting wreckage for home.

Manoy, how much of memory is sorting,
how much is bidding away time,
and how much is dreading the rain?

After a typhoon we swelled to the river.
You plunged right into your mark,
I aimed at murky water,
            trailing as I have always trailed
            your footsteps for six years,
            only to hit surface gravels.

Blood flowered on mud like tendrils
exquisite and terrifying.
You snapped a guava branch,
            chewed the leaves into paste
            and balmed my peeled skin
            without reprimand or appeasement.

Manoy, every now and then I searched
your name in maps. Yesterday
I evened out the scars on my knees,
            the ones you mutely tended, indelible
            as the mark of your absence. As the love
            that you could only sign in silence.