I like this image:

into the salmon and oyster clouds

It reminds me of the first time I visited my grandfather in the Philippines and walked around the university where he worked, early in the morning. I remember how the air felt different than where I was from and all the tropical details that revealed themselves: the type of stone and mortar that made up the old sidewalks and the dull green of the moss that grew in the uneven surfaces, the shapes of leaves I'd never seen before and the glow of the sun coming through the clouds, made more vivid, my grandfather said, because the ash from the recent eruption of Mt. Pinatubo still hung heavily over the country. And then the birds began to sing.

Birdsong changes with longitude and latitude and I grew up where mornings sound like crows and mourning doves. Other birds sing, but those are the ones that invade the consciousness. What I notice when I wake up far from the house I grew up in, I usually notice the birdsong and the smells of a place and then the sounds of people. At my parent's house, the most one hears of people are the passing chatter of dog walkers, the even scrape of running shoes and the diminishing hush of passing cars and in the summer, sometimes a lawnmower or two, rumbling to life and then droning over the lawns.

When I lived in Vietnam, I wouldn't hear any birds, unless it was that nervous flock that ate the hard, green fruit that fell in the garden, the ones that no one ever seemed to eat. I'd also hear the fishing boats, with their improvised engines coughing back into the harbor, and the people on small-engine motorcycles riding around, playing the same, canned message, asking people to exchange their broken electronics for small sums of cash. Then there were the women, who would ride by on bicycles, selling noodles or bread, sometimes ice-cream, each with their own distinctive cries. When I had my pig, I'd heard him snuffling around and then eventually squealing at me to wake up and give him his breakfast of watery rice and rice bran. Behind it all, there was the sound of the ocean.

This past week, I was in Boston. I wasn't doing anything much, other than visiting friends and remembering what it was like to live there. After I left the house on Tuesday, I ended up walking a long way, through BU and into Kenmore square. I'd just sent a message to a guy I've known for 26 years, a guy who is my brother in every way except genetically. He was supposed to take a look at a tooth that's bothering me, since he's training to be a dentist, it seemed like a win-win. Moments later he called. He sounded exhausted. Just hours before, his wife had gone into labor and he was now the proud father of a baby boy. I congratulated him and we chatted a bit before I let him go. It struck me that it wasn't so long ago that we would wake up together, either at his house or mine and we'd eat breakfast, where he'd invariably ask either my mom or his mom to strain his orange juice and how when we'd play it was always me looking out for him because he was so clumsy and frail. An image came to mind of footage he and I once saw in health class. It was a closeup of a woman crowning and the blood and amniotic fluids were spilling out and somewhere overhead we could hear the woman struggling and then the baby appeared. It reminded me of stories where a witch or a shaman would read the future in an animal's entrails and I wondered then, if babies cry because they read their own futures in the shreds of what once was their home.

I ended up using that in a poem (of course) which you can read on my site, if you like.