I. 

Remember
you are salt, and to salt
you shall return. 
A generation sets its hopes in a wicker basket
and sends them down the river
dreaming of milk and honey
to become a person of grandeur.
A child like this 
will forever walk backwards
along the banks.

II.

When I told my father
I was going east for school
he told me that, like the ocean,
it was in my blood
to move. 
Ang-ngalo, the wandering giant,
built a salt-palace
by the sea, 
only for the ocean, 
an accumulation of goddess tears, 
to swallow it—

the moral being,
a wanderer cannot 
make a home / the goddesses
of sorrow will always
return / you cannot outrun
your nature /
or, my father’s favorite: 
to love a place 
you have to leave it.

III.

We are a family accustomed 
to haunting,
and to being haunted. 
A wraith of the woods, 
my father holds 
pine cones 
to his ears like conch shells.
He licks the sap off 
the evergreens
and recoils at the sweetness. 

Like him, 
I let my salivating
run like a river from doorstep
to doorstep.