—after Frederic Edwin Church’s “Mt. Ktaadn”

because the trees carry no names;
because the peaks spear the sky

like nails biting into familiar mangoes;
because I had not spoken Tagalog in weeks;

because my mother had texted me a picture
of the first red berries of our aratilis tree;

because the painted cows bowed like the cows
on my grandfather’s farm, their jowls

sagged with age; because in the second before
I read the description, I mistook this American

mountain for the gentler slopes of Mount Makiling;
because our myths believe Mount Makiling is the fossilized

body of a kind goddess or an alternate Calypso
spiriting men away into marital happiness;

because, like the boy in the corner of the painting,
I had also trusted our aratilis tree to bear my weight

those young evenings I had plotted to leave—leaving being the central
conflict I assume he has also chosen; because, like me, the boy would not

withhold anything from a goddess who whisks him home;
because, like me, he could grow to forget time’s distance;

because from that distance our lives held
the same inexplicable element of loss.

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