Alaska Series (continued)

Weekends - King Cove

Saturdays, Aleut fishermen return.  Our canning complete, we shower and have dinner.  Later, a movie or dance at the bunkhouse. Jimmy plays his sax. Freddie strums a washtub bass. Girls come to mingle and flirt. 

Sundays, we climb the bluff north from town to fire our guns.   I pack a .22 rifle and kill a gull.  Kenny carries a .32 Barretta, a bullet in the chamber.  By accident, he shoots himself.  They send him home. I sell my gun.

We play ping-pong or shoot hoops in a warehouse where we hang a rim.  Sometimes, we stroll King Cove’s boardwalk to it’s sweet shop for shakes. Native girls hang out there.

Alaska Series No. 11

Laigo’s “East is West” *

Mahogany artist of mahogany men fashions homage to Filipinos

who crossed the ocean of dreams.  Articulates it with Alaskeros,

sakadas, waiters,  asparagus and hop pickers, nurses, pensionados,

barbers and boxers.   Accents it with gambling dens, cockfights,

dime-dances, brothels and bunkhouses. Adorns it with in-laws and outlaws 

of the Spanish cross and Moorish moon.

Pinoys arrived with tamaraw and carabao memories.

Silent servants apprenticed in this new Eden. 

Melting into the melting pot.  Clinging to an adobo past,

they came…

Hearts in search of America,

Your east-west star celebrates their memory and yours.

Alaska Series No. 12

* I wrote this final Alaska Series work in memory of Val Laigo.  His sculpture, a tritych,can be viewed at Jose Rizal Park on Beacon Hill in Seattle. He positioned it to look west toward the Philippines and east to the United States.  He opened the star as a symbolic entrance and as a way of looking back.