Greater Joy by Jason Bayani
Greater Joy
by Jason Bayani
How little there is to know of the body, that we would emerge from the water, never a complete new – there, inside
a facsimile of older grief
They say that the body inherits memory. Maybe it is just the newer pain that learns to understand us through us. Trauma as a wire through the generations.
“We are not alone in this,” I repeat then inhale. Each flush of air sketching in my mind all the parts of me that will remain hidden. This is a kind of practice in faith, I tell myself.
On the day the coroner holds my dead heart in his hands, what will we call it? Out-of-commission parts? A collapsed engine?
What becomes of the well of ideas, the great imagination, every bit of touch that ignites and remains, still? Where does this go?
I want to believe that joy is inherited, too. Would they want us to have this, as well? Doesn’t everyone you love deserve the entirety of you? Some day I’m gonna get gone from here. Some day you will. I grieve for you, already. But I believe that grief is an honest gift. It is how you learn to hold the whole of a person. So much of loss counted in the absence.
There is nothing missing, your fullness overwhelms me. the rich and varied life of a person, all of its requisite pleasure and madness.
Maybe we learn to live with losing, make a world that loves us and our pain in equal measure. In there is a greater joy, I must believe it is one as equal to the weight of our living.
This poem came to me by my friend Rako Fabionar, and I share some background with author being born in the Philippines myself and being of the Bay Area. Jason Bayani writes from the intersection of Filipino American diasporic experience and contemporary Bay Area lyric. The inheritance, the practice, the questions, the joy. “Doesn’t everyone you love deserve the entirety of you?” And you may already realize I love the poems about weighing, learning to live with the losing, and joy equal to the weight of our living.
