I FOUND ORPHEUS LEVITATING

above the hood of an illegally parked red Toyota Corolla

on Mabini Street. He was tired of all that descending

into and ascending from those pretentious

New Yorker and Atlantic Monthly  poems.

He asked me to give him new clothes so I dressed him

in an old barong tagalog and some black pants.

Because he wanted new friends in a new land, I introduced

him to Kapitan Kidlat, our local comic book hero.

But after a few whips of that lightning bolt, Orpheus

recognized Kidlat as Zeus in another clever disguise.

So, I took him to Mt. Makiling where Malakas & Maganda

(the mythical first Filipino man and woman) live

in a mansion with an Olympic size swimming pool.

He said Maganda's aquiline features remind him

of Eurydice and Malakas has the solid torso

of a younger Apollo. He asked me to translate

the word, threesome into Tagalog.

Malakas & Maganda agreed and they stripped

Orpheus of his clothes as they led him

to their giant bamboo bed.

I waited outside in the car all afternoon before he emerged

from the mansion smelling of Sampaguitas and Ylang-Ylang.

He was hungry so we drove to the nearest

Kamayan restaurant where he learned

how to eat rice and pork abobo with his bare hands.

"It's wonderful! This was the way it used to be.

When the industrial revolution happened, all of us on Mt. Olympus

suddenly had forks and knives appear in our hands. We used

them as garden tools at first." Afterwards, he wanted to drink

and go dancing. I paid the hundred peso cover charge

for both of us at the Hobbit House in Ermita. The first

thing he did in the dark, smokey bar was trip over

one of the dwarf waiters, all the waiters were dwarfs. "I'm sorry,

I couldn't see. It feels as if I had just walked into a Fellini film."

He placed his hands in front of him as if he were pushing

back a glass wall."No, No, I'm not in a movie,

I'm inside a fucking poem!

I can see the poet's scrunched-up face on the other side

of the computer screen!"  I told Orpheus to shut up

or the bouncers, who were not the same size as the waiters,

would throw us out of the bar. We sat

in a booth across from each other and ordered double

shots of Tanduay Rum. I asked him if he understood

the concept of "the willing suspension of disbelief." 

I asked him to look me straight

in the face before he ran out into the street.