San Maló

No birds, no boats

are visible on the water, which roils

and foams as if an acreage of cotton

rippled from a whip or a prod, above

and below. You could say it doesn't take

much to feel how little influence

we have in a world we once thought

we could make our home. My people leaped

ashore from the blue-black hold of a three-

masted ship, sick of salt-winds, aching

for the remembered tenderness of bodies

before they wore a harness or bent

under cargoes of cotton and silk,

amber, cassia bark. Never mind

that the bruise from such a severance

might not heal. Never mind that water-

old sojourner, restless tenant-

would still wind through the centuries,

through houses on stilts in the middle

of an estuary, before fanning

back out into the sea.

"Saint Malo was the first permanent settlement of Filipinos and

perhaps the first Asian-American settlement in the United States....

The settlement may have been formed as early as 1763 or 1765 by

Filipino deserters and escaped slaves of the Spanish Manila galleon

trade."

- Wikipedia