With National Artist Bien Lumbera

At the Cultural Center of the Philippines (CCP) canteen, 02/0 8/08.

Christmas Birthday

Mother has told me this story many times:
when I was ready to be born, she panicked,
finding it difficult from her bed to summon
the hospital nurses, busy as they were
opening gifts, eating fruitcakes, singing
jingle bells, jingle bells, jingle all the way.
Christmas is just one in three hundred
sixty-five and one-fourth days of a year,
so what were the chances of a childbirth
happening that 3 a.m.? As slim as one:


Christmas being about a birthday.
When I was a child, father bore me up
on his shoulders one night to reach for a star
with a long tail. My godfather was another
story. He was a long-time big-shot mayor
of some suburban town who never played
Santa Claus to my childhood, and all I can
remember receiving from him was a greeting
card with a tear-off coupon for a free one-year
accident insurance, if I filled it up


and mailed it to the company within a week.
Which I never did. He’s not mayor anymore.
Often, I would be told how fortunate
I was to have been born on the same day
as the Holy Child, but more often I would hear
about how unfortunate I was to receive
package-deal gifts each year: Merry-Christmas-
plus-Happy-Birthday rolled up into one;
like a Swiss-army knife with folding scissors,
folding blade, folding nail file and clipper.


For a series of Christmases, high school friends
would gather at my house in the evening,
because they had to be at church with parents
in the morning, and attend family gatherings
till late afternoon. At my Christmas birthday
we would drink and reminisce about the octopus
ride at the school fair, and how we made
the chemistry teacher cry, and joke about
Miss so-so from this exclusive all-girls school
who lost her undies by the swimming pool.


They would stay on until this former classmate
of ours who was a brother in a Catholic seminary
would finally arrive close to midnight, coming
all the way from visiting his folks South of Manila.
He’s in heaven now. He died a priest, in his sleep,
six years after the last of our parties, which ended
when someone got so drunk he threw up
in the middle of the living room, and we all saw
our youth, which used to be rolled up with the past,
turn sour, disgusting, and unwanted on the floor.



vvvvv

Initially published in the Sunday Inquirer Magazine of December 23, 2007. Thanks to Luisa Igloria for comments leading to this revised version, January 2008.

With National Artist for Literature Virgilio Almario

At the "Pictura Poiesis" reading in Mag:net cafe Katipunan, November 19, 2007.

Sick Leave

Like a patch of skin spared
from sunburn by a shield
of cloth or sunblock lotion,
there’s a rectangle on the wall
lighter than the wall itself,
where a painting used to hang.
Now that the artwork is gone,
visitors ask, “What used to be there?,”
and “What was it about?,”
as if they hadn’t seen the piece before,
or maybe not carefully enough.
‘Wasn’t there a woman seated
in a café?, Didn’t she have a glass
of wine, or some company?,”
The damp ground, eavesdropping,
almost shifts, holding up the house
whose wall holds up a rusty nail
in its perpetual upturned pose,
holding up no answer.

On my fourth day in hospital
with dextrose feeding me twenty
drops a minute, I picture in my mind
a space I may have left behind,
not entirely empty, but of air
made thinner by my absence,
or of lighter tissue,
so that people pause, inquire,
and imagine what used to be there.

“So where’s the painting now?”


vvvvv

(With reference to Juan Luna's painting, "Parisian Life")

On Juan Luna’s “Tampuhan (1895)”

It is a yellow afternoon that slides open
the capiz-shell windows,
that makes the mahogany floor
like a pond shimmer with silhouettes
of the ventanilla’s squinting fingers.
“My dear, you’re missing the procession
below.” He leans out, as if wanting
to join the shuffle of dusty feet.
She looks in, anchored to wooden things.
The yellow light passes without a sound
between them.

Set Design for Act Three

I will stage the remainder of my life
this way: black iron stairs spiraling
to upper floor, leaving behind all
clutter at ground. Upstairs, white.
White plastered walls and cathedral
ceiling; floor of tongue-and-groove
planks, six inches wide, bleached.
Large frosted windows at both ends,
north and south, draped with sheets
of canvas like thin slices of sunrise.
By the brighter end, a potted cactus
to soak in the filtered light. Slightly
off center, a weathered boat for a bed,
with bamboo outrigger to the floor's
wooden lake. And a bare bulb hanging
low from the ceiling to lure by next dawn
the errant fish. In case it comes.


(First appeared in a slightly different version on page 176 of BUDHI: A Journal of Ideas and Culture, volume VII, published in 2003 by the Ateneo de Manila University.)

Frame

It happens in a special-effects movie
or animated cartoon: the camera
zooms out, making the current scene
smaller, smaller, till it becomes
a miniature part of a new frame which,
in turn, is taken over by a bigger picture.
A pigeon perched on a parapet
becomes a gleam in the glasses
of a young man leaving or left behind
pacing up and down in an airport lounge;
freezes to become a still in an open spread
of a magazine dangling at a sidewalk stand,
which turns out to be a view from the side
mirror of a fancy float on its way
to the Independence Day parade,
with flag-waving onlookers all around,
all in all merely an image on a postcard
on which this poem is scribbled. Elsewhere,
in a cramped room, someone's world
is caving in, and the poor fellow,
thinking this is all there is, lets go
of the poem. I want to tell him, It's not the end,
but the plane I am on takes off
before the postcard hits the floor.
From my window seat I see his house vanish
into an avenue of trees, winding strip of green,
ridge on the shell of a turtle-shaped island,
clouds engulfing the scene like giant eyelids
closing in on something similar to sleep,
only much larger.


(Appeared in a slightly different form on page 12 of Ideya Journal of the Humanities published in 2004 by the De La Salle University College of Liberal Arts.)

Poet's Easter Morning at the Beach

The sun shedding its cloudy shroud;
The grey mountain rising up to green;
The shore reclaiming its former shape;
The early swimmer surfacing to air;
The crab scurrying out of its burrow;
The hermit abandoning its shell;
The driftwood touching land;
The poet at the threshold of wakefulness,

for a time losing all words for all things,
forgetting all names and all meanings,
and it doesn’t have to be a Sunday.

Questions for Would-be Parents of Poems

If tonight you leave a poetry book open
on page 25, will a candle alight there?
What color is the lion in your dreams
when you dream that you are sheep?
How do you explain the hypotenuse
of happiness to a red hot-air balloon?
Why do light bulbs envy the moon?
Does a charcoal stick cry for the tree
that it draws? What is the longest route
from Manila to Mexico that only once
crosses the equator? When does marriage
become a chandelier? What do you see
at the corner of your eye as you turn
the corner down the corridor of being?
Do words cry when they are born?
Why, oh why, would you take to heart
a poem that takes your life apart?

If This Were Not Love

If this were not love,
I wouldn’t kiss you.
My head would turn
the instant your head
would rise to meet
mine, allowing
our cheeks to console
each other as I distract
you with a tight
embrace. My fingers
would comb your hair
the way mangrove
roots sift through mud
to anchor at the swampy
edge of the bay, extending
the land but not
sailing away. My legs
would entwine around
your legs, with my feet
locked on to yours, as though
we were one immortal
creature with many arms
and many legs, but with many
hearts as well. And my body
will rub against your
body, like millstone
to the mill, skin
on smooth skin, grinding
watered grains
into milk, but only
for spilling.


I wouldn’t kiss you
If this were not love.



(Appeared in a slightly different version in the book "What the Water Said," published 2004 by Libro Agustino. This revised version was read by SGH at the Alliance Francaise de Manille's Printemps des Poètes, March 19, 2007.)

To the One Sleeping with Me Tonight

When I cling to you like a child
Frightened of fireworks, hold me
Tight until my skin on yours perspires
And I roll away, opening us up
Like the shell of a steamed oyster.
You may fake orgasms but please
Don’t lie with kisses. Mouths can tell
When breath is withheld, the way
The seashore knows when the tide
Has drowned in its own shallowness,
The beach ball sun adrift beyond its
Own horizon. Sleep on even when
I get up suddenly before dawn. Don’t
Worry; I have just gone to the next
Galaxy to pee. And for the light years
That I’m away, don’t look for imported
Cigarettes and matches inside the side
Table drawers. Only impaled promises
Lurk there, of the kind lavender-scented
Candles and aphrodisiacs are made.


(First published on page 179 of the CCP Literary Yearbook, "Ani 31.")

Undertow

There is no smell of chlorine
to pierce the nose. In this river
water enfolds me clear
and flowing, currents without waves.
My legs are flourescent pale
underneath, where small fishes
mingle with the bathers, unperturbed,
except by the occasional dives.

I see you coming out
of the waterfall, your body
cutting through the white curtain
whose long hair parts only for the enchanted.
And the enchanting.

Better than misty air
there is liquid bridge between us now
and if my enduring wish were electricity
I would have touched you,
and warmed this river for you.
But fear of intrusion engulfs me
and the undertow of possible rejection
pulls me down, down
to drown with the stones
petrified, the algae,
the dead leaves decaying.

vvvvv

( Published in a different version on page 8 of The Philippine Starweek magazine, January 8, 1995. Revised March 15, 2007.)

How to Be a Lintel

(for Edith Tiempo and Marjorie Evasco)


Marjorie said, “Let us visit the sage
of poetry at her hilltop home in Dumaguete
from where we can observe the ferries
crossing the sea to Cebu, and from her
learn the art of transporting words
from shore to shore one sense at a time.
Like traversing the distance between two columns
With your own body bearing the weight
of all your future children jumping up and down
the springboard of your spine.” And so we went.


The sage said, “The lintel cannot be too unforgiving
or it breaks; let poetry bend and let your span
be measured the way one approximates
the height of a tree by the length of its shadow
at sunset, so that you do not buckle
under the stress of your own body stretching
to bridge the void.” She lay flat on her back
like a beam, almost floating on air with her head
and feet held up by two acacias, one on each end,
and though there was ample headroom in the passage
she cleared up for us, we bowed as we passed.


(-from the 2006 collection, "Building a House," revised March 14, 2007)

Afternoon with a National Artist

In Dumaguete with mom Edith Tiempo and NCCA Chairman Ambeth Ocampo, February 25, 2007.

How to Be a Door

Hinge your life on something
as steadfast as a jamb
but know which way to swing.
(Those who swing both ways
belong between the dining hall
and the kitchen.) Hold your breath
when you are locked, inhale deeply
with every knock that isn't answered
with "come in." Be still
when there is no reply from the innkeeper
of all things. Your name is Portal
so with your body keep out sickness
and greed, and builders who do not know
how to hammer a house with quiet words.
Let sorrow pass, and youth, and the goldest giraffe
who bends low to nibble from a lady's hand,
that all may enter who have traveled worlds
to be astonished; weary now of boulevards
that look out to the sea but never wave;
finally stepping out of solitude into shade,
shaking hands with all they meet inside, all
who have come before them, all who must dwell.


(-from the 2006 collection, "Building a House," revised March 12, 2007)

Ticket

What I keep in my wallet is evidence
of another time: as I unfold this small piece
of paper, its creases transform into furrows,
then forks in a road more tentative
than a typhoon’s turns. You’re seated
beside me again, stringing stories with songs
like multi-colored beads as the window world
becomes a blur of buildings, trees, and electric poles
that could be the ones running outside
while our bus stayed in place. It didn’t matter then.
We had left everything behind that day for a lunch
three hours away and five hours back;
grilled freshwater fish with coconut milk
by the banks of a lake so calm its ripples
resembled rings 0f a tree trunk centuries old,
so that while the afternoon sun was busy
untying its shoes, one could count the age of the water.
It was not too long ago when I stopped
at twenty-seven and said to myself this is the year
I would like to relive over and over again,
come back to like an earmarked page when,
coming to the last few chapters of a novel,
one can already sense how it would probably end:
the lake concealing its lines, the sun disrobing,
dipping into the pool, the bus heading back to the city.

A passenger looking out the window,
with a return ticket in his wallet.

vvvvv

(Initially appeared on page 68 of the Philippines Free Press magazine, August 27, 2005. Revised March 15, 2007)

Ticket (draft)

This is what I keep in my wallet
as evidence of another time: When
I unfold this small piece of paper,
its creases change from furrows
to forks in a road more tentative
than a typhoon's turns. And you're
seated beside me again, stringing
stories and songs as the window world
becomes a blur of buildings and trees
that could be the ones running outside
while the bus we were on stayed in place
for all I care. We left everything behind
that day for a never-ending lunch three
hours away and four hours back.

To Do Today

to write. to simply type away the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy doe. to keep on typing without going back to correct mistakes. to roll over with the day f to let the rivefr run free, unimpeded. to write. to wait for the angelus. the annunciation.

(Free writing)

The Space of Today

today doesn't occupy space;
today is the space.
today doesn't consume time;
today is the time.
i am the occupant,
i am the consumer.
i am in today like a bullfrog in its mudhole
croaking the minutes of eternal night,
the rain pouring from the sky-pitcher
to the basin of earth; water soaking
everything, every thing.

(Free writing)

Today

Today, I write today.