First of all, this is not a book.
There are no words nor numbered pages.
A woman is speaking in low tones from another room,
In another house, a distant country
Her whisper close as mother's
Or lover's song warming the ear.
Snow is falling. Lightning flashes in a desert.
Waves lap up and down an endless beach.
When planets collide, they do not crumble.
At the end of this world is another.
In large halls, strangers dance
Waltzing with wings and heavy hearts.
You call each day by a secret name.
On porcelain jars, under the intertwining trees,
Painted lovers touch tentatively, painted lips.
They do not part even as you watch them.
When she leaves you,
Her receding figure growing large in your eyes,
You will not call after her.
Wise as a child weighed down by discoveries,
You can bear anything. From now on,
All simple lives are legendary.
You keep her fairy tales like sweets
Or stolen stones under your tongue.
Tuesday, October 12, 2010
Andy Warhol Speaks to His Two Filipina Maids page divider Alfred A. Yuson page divider
Art, my dears, is not cleaning up
after the act. Neither is it washing off
grime with the soap of tact. In fact
and in truth, my dears, art is dead
center, between meals, amid spices
and spoilage. Fills up the whitebread
sweep of life's obedient slices.
Art is the letters you send home
about the man you serve. Or the salad
you bring in to my parlor of elites.
While Manhattan stares down at the soup
of our affinities. And we hear talk of coup
in your islands. There they copy love
the way I do, as how I arrive over and over
again at art. Perhaps too it is the time
marked by the sand in your shoes, spilling
softly like rumor. After your hearts I lust.
In our God you trust. And it's your day off.
Walking Home by: Emmanuel S. Torres page divider
At midnight I and a stranger drowsetoward separate homes.
The crunch of small stones underfoot
reminds us how far we are
from each other, although our shadows
would include each other more
than once, streaming forward
from the streetlight behind us
brightening the loneliness
of the steps toward sleep.
At the fork of the road, we part
ways, deepening into night.
How we are closer now,
brothered by night's darkness and beasts
of solitude on all fours.
Each bush is thick with shadow brows
of thieves and the unloved wind
blows my hair to let me in
on its curious passion
for prodigals. As from tree stones
harden away and from stones my heels,
I think of what I have done
or not done, of what I am supposed
to repent to the night that has
small power to absolve. Frogs
croak across my wayfaring,
persisting upon my will to walk
not past the life whose sakes
could be mine to share piecemeal out
to others. Stars are in their places,
naturally, and have nothing to give,
only beauty, although I have
wronged lives and my own least name
walking more than miles
away from those I would love
and strangers to whom I have given
false directions. Yet I take
courage from one light bulb
left burning at the backdoor
of a house no batwing black
can foul, canceling all thought
of stars, their strange violence
and stranger absences.
It will not blur in my storm:
one light god fathering
tracks back to worn thresholds,
not furthering the cause of darkness
in, but my makeshift life,
another only try
to brighten the four corners
of what I have and set straight
my room's several wayward lines
The crunch of small stones underfoot
reminds us how far we are
from each other, although our shadows
would include each other more
than once, streaming forward
from the streetlight behind us
brightening the loneliness
of the steps toward sleep.
At the fork of the road, we part
ways, deepening into night.
How we are closer now,
brothered by night's darkness and beasts
of solitude on all fours.
Each bush is thick with shadow brows
of thieves and the unloved wind
blows my hair to let me in
on its curious passion
for prodigals. As from tree stones
harden away and from stones my heels,
I think of what I have done
or not done, of what I am supposed
to repent to the night that has
small power to absolve. Frogs
croak across my wayfaring,
persisting upon my will to walk
not past the life whose sakes
could be mine to share piecemeal out
to others. Stars are in their places,
naturally, and have nothing to give,
only beauty, although I have
wronged lives and my own least name
walking more than miles
away from those I would love
and strangers to whom I have given
false directions. Yet I take
courage from one light bulb
left burning at the backdoor
of a house no batwing black
can foul, canceling all thought
of stars, their strange violence
and stranger absences.
It will not blur in my storm:
one light god fathering
tracks back to worn thresholds,
not furthering the cause of darkness
in, but my makeshift life,
another only try
to brighten the four corners
of what I have and set straight
my room's several wayward lines
The Three Temptations by: E. San Juan, Jr.
"What death would you desire?"
She says: "A bronze death that yields
a cloister for the heart; or that
which is charter for a giant, a silver death;
or that for which one must labor:
one's sacrament, that's a death of gold?"
Alas, how can your pilgrim choose?
Always there's the hissing of fire--
On my neck creeps the salamander!
But here on this steadfast ground
earth whereon the mighty have fallen,
gnomes choir a bronze hymn to you
and yet could I but rear for myself--
a giant's head far from all solitude--
O how the undine's luster shall flood
into my silver sepulcher! For it is fate
out of gorges between sheer cliffs
that gives us wings for pilgrimage
and you who dance like a scented sylph
on the winds have not, have not
the golden character of grace
and should you but pray for me
'a fine and private place' plucked up
for this death, my death, that's golden
to you alone I give my only name--
"Oh, now, what death would you desire?"
She says: "There is only my embrace."
Open Letters to Filipino Artists by: Emmanuel Lacaba
I Invisible the mountain routes to strangers:
For rushing toes an inch-wide strip on boulders
And for the hand that's free a twig to grasp,
Or else we headlong fall below to rocks
And waterfalls of death so instant that
Too soon they're red with skulls of carabaos.
But patient guides and teachers are the masses:
Of forty mountains and a hundred rivers;
Of plowing, planting, weeding, and the harvest;
And of a dozen dialects that dwarf
This foreign tongue we write each other in
Who must transcend our bourgeois origins.
South Cotabato
May 1, 1975
II
You want to know, companions of my youth
How much has changed the wild but shy young poet
Forever writing last poem after last poem;
You hear he's dark as earth, barefoot,
A turban round his head, a bolo at his side,
His ballpen blown up to a long-barreled gun:
Deeper still the struggling change inside.
Like husks of coconut he tears away
The billion layers of his selfishness.
Or learns to cage his longing like the bird
Of legend, fire, and song within his chest.
Now of consequence is his anemia
From lack of sleep: no longer for Bohemia,
The lumpen culturati, but for the people, yes.
He mixes metaphors but values more
A holographic and geometric memory
For mountains: not because they are there
But because the masses are there where
Routes are jigsaw puzzles he must piece together.
Though he has been called a brown Rimbaud,
He is no bandit but a people's warrior.
South Cotabato and Davao del Norte
November 1975
III
We are tribeless and all tribes are ours.
We are homeless and all homes are ours.
We are nameless and all names are ours.
To the fascists we are the faceless enemy
Who come like thieves in the night, angels of death:
The ever moving, shining, secret eye of the storm.
The road less traveled by we've taken-
And that has made all the difference:
The barefoot army of the wilderness
We all should be in time. Awakened, the masses are Messiah.
Here among workers and peasants our lost
Generation has found its true, its only home.
Davao del Norte
For rushing toes an inch-wide strip on boulders
And for the hand that's free a twig to grasp,
Or else we headlong fall below to rocks
And waterfalls of death so instant that
Too soon they're red with skulls of carabaos.
But patient guides and teachers are the masses:
Of forty mountains and a hundred rivers;
Of plowing, planting, weeding, and the harvest;
And of a dozen dialects that dwarf
This foreign tongue we write each other in
Who must transcend our bourgeois origins.
South Cotabato
May 1, 1975
II
You want to know, companions of my youth
How much has changed the wild but shy young poet
Forever writing last poem after last poem;
You hear he's dark as earth, barefoot,
A turban round his head, a bolo at his side,
His ballpen blown up to a long-barreled gun:
Deeper still the struggling change inside.
Like husks of coconut he tears away
The billion layers of his selfishness.
Or learns to cage his longing like the bird
Of legend, fire, and song within his chest.
Now of consequence is his anemia
From lack of sleep: no longer for Bohemia,
The lumpen culturati, but for the people, yes.
He mixes metaphors but values more
A holographic and geometric memory
For mountains: not because they are there
But because the masses are there where
Routes are jigsaw puzzles he must piece together.
Though he has been called a brown Rimbaud,
He is no bandit but a people's warrior.
South Cotabato and Davao del Norte
November 1975
III
We are tribeless and all tribes are ours.
We are homeless and all homes are ours.
We are nameless and all names are ours.
To the fascists we are the faceless enemy
Who come like thieves in the night, angels of death:
The ever moving, shining, secret eye of the storm.
The road less traveled by we've taken-
And that has made all the difference:
The barefoot army of the wilderness
We all should be in time. Awakened, the masses are Messiah.
Here among workers and peasants our lost
Generation has found its true, its only home.
Davao del Norte
Landscape with Figures
Homeward again under foreign stars,
history was a strange gush of wind from memory
that came to echo waterfalls of those years:
home to find the place lost among
galaxies of signs. The hills were gone. The river
trail was forgotten. . . Trying to remember meadowlark
and those who perished in the vanishing land
(bones in the earth where our parents died poor),
the journey fell into heavy tides of flowing
scorn that echoed and reechoed time there.
The sun was most unkind to the place:
history: names of men: patterns of life:
all that distant floodtide heaved and moved,
breaking familiar names that immortal tongues
clipped for the heart to cry, "Home is a foreign address,
every step toward it is a step toward three hundred years
of exile from the truth. . ."
It was not homeward
to the first known land, nor escape
to white sea sprays blossoming on inland shore,
nor love leaping the boundaries naked in the soul,
but a vast heritage of war and destruction breaking
too soon for the living and willing to die.
Life is a foreign language. Every man mispronounced it . . .
Sunday, October 3, 2010
The Rose
Through the impenetrable dark she searches with insistence,
The liquid of life she craves for vital sustenance,
Replenished by the moisture found beneath,
Strengthened by nutrients stolen like a thief,
Her gentle beauty so enticing, yet deceptive,
Her natural defence so severe, yet effective,
Pain is reserved for all that dare to touch her,
Her wrath is not something you wish to incur,
She reaches her arms towards the warmth of the sun,
Revelling in the glory like she, is the only one,
Spreading her fingers to capture every single ray,
Making use of every available second within the day,
Revealing to the world her alluring magnificence,
Pushing forth her tender petals to a captive audience,
Exquisite, abundant beauty beyond all imagination,
Encircling the viewer and holding their fascination,
She stands alone, stark, pleading her request,
A painter’s model, posed perfectly and statuesque,
Picturesque and solitary, her stature is formidable,
Her presence beyond the incredible
The tender petals hiding beneath them her ferocious thorns,
When her flower begins to fade Mother Nature will softly mourn,
Her time is short and shared with only but a few,
Perhaps next time, the spectator, can be you...
Take the time to enjoy beauty while it is there as tomorrow it may not be.......
The liquid of life she craves for vital sustenance,
Replenished by the moisture found beneath,
Strengthened by nutrients stolen like a thief,
Her gentle beauty so enticing, yet deceptive,
Her natural defence so severe, yet effective,
Pain is reserved for all that dare to touch her,
Her wrath is not something you wish to incur,
She reaches her arms towards the warmth of the sun,
Revelling in the glory like she, is the only one,
Spreading her fingers to capture every single ray,
Making use of every available second within the day,
Revealing to the world her alluring magnificence,
Pushing forth her tender petals to a captive audience,
Exquisite, abundant beauty beyond all imagination,
Encircling the viewer and holding their fascination,
She stands alone, stark, pleading her request,
A painter’s model, posed perfectly and statuesque,
Picturesque and solitary, her stature is formidable,
Her presence beyond the incredible
The tender petals hiding beneath them her ferocious thorns,
When her flower begins to fade Mother Nature will softly mourn,
Her time is short and shared with only but a few,
Perhaps next time, the spectator, can be you...
Take the time to enjoy beauty while it is there as tomorrow it may not be.......
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