09-20-2016, 04:51 PM
(This post was last modified: 09-20-2016, 06:03 PM by RiverNotch.)
So again, my sister bought me an anthology of Filipino Poetry in English a couple of days ago, and, legal woes somewhat assuaged (if you have more detailed knowledge of Philippine copyright law, do post in the other thread) I'll present a lot of the poems here --- gradually, since it's a print-book. The anthology is titled "A Habit of Shores: Filipino Poetry and Verse from English, 60's to the 90's", and its editor is Gémino H. Abad, Ph.D. Feel free to comment on the poems as I go!
Scribe's note 1: How do you indent? I think the indents I used below were a bit too much.
Scribe's note 2: So I tried {=4}, and....well, just look at the contents.
Scribe's note 3: So it's {=4}{space}text! Massive thanks to ray for this.
Scribe's note 4: An especially long update today! I haven't been able to read much of the rest of the book yet, so this thread is catching up! Anyway, some of Fernando Afable's poems had a few typos, the manuscripts Gemino Abad took them from were unpublished, so I corrected them; the corrections shouldn't be intrusive, they all involved only spelling. And for the piece by Albert B. Casuga, the presented copy did not have the subtitle or the prologue, though according to Dr. Abad's notes they were present in other published manuscripts: I chose to include them, as I found them particularly useful. Dr. Abad also presented a few variations of the piece (as well as a few variations on other pieces I've already posted), but I've chosen not to publish them here, to give the especially interested incentive to buy the book, xP.
CONTENTS
Luis Cabalquinto
Hometown
Sunday with the Smiths
At Camp Look-Out
Eating Lechon, with my Brothers & Sisters
Alignment
Oil Flame Fandango
The Dog-Eater
The Ordinance
Nassau Lights
Depths of Fields
Myrna Peña-Reyes
San Juan
For E.K.
Breaking Through
Red Sunflower
Ruth Was Not Penelope
The River Singing Stone
Grandmother's Jewels
The Manong and His Dog
Loading
Watchers and Trainers
Cesar T. Mella, Jr.
Candletallows
The Fragrant Field
Cesar Ruiz Aquino
Memory
Kalisud á la Rizal
Word Without End
Dedication
Sun
Jason Montana
Satori, After Reading Sylvia
From Rituals for Comrade Anna (1950-1989)
Fernando Afable
The Language Problem
Letter to the Philippines
El Camino Real
The Ice Storm
Manila International
In Medias Res
Albert B. Casuga
In a Sparrow's Time
Luis Cabalquinto
HOMETOWN
After a supper of mountain rice
And wood-roasted river crab
I sit on a long bench outside
The old house, looking at a river:
Alone, myself, again away
From that other self in the city
On this piece of ancestor land,
My pulses slowed, I am at peace.
I have no wish but this place ---
To remain here in a stopped time
With stars moving on that water
And in the sky a brightness
Answering: I want nothing else
But this stillness filling me
From a pure darkness over the land
That smells ever freshly of trees.
The night and I are quiet now
But for small laughter from a neighbor,
The quick sweep of a winged creature
And a warm dog, snuggled by my feet.
1973
SUNDAY WITH THE SMITHS
The pond fish have been caught & cleaned
& I have left their heads on
& Bob says "Ugh!" as Kathleen prepares to
bake them.
Steve is doing the chickens on the
outdoor grill
& at a table on the grass in front
of this white farm house
Vicky and I lay out stuff on the cloth.
When everything is done after an hour
we all sit down for dinner,
Having earlier begun our wine
& fruit.
"A fine day for a barbecue party,"
Kathleen says,
& We pause & Bob says grace.
I sit sharply aware: I feel & see
Us all, as if apart: I watch from a
point just above my head in space,
Beside the blue spruce alive with needles
of light.
We quietly pray, & the bees come to us for
the wayward wine on our lips.
The sun's long lukewarm rays ---
& the smells of apples in the yard
& of pears on our clothes
& of "Shaggy" chasing shadows
Among the yellow lilies ---
bring a small quake rushing
Towards the end of my fingers.
I pray that something gentle
& old, involving all of us, should often
come true: something like today,
Something after this Sunday's mold.
1973
AT CAMP LOOK-OUT
Up,
Where the mind turns clean
And light
As sea wind moving into mountain peaks,
I let that other in me free ---
Quickly, he runs towards the trees:
curious, his fingers explore the lichens.
He rides the breeze, afloat and bright,
shimmering as a straying bee.
He zooms upon a random-flying bird,
mounts it, the two becoming an odd object.
He changes into many shapes and sizes:
gets to be a frond of coconut,
a graceful broad-leaved fern,
a bloom in the distance.
He becomes, too, the listening stone, sunk
in grass.
Finding a solitary sheep, he grazes with it,
shaking his head, bending his
tongue into the animal's language.
He meanders among the wild strawberries,
picking and tasting the half-ripe fruit,
then spitting it out for the bitterness ---
like an unlearned mountain goat.
He creates and recreates himself, steps in and out
of his small and larger self,
growing more magical with each change,
with every movement.
Finally losing all distinction, he grows
to become the mountain itself,
both the sky and the sea.
Then, finished with his artful games,
and wanting to return,
He assumes my face again.
So,
Strengthened and fulfilled, I go ---
carrying that other, peaceful
within me ---
Back to my busy place, in a lowland city.
1974
EATING LECHON,
WITH MY BROTHERS & SISTERS
What fullness in the life is this which possesses
An October night
In the patio of my mother's house
Eating lechon with my brothers & sisters
At a reunion ---
We laugh, we dine & wine: my nephews I don't recognize ---
Grown: my nieces beautiful, with smooth skins &
White teeth: against my brothers' & sisters' dark
Middle age.
We are all here, all ears:
I tell them about the Flamenco dancers in Madrid;
How the lights bloom each night in Paris;
How cold the lakes are in September in Switzerland.
I tell them about my disappointments in Rome; how I danced
All night with friends on a canal barge in Amsterdam
Where they served the best wine & cheese.
I tell them, too, about the poverty I saw in India
& the beauty of the Taj. And I tell them specially
About the Chinese friend I met in London & seen again
In Hongkong: the surprising hospitality: the nights
At the Chinese opera: the endless dinners: the eating
With chopsticks in the cold blue dawn at a sidewalk table
In a secret quarter in Kowloon where old men sleep on
Doorsteps.
They are here, they listen.
We all listen, late into the night in the light of
A full moon over Magarao. We dream our dreams
Again, brothers & sisters, nephews & nieces, mother
& siblings: together.
Later, as I rest alone in my room, hearing
My nieces sing of love & the adolescent
In the dulcet tone of my childhood dialect,
I also hear a silence beyond their young
Voices, undisturbed but for the distant bark of a dog.
I listen & try to take all in
With a new understanding.
When sleep comes gently
I feel at peace: tonight at least, content.
1974
ALIGNMENT
It happened again this afternoon
While watching a Wertmuller movie
In the East Village:
This alignment that comes
Like a magnet's work on iron filings
When most things of the mind
As well as of the body are turned
Toward the one direction
Where all must come from
And where all must one day begin
Again: it comes unsummoned, a shift
Now familiar, a quick
Turning over of an event,
It comes as a small wind in Central Park,
The noontime hammering heard in a Philippine village.
It is an afternoon walk on a rain-wet street in Agra,
Neon lights seen from a hotel at midnight in Tokyo.
It came once from the bend of a woman's body in Rome,
From a late Flamenco show in Barcelona.
Also it came on the Monterey road
Riding the Greyhound from San Francisco ---
And, again, in the odd light of an old man's eye
Photographed in New Mexico.
When it happens a strong grip takes over
In the body: the head becomes light.
The hairs stand on end, the pores open
And currents run down to the palms and feet:
Aware at this moment of a new knowledge
That makes the old truths untrue.
Still, each time this happens,
The clarity lasts only seconds:
Before full possession can take place
Something changes the air, reworks the body:
The mind is dislodges, recalled
To an accustomed disorder.
1977
OIL FLAME FANDANGO
They have come out to dance --- the mango flames!
And their song has brought perfect bodies --- watch:
How out of the bodies burst doves that bite
And dismember the air, casting it into laughing water,
How arcs of golden bone drum against the hollow trees
And fishes fly swiftly out of their shallows,
How they become winged creatures that soar above the harvest
Before the monsoon rains come running with muddy feet,
And see how behind the bamboo dark young couples make love,
Their long-haired night a woman moved by tongues.
1982
THE DOG-EATER
It was the piss on the snow
On a sidewalk in New York
That brought up the thought of a moon
In his childhood: in a cloudless sky,
A clean sphere like a huge new lamp
Under which, for the first time, the boy saw the dog-eater.
It was said in the barrio of San Miguel that the man Jose
Ate dog's meat each day of the week
And the village dogs could tell it from his scent,
That eating dog's meat occasionally was all right
But to do it every day makes you smell like a dog yourself.
But they say that Jose knew that too and he was a man
Who knew who he was and what he was doing.
On the moon-lit night he saw the dog-eater
He heard the barking and howling, first from a distance
Softly, then rising in volume like an accompaniment
To something coming that was dangerous to someone ---
Though not to the boy who eagerly waited.
He saw him from the window of his house:
A small dark man in a dark shirt who walked
Easily, as if oblivious to the noise and commotion
That followed him, as all the dogs in all the houses
(All houses in the boy's village kept dogs
And the boy's house had three) came out
To complain, barking and following the dog-eater
Though they dared not come close enough to do him any harm.
The dog-eater, the light of the moon on his white hair
And on his thin clothes, walked by with his head tilted
To the ground. He never lifted his head
Even when somebody called out his name
And said something the boy did not understand.
He kept his eyes to the gravel road, walking
Until his body disappeared at the bend.
When the dog-eater was gone, the boy looked up:
He saw again the bright moon in the cloudless sky.
He stared at its huge and pervasive presence ---
Its color like the color that many years later
He would see on a patch of snow
On a sidewalk in New York.
1983
THE ORDINANCE
Stepping out of my apartment building,
One early morning, I meet a poem
Being walked around the block by its master.
I follow them.
At the corner, the poem stops and bends its hind legs.
Something drops to the pavement.
Another poem?
I quicken my steps.
But before I can reach the fallen object
The poem master notices it.
He turns back and takes out a poem scooper.
In one sweep he scoops up the new poem.
He sees me coming and hurriedly
Slips the scooped poem into a pouch,
Then wipes the pavement clean.
Keeping an eye on his poems, the poem master
moves away.
Later, at the newsstand, I pick up the paper
And learn what this is all about:
A new ordinance passed, banning poems from
littering the streets ---
To promote public hygiene and better relations
among the citizens.
1983
NASSAU LIGHTS
We are conscripted by the moonlight as
Witnesses to its fine postulate on the kinship
Between our human skin and this earthly sand:
It calls out to other lights of the mind.
We see a starry night's outstretched hand
In the quick outline of a gesture, of a lover's.
We get punchy in the sudden joy of this freedom
From the closed-teeth watching of ourselves.
And now we look at the glitter of a wave approach:
One more light to join us, to bear witness.
1986
DEPTHS OF FIELDS
I walk some hundred paces from the old house
where I was raised, where many are absent now,
and the ricefields sweep into view: here where
during home leaves I'm drawn to watch on evenings
such as this, when the moon is fat and much given
to the free spending of its rich cache of light
which transmutes all things: it changes me now,
like someone restored to the newness of his life.
Note the wind's shuffle in the crown of tall coconut
trees; the broad patches of moon-flecked water ---
freshly-sowed with seedlings; the grass huts of
croppers, windows framed by the flicker of kerosene
lamps: an unearthly calm pervades all that is seen.
Beauty unreserved holds down a country's suffering.
Disclosed in this high-pitched hour: a long-held
secret displaced by ambition and need, a country
boy's pained enchantment with his hometown lands
that remains intact in a lifetime of wanderings.
As I looked again, embraced by depths of an old
loneliness, I'm permanently returned to this world,
to the meanings it has saved for me. If I die now,
in the grasp of childhood fields, I'll miss nothing.
1992
Scribe's note 1: How do you indent? I think the indents I used below were a bit too much.
Scribe's note 2: So I tried {=4}, and....well, just look at the contents.
Scribe's note 3: So it's {=4}{space}text! Massive thanks to ray for this.
Scribe's note 4: An especially long update today! I haven't been able to read much of the rest of the book yet, so this thread is catching up! Anyway, some of Fernando Afable's poems had a few typos, the manuscripts Gemino Abad took them from were unpublished, so I corrected them; the corrections shouldn't be intrusive, they all involved only spelling. And for the piece by Albert B. Casuga, the presented copy did not have the subtitle or the prologue, though according to Dr. Abad's notes they were present in other published manuscripts: I chose to include them, as I found them particularly useful. Dr. Abad also presented a few variations of the piece (as well as a few variations on other pieces I've already posted), but I've chosen not to publish them here, to give the especially interested incentive to buy the book, xP.
CONTENTS
Luis Cabalquinto
Hometown
Sunday with the Smiths
At Camp Look-Out
Eating Lechon, with my Brothers & Sisters
Alignment
Oil Flame Fandango
The Dog-Eater
The Ordinance
Nassau Lights
Depths of Fields
Myrna Peña-Reyes
San Juan
For E.K.
Breaking Through
Red Sunflower
Ruth Was Not Penelope
The River Singing Stone
Grandmother's Jewels
The Manong and His Dog
Loading
Watchers and Trainers
Cesar T. Mella, Jr.
Candletallows
The Fragrant Field
Cesar Ruiz Aquino
Memory
Kalisud á la Rizal
Word Without End
Dedication
Sun
Jason Montana
Satori, After Reading Sylvia
From Rituals for Comrade Anna (1950-1989)
Fernando Afable
The Language Problem
Letter to the Philippines
El Camino Real
The Ice Storm
Manila International
In Medias Res
Albert B. Casuga
In a Sparrow's Time
Luis Cabalquinto
HOMETOWN
After a supper of mountain rice
And wood-roasted river crab
I sit on a long bench outside
The old house, looking at a river:
Alone, myself, again away
From that other self in the city
On this piece of ancestor land,
My pulses slowed, I am at peace.
I have no wish but this place ---
To remain here in a stopped time
With stars moving on that water
And in the sky a brightness
Answering: I want nothing else
But this stillness filling me
From a pure darkness over the land
That smells ever freshly of trees.
The night and I are quiet now
But for small laughter from a neighbor,
The quick sweep of a winged creature
And a warm dog, snuggled by my feet.
1973
SUNDAY WITH THE SMITHS
The pond fish have been caught & cleaned
& I have left their heads on
& Bob says "Ugh!" as Kathleen prepares to
bake them.
Steve is doing the chickens on the
outdoor grill
& at a table on the grass in front
of this white farm house
Vicky and I lay out stuff on the cloth.
When everything is done after an hour
we all sit down for dinner,
Having earlier begun our wine
& fruit.
"A fine day for a barbecue party,"
Kathleen says,
& We pause & Bob says grace.
I sit sharply aware: I feel & see
Us all, as if apart: I watch from a
point just above my head in space,
Beside the blue spruce alive with needles
of light.
We quietly pray, & the bees come to us for
the wayward wine on our lips.
The sun's long lukewarm rays ---
& the smells of apples in the yard
& of pears on our clothes
& of "Shaggy" chasing shadows
Among the yellow lilies ---
bring a small quake rushing
Towards the end of my fingers.
I pray that something gentle
& old, involving all of us, should often
come true: something like today,
Something after this Sunday's mold.
1973
AT CAMP LOOK-OUT
Up,
Where the mind turns clean
And light
As sea wind moving into mountain peaks,
I let that other in me free ---
Quickly, he runs towards the trees:
curious, his fingers explore the lichens.
He rides the breeze, afloat and bright,
shimmering as a straying bee.
He zooms upon a random-flying bird,
mounts it, the two becoming an odd object.
He changes into many shapes and sizes:
gets to be a frond of coconut,
a graceful broad-leaved fern,
a bloom in the distance.
He becomes, too, the listening stone, sunk
in grass.
Finding a solitary sheep, he grazes with it,
shaking his head, bending his
tongue into the animal's language.
He meanders among the wild strawberries,
picking and tasting the half-ripe fruit,
then spitting it out for the bitterness ---
like an unlearned mountain goat.
He creates and recreates himself, steps in and out
of his small and larger self,
growing more magical with each change,
with every movement.
Finally losing all distinction, he grows
to become the mountain itself,
both the sky and the sea.
Then, finished with his artful games,
and wanting to return,
He assumes my face again.
So,
Strengthened and fulfilled, I go ---
carrying that other, peaceful
within me ---
Back to my busy place, in a lowland city.
1974
EATING LECHON,
WITH MY BROTHERS & SISTERS
What fullness in the life is this which possesses
An October night
In the patio of my mother's house
Eating lechon with my brothers & sisters
At a reunion ---
We laugh, we dine & wine: my nephews I don't recognize ---
Grown: my nieces beautiful, with smooth skins &
White teeth: against my brothers' & sisters' dark
Middle age.
We are all here, all ears:
I tell them about the Flamenco dancers in Madrid;
How the lights bloom each night in Paris;
How cold the lakes are in September in Switzerland.
I tell them about my disappointments in Rome; how I danced
All night with friends on a canal barge in Amsterdam
Where they served the best wine & cheese.
I tell them, too, about the poverty I saw in India
& the beauty of the Taj. And I tell them specially
About the Chinese friend I met in London & seen again
In Hongkong: the surprising hospitality: the nights
At the Chinese opera: the endless dinners: the eating
With chopsticks in the cold blue dawn at a sidewalk table
In a secret quarter in Kowloon where old men sleep on
Doorsteps.
They are here, they listen.
We all listen, late into the night in the light of
A full moon over Magarao. We dream our dreams
Again, brothers & sisters, nephews & nieces, mother
& siblings: together.
Later, as I rest alone in my room, hearing
My nieces sing of love & the adolescent
In the dulcet tone of my childhood dialect,
I also hear a silence beyond their young
Voices, undisturbed but for the distant bark of a dog.
I listen & try to take all in
With a new understanding.
When sleep comes gently
I feel at peace: tonight at least, content.
1974
ALIGNMENT
It happened again this afternoon
While watching a Wertmuller movie
In the East Village:
This alignment that comes
Like a magnet's work on iron filings
When most things of the mind
As well as of the body are turned
Toward the one direction
Where all must come from
And where all must one day begin
Again: it comes unsummoned, a shift
Now familiar, a quick
Turning over of an event,
It comes as a small wind in Central Park,
The noontime hammering heard in a Philippine village.
It is an afternoon walk on a rain-wet street in Agra,
Neon lights seen from a hotel at midnight in Tokyo.
It came once from the bend of a woman's body in Rome,
From a late Flamenco show in Barcelona.
Also it came on the Monterey road
Riding the Greyhound from San Francisco ---
And, again, in the odd light of an old man's eye
Photographed in New Mexico.
When it happens a strong grip takes over
In the body: the head becomes light.
The hairs stand on end, the pores open
And currents run down to the palms and feet:
Aware at this moment of a new knowledge
That makes the old truths untrue.
Still, each time this happens,
The clarity lasts only seconds:
Before full possession can take place
Something changes the air, reworks the body:
The mind is dislodges, recalled
To an accustomed disorder.
1977
OIL FLAME FANDANGO
They have come out to dance --- the mango flames!
And their song has brought perfect bodies --- watch:
How out of the bodies burst doves that bite
And dismember the air, casting it into laughing water,
How arcs of golden bone drum against the hollow trees
And fishes fly swiftly out of their shallows,
How they become winged creatures that soar above the harvest
Before the monsoon rains come running with muddy feet,
And see how behind the bamboo dark young couples make love,
Their long-haired night a woman moved by tongues.
1982
THE DOG-EATER
It was the piss on the snow
On a sidewalk in New York
That brought up the thought of a moon
In his childhood: in a cloudless sky,
A clean sphere like a huge new lamp
Under which, for the first time, the boy saw the dog-eater.
It was said in the barrio of San Miguel that the man Jose
Ate dog's meat each day of the week
And the village dogs could tell it from his scent,
That eating dog's meat occasionally was all right
But to do it every day makes you smell like a dog yourself.
But they say that Jose knew that too and he was a man
Who knew who he was and what he was doing.
On the moon-lit night he saw the dog-eater
He heard the barking and howling, first from a distance
Softly, then rising in volume like an accompaniment
To something coming that was dangerous to someone ---
Though not to the boy who eagerly waited.
He saw him from the window of his house:
A small dark man in a dark shirt who walked
Easily, as if oblivious to the noise and commotion
That followed him, as all the dogs in all the houses
(All houses in the boy's village kept dogs
And the boy's house had three) came out
To complain, barking and following the dog-eater
Though they dared not come close enough to do him any harm.
The dog-eater, the light of the moon on his white hair
And on his thin clothes, walked by with his head tilted
To the ground. He never lifted his head
Even when somebody called out his name
And said something the boy did not understand.
He kept his eyes to the gravel road, walking
Until his body disappeared at the bend.
When the dog-eater was gone, the boy looked up:
He saw again the bright moon in the cloudless sky.
He stared at its huge and pervasive presence ---
Its color like the color that many years later
He would see on a patch of snow
On a sidewalk in New York.
1983
THE ORDINANCE
Stepping out of my apartment building,
One early morning, I meet a poem
Being walked around the block by its master.
I follow them.
At the corner, the poem stops and bends its hind legs.
Something drops to the pavement.
Another poem?
I quicken my steps.
But before I can reach the fallen object
The poem master notices it.
He turns back and takes out a poem scooper.
In one sweep he scoops up the new poem.
He sees me coming and hurriedly
Slips the scooped poem into a pouch,
Then wipes the pavement clean.
Keeping an eye on his poems, the poem master
moves away.
Later, at the newsstand, I pick up the paper
And learn what this is all about:
A new ordinance passed, banning poems from
littering the streets ---
To promote public hygiene and better relations
among the citizens.
1983
NASSAU LIGHTS
We are conscripted by the moonlight as
Witnesses to its fine postulate on the kinship
Between our human skin and this earthly sand:
It calls out to other lights of the mind.
We see a starry night's outstretched hand
In the quick outline of a gesture, of a lover's.
We get punchy in the sudden joy of this freedom
From the closed-teeth watching of ourselves.
And now we look at the glitter of a wave approach:
One more light to join us, to bear witness.
1986
DEPTHS OF FIELDS
I walk some hundred paces from the old house
where I was raised, where many are absent now,
and the ricefields sweep into view: here where
during home leaves I'm drawn to watch on evenings
such as this, when the moon is fat and much given
to the free spending of its rich cache of light
which transmutes all things: it changes me now,
like someone restored to the newness of his life.
Note the wind's shuffle in the crown of tall coconut
trees; the broad patches of moon-flecked water ---
freshly-sowed with seedlings; the grass huts of
croppers, windows framed by the flicker of kerosene
lamps: an unearthly calm pervades all that is seen.
Beauty unreserved holds down a country's suffering.
Disclosed in this high-pitched hour: a long-held
secret displaced by ambition and need, a country
boy's pained enchantment with his hometown lands
that remains intact in a lifetime of wanderings.
As I looked again, embraced by depths of an old
loneliness, I'm permanently returned to this world,
to the meanings it has saved for me. If I die now,
in the grasp of childhood fields, I'll miss nothing.
1992