09-27-2016, 05:57 PM
Ah, the spaces. Let's see.
Cesar T. Mellar, Jr.
CANDLETALLOWS
Daylight is gone and the nightwind
screams in my heart,
howls to the trees of fire.
November is so active in this town
of corpses. The candles sing
as in churches in April or on wedding days.
I have covered my typewriter,
nailed my mind on the doorway of darkness
to be alone while I embrace you.
How colder than the rains you are
now dawn is bleeding
and funeral tongues are scraping candletallows
on the moveless grass.
1974
THE FRAGRANT FIELD
This field will never brown, neither will it
ever grow arid,
Nor cease to be fragrant, nor in the dawn
When the sky is orange,
Cease to glory in the bursting light
And let the birds come wheeling in the air.
Do I care for more? This field is love enough
for me.
It yields me everything.
A plate of rice, a bowl of coconut milk;
Some fresh vegetables, and fish from its watery bosom
More than what my body's basket can hold.
And for my soul, you ask?
Each dusk, by the flickering candlelight,
In my bamboo chair, I sing with Tagore.
1975
Cesar Ruiz Aquino
MEMORY
It seemed from the dead that I rose
To retrieve my body
As an executioner would
His rope.
I looked at you, drowned
But for the lidded gaze,
The bright birds roosting
Beneath your limbs.
It is thus that our eyes would meet.
Always.
Always I'd look at you, long gone, and day
Hoods my face like moonlight.
1985
KALISUD A LA RIZAL
What shall I do if she suddenly asks
Me for verses? Leave it to the weather?
Describe the available moon --- whether
Waxing or waning? Alas, the Muse basks
In her absence! Invisibility
Of invisibilities! all is in
Visibility --- the ability
To begin only is amiss --- no sin
In itself except that by Hera she
Is so mine to write, O so meant to be
The word I cannot word, the nightmarish
Love of love of love by which I perish ---
What shall I do if she asks me for verses?
Aye, how shall Death be if I cannot write?
1987
WORD WITHOUT END
East, all memory and all the yearning
Lost. But how dawn performs the glory,
Overnight perhaps pondered the bone
Valley, where love and paradise grow.
Vouchsafed the word, the heart for story
Early seized God's incredible morning,
Looting the universe of the horned moon,
Of the owl's hooting, of the worm's glow ---
O Love, upon these passwords that borrow
Virtue from lovers, grant it a starry
Evening to beat, forever and a sun-
Lit day, when even winters are burning.
Love, for a day, be the tetragrammaton ---
Open only the vanished places, blow
Vendavals and let the last one tarry
Even as the sands and there's no turning.
1987
DEDICATION
Forests and rivers by her dreamed
Breast, the fire of secret moons
Whose limbs heal the very words
Whence they flow, and when at rest
Bank, all imponderable finitude, the foaming
Tide of stars. The mirror long-kept!
The windfall of her sleep stirs the beasts
And I leap in rage across the void.
How can I touch her when she has fled
Inside me?
Like a lost tribe in marches of love
And terror I have wandered,
Grown old alone.
1988
SUN
I dreamt the sun no longer just rose and set.
It nudged the moon, playful at the whiteness.
It zigzagged, spiraled, yoyoed. Played possum
When God stirred at midday, at the brightness.
It went sideways below the horizon
Creating an endless sunrise and sunset, a sun
That played hide-and-seek, peek-a-boo
With shadows. And the fish jumped and the birds.
It played hooky, drifted away and wandered
As if in search of its origin, farther and farther
Till it twinkled and I heard the river
Ambushed by the universe that had fled within.
I heard your shout from the other side of the world
And you sounded younger. I heard the mermaids.
The grass. The hand. Picasso's three musicians ---
But the star was coming home in a dawn in which
Sun moves towards us, not round.
How can the sun do this? Wake as I might
The miracle held out. I heard the cock crow
You awash in sleep, incredible in the light.
1993
Cesar T. Mellar, Jr.
CANDLETALLOWS
Daylight is gone and the nightwind
screams in my heart,
howls to the trees of fire.
November is so active in this town
of corpses. The candles sing
as in churches in April or on wedding days.
I have covered my typewriter,
nailed my mind on the doorway of darkness
to be alone while I embrace you.
How colder than the rains you are
now dawn is bleeding
and funeral tongues are scraping candletallows
on the moveless grass.
1974
THE FRAGRANT FIELD
This field will never brown, neither will it
ever grow arid,
Nor cease to be fragrant, nor in the dawn
When the sky is orange,
Cease to glory in the bursting light
And let the birds come wheeling in the air.
Do I care for more? This field is love enough
for me.
It yields me everything.
A plate of rice, a bowl of coconut milk;
Some fresh vegetables, and fish from its watery bosom
More than what my body's basket can hold.
And for my soul, you ask?
Each dusk, by the flickering candlelight,
In my bamboo chair, I sing with Tagore.
1975
Cesar Ruiz Aquino
MEMORY
It seemed from the dead that I rose
To retrieve my body
As an executioner would
His rope.
I looked at you, drowned
But for the lidded gaze,
The bright birds roosting
Beneath your limbs.
It is thus that our eyes would meet.
Always.
Always I'd look at you, long gone, and day
Hoods my face like moonlight.
1985
KALISUD A LA RIZAL
What shall I do if she suddenly asks
Me for verses? Leave it to the weather?
Describe the available moon --- whether
Waxing or waning? Alas, the Muse basks
In her absence! Invisibility
Of invisibilities! all is in
Visibility --- the ability
To begin only is amiss --- no sin
In itself except that by Hera she
Is so mine to write, O so meant to be
The word I cannot word, the nightmarish
Love of love of love by which I perish ---
What shall I do if she asks me for verses?
Aye, how shall Death be if I cannot write?
1987
WORD WITHOUT END
East, all memory and all the yearning
Lost. But how dawn performs the glory,
Overnight perhaps pondered the bone
Valley, where love and paradise grow.
Vouchsafed the word, the heart for story
Early seized God's incredible morning,
Looting the universe of the horned moon,
Of the owl's hooting, of the worm's glow ---
O Love, upon these passwords that borrow
Virtue from lovers, grant it a starry
Evening to beat, forever and a sun-
Lit day, when even winters are burning.
Love, for a day, be the tetragrammaton ---
Open only the vanished places, blow
Vendavals and let the last one tarry
Even as the sands and there's no turning.
1987
DEDICATION
Forests and rivers by her dreamed
Breast, the fire of secret moons
Whose limbs heal the very words
Whence they flow, and when at rest
Bank, all imponderable finitude, the foaming
Tide of stars. The mirror long-kept!
The windfall of her sleep stirs the beasts
And I leap in rage across the void.
How can I touch her when she has fled
Inside me?
Like a lost tribe in marches of love
And terror I have wandered,
Grown old alone.
1988
SUN
I dreamt the sun no longer just rose and set.
It nudged the moon, playful at the whiteness.
It zigzagged, spiraled, yoyoed. Played possum
When God stirred at midday, at the brightness.
It went sideways below the horizon
Creating an endless sunrise and sunset, a sun
That played hide-and-seek, peek-a-boo
With shadows. And the fish jumped and the birds.
It played hooky, drifted away and wandered
As if in search of its origin, farther and farther
Till it twinkled and I heard the river
Ambushed by the universe that had fled within.
I heard your shout from the other side of the world
And you sounded younger. I heard the mermaids.
The grass. The hand. Picasso's three musicians ---
But the star was coming home in a dawn in which
Sun moves towards us, not round.
How can the sun do this? Wake as I might
The miracle held out. I heard the cock crow
You awash in sleep, incredible in the light.
1993