Pinoy Penman

Flotsam & Jetsam (20) for April 30, 2006


I'D NEVER heard of John Engels before I picked up a book of his poems (of which this is the title poem) from a Book Sale bin in Cubao a week ago. But here's the kind of poem I wish I'd written (or could write).


VIVALDI IN EARLY FALL
by John Engels

O this is what it is to be
Vivaldi, in September, in my
forty-eighth year, the pines
just beginning to sing
on the hillsides, the rivers
coloring with the first rains
(which are, as usual, precisely
on time). And there is also

this young girl, who, each year,
I bring into my mind,
making it to be that if she knew
by what measure I considered her,
she would turn and look at me and smile,
thinking, “It is the priest again,
the one with red hair, who is said
to make music, and who—as every year—
has gone a little sweetly crazy,
and I think he may love how I am today
in my blue dress.” And she
is right. In September I am moved
to the melancholy theme: I like to make the cello
sing with the pines, be on the verge
of the thunderously sad. And, as always,
at this time I would like to make the melody

go on forever, but cannot, being cursed
to disdain my narrow lusts
and sorrows. I have never said
that with me an innocent angel
is alone at work: it may be
I exercise the murderous grace.
But in September, the face of God
passes through my walls to show me
how the motion of song sleeps
at the center of the world, as, indeed,
among the Angels, innocent of time. I hear

at this time every year the voice that loves me
crying out return! return! and I do, I round
on the beginning in full belief:
and the girl is gone, having never breathed
as I breathe, in the weary
exactitude of matter. The song
stops at the certain moment
of its growth. It is
the truth of me, not any lie
that I imagine, and I
can do nothing with it. Still,

it is autumn, and over the whole world
the air resumes its liveliness; and I,
Vivaldi, possessed of love and confidence
in measure wonderful to me, I seek
to magnify the text: viola, bassoon, cello,
it is as if the trees have broken into song,
and the song roots, blossoms, thrusts
deep toward the still center, overspreads
the sky like a million breathing leaves.

Flotsam & Jetsam (19) for Wednesday, April 19, 2006


JUST A quick note for now (now that I'm paying S$10 per bloody hour for the hotel wi-fi) to say what a great time I had interviewing "globe trekker" Ian Wright here in Singapore. He's opening a new series on May 7, moving up "from beer to champagne", spending weekends with the rich and famous like Karen Mok and Lord Carnarvon instead of Mongolian horsemen and Bantu tribesmen for a change. We had dinner last night around the theme of "Food I Like"--no yak eyeballs or rotten shark meat, thankfully. More to come in forthcoming pieces for the Philippine Star. Abangan!

Meanwhile, here's a couple of pix to prove it really happened. (That's me with the Inquirer's food critic Micky Fenix.)

Flotsam & Jetsam (18) for April 15, 2006

I TRUDGED home from my jog around the UP oval this afternoon feeling deeply despondent, for reasons I couldn’t pinpoint or express. The sun was setting and once it had gone over the edge the light lingered for quite a while in that indeterminate state we call twilight or agaw-dilim (“pagkagat ng dilim,” an anthropologist friend once explained to me, came from an ancient belief that a giant crocodile devoured the earth at that moment). I could feel that crocodile’s teeth in my heart today, sinking into some soft ventricle, spreading venom of a sweet, slow-acting kind.

I’m not sure if it was the fading light, the neither-here-nor-there haze of dusk that makes driving dangerous and disorients anyone who wakes up from a nap at that strange hour. Was I just being overtaken by melancholy, by the sense of a gloriously bright day slipping into a night full of doubt and distant laughter, of a moon visible only to the other side of the world, or of the city, for that matter?

Sometimes I wonder if all this walking and running by myself is good for me; I end up thinking and fretting too much, instead of sweating out whatever it is that distresses me. But everyone who jogs around that oval must have his or her own cross to bear, thinking with one foot and learning with the other—learning, in so many words and steps, to value oneself as one values others.

That moon will be where I place it in the sky of my mind, of my imagination. It will be a munificent moon, one that will bring us bounties and blessings—but only when it wants to, when the time is ripe.

Those of you who know me might think me turning to voodoo; I am not. I will say that it was a moon-poem by Robert Graves that drove me back to school 25 years ago—his belief in a lunar “White Goddess”, bringer of rain and muse of poetry. But as muses go, you cannot demand anything of her; you can only ask; she will decide—she can be "Neither foretold, cajoled, nor counted on"—and she can deny you as swiftly and as cruelly as an executioner’s axe.

Perhaps that explains this afternoon’s deep funk: after the sunset, somewhere in the sky the moon was rising, and I was asking, and I was asking, and I was asking.




TURN OF THE MOON
by Robert Graves

Never forget who brings the rain
In swarthy goatskin bags from a far sea:
It is the Moon as she turns, repairing
Damages of long drought and sunstroke.
Never count upon rain, never foretell it,
For no power can bring rain
Except the Moon as she turns; and who can rule her?

She is prone to delay the necessary floods,
Lest such a gift become an obligation,
A month, or two, or three; then suddenly
Not relenting, but by way of whim
Will perhaps conjure from the cloudless west
A single rain-drop to surprise with hope
Each haggard upturned face.

Were the Moon a Sun, we could count upon her
To bring rain seasonably as she turned;
Yet no-one thinks to thank the regular Sun
For shining fierce in summer, mild in winter—
Why should the moon so drudge?

But if one night she brings us, as she turns,
Soft, steady, even, copious rain
That harms no leaf nor flower, but gently falls
Hour after hour, sinking to the tap roots,
And the sodden earth exhales at dawn
A long sigh scented with pure gratitude,
Such rain—the first rain of our lives, it seems,
Neither foretold, cajoled, nor counted on—
Is woman giving as she loves.

Flotsam & Jetsam (17) for April 15, 2006

MANY YEARS ago, in the mid-1960s, we lived in Pasig—in three or four different places in Pasig, actually, in Barrios Malinao, Bambang, and San Nicolas. They were the years I grew up in all kinds of ways—as my partly autobiographical short story “Only the Beginning” notes, it was that time when, “Like most Filipino boys, I parted with my excess ouncelet of flesh just before my voice deepened. I was twelve, that year before high school, and just beginning to be aware that certain sights hitherto unremarked, certain curves and folds of skin on the female body, could provoke distressfully embarrassing responses in mine.” But let’s not go there.

I remember Pasig for other reasons more devout than the crush I had on our catechist Isabel, and on Luzviminda the dark and toothless local beauty, and on Julie Andrews and Rosanna Podesta. I was a member of the Legion of Mary (Praesidium Virgin Most Powerful), which enabled me to enter every house in the neighborhood and slurp milky macaroni soup after the Block Rosary under the holiest of guises, but which also required me to perform appropriately prayerful duties, such as attending the Good Friday procession around the poblacion. I enjoyed that task, truth to tell, reveling in the mystery of the shrouded pasos (pledged penitents in characteristically dark and heavy gowns), in the swell of the paraffin-thickened air, in the noble beauty of the mestizas who seemed suddenly to emerge from the town’s farthest and best-protected corners, like short-lived blooms.

For the first time in many years, I returned there yesterday, armed with a camera and a yearning to remember a life before all the missteps and complications of adulthood. I saw some of it, and was glad to recognize albeit fading vestiges of a Pasig I knew. The procession seemed shorter and less imposing than it used to be; one of my teenage crushes might have passed by and I wouldn’t even have known. Sic transit gloria mundi, as my priest-friend and fellow political prisoner Fr. Joe Nacu used to exclaim whenever he lost in chess, but I think some candle had flamed out within me first, through none of Pasig’s fault. Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.

Flotsam & Jetsam (16) for April 11, 2006

We were happy to attend the celebration of the 50th wedding anniversary of Elmer and Elenita Ordoñez at the Casino Español last Sunday, one of the highlights of which was the reading by the couple of this poem by Edna St. Vincent Millay.


SONNET: LOVE IS NOT ALL
Edna St. Vincent Millay

Love is not all: It is not meat nor drink
Nor slumber nor a roof against the rain,
Nor yet a floating spar to men that sink
and rise and sink and rise and sink again.
Love cannot fill the thickened lung with breath
Nor clean the blood, nor set the fractured bone;
Yet many a man is making friends with death
even as I speak, for lack of love alone.
It well may be that in a difficult hour,
pinned down by need and moaning for release
or nagged by want past resolution's power,
I might be driven to sell your love for peace,
Or trade the memory of this night for food.
It may well be. I do not think I would.