I may have been born
with my hair in an old
lady bun, my hands buried
deep in the pockets
of a skirt too long for me;
with my feet in socks
wrapped and layered
to cover the peeling scabs.
I may have been born with
a stray tooth sown
in the bed of my gum,
a penchant for blinking
furiously until tears came.
The walls of my father’s
house were full of women’s
secrets: with whispering
above piles of laundry,
and clouds of dirty blood
dissolving in the water.
Someone shook
condensation out
from inside the rice
pot’s lid, and a few
drops touched my cheek.
I came to know how salt
cradles the body in warm
waters at birth, and
how we carry its taste
with us into our afterlife.
Instruction
Sailed all night, and got down to Quinbrough water, where all the great ships are now come, and there on board my Lord, and was soon received with great content. And after some little discourse, he and I on board Sir W. Pen; and there held a council of Warr about many wants of the fleete, but chiefly how to get slopps and victuals for the fleete now going out to convoy our Hambro’ ships, that have been so long detained for four or five months for want of convoy, which we did accommodate one way or other, and so, after much chatt, Sir W. Pen did give us a very good and neat dinner, and better, I think, than ever I did see at his owne house at home in my life, and so was the other I eat with him. After dinner much talke, and about other things, he and I about his money for his prize goods, wherein I did give him a cool answer, but so as we did not disagree in words much, and so let that fall, and so followed my Lord Sandwich, who was gone a little before me on board the Royall James. And there spent an houre, my Lord playing upon the gittarr, which he now commends above all musique in the world, because it is base enough for a single voice, and is so portable and manageable without much trouble. That being done, I got my Lord to be alone, and so I fell to acquaint him with W. Howe’s business, which he had before heard a little of from Captain Cocke, but made no great matter of it, but now he do, and resolves nothing less than to lay him by the heels, and seize on all he hath, saying that for this yeare or two he hath observed him so proud and conceited he could not endure him. But though I was not at all displeased with it, yet I prayed him to forbear doing anything therein till he heard from me again about it, and I had made more enquiry into the truth of it, which he agreed to. Then we fell to publique discourse, wherein was principally this: he cleared it to me beyond all doubt that Coventry is his enemy, and has been long so. So that I am over that, and my Lord told it me upon my proposal of a friendship between them, which he says is impossible, and methinks that my Lord’s displeasure about the report in print of the first fight was not of his making, but I perceive my Lord cannot forget it, nor the other think he can. I shewed him how advisable it were upon almost any terms for him to get quite off the sea employment. He answers me again that he agrees to it, but thinks the King will not let him go off: He tells me he lacks now my Lord Orrery to solicit it for him, who is very great with the King. As an infinite secret, my Lord tells me, the factions are high between the King and the Duke, and all the Court are in an uproare with their loose amours; the Duke of Yorke being in love desperately with Mrs. Stewart. Nay, that the Duchesse herself is fallen in love with her new Master of the Horse, one Harry Sidney, and another, Harry Savill. So that God knows what will be the end of it. And that the Duke is not so obsequious as he used to be, but very high of late; and would be glad to be in the head of an army as Generall; and that it is said that he do propose to go and command under the King of Spayne, in Flanders. That his amours to Mrs. Stewart are told the King. So that all is like to be nought among them.
That he knows that the Duke of Yorke do give leave to have him spoken slightly of in his owne hearing, and doth not oppose it, and told me from what time he hath observed this to begin. So that upon the whole my Lord do concur to wish with all his heart that he could with any honour get from off the imployment. After he had given thanks to me for my kind visit and good counsel, on which he seems to set much by, I left him, and so away to my Bezan againe, and there to read in a pretty French book, “La Nouvelle Allegorique,” upon the strife between rhetorique and its enemies, very pleasant. So, after supper, to sleepe, and sayled all night, and came to Erith before break of day.
above all music
is a voice in my head
that said to go under
like light into a hole
or a heart into a book
or enemies to sleep
Erasure poem derived from The Diary of Samuel Pepys, Friday 17 November 1665.
Dream, poem
Who says to write
a dream is to cheat
on the poem? Neither
has the ironclad
solution. Or
both delight
in invention.
Feast day
Up, and fitted myself for my journey down to the fleete, and sending my money and boy down by water to Eriffe, I borrowed a horse of Mr. Boreman’s son, and after having sat an houre laughing with my Lady Batten and Mrs. Turner, and eat and drank with them, I took horse and rode to Eriffe, where, after making a little visit to Madam Williams, who did give me information of W. Howe’s having bought eight bags of precious stones taken from about the Dutch Vice-Admirall’s neck, of which there were eight dyamonds which cost him 60,000l. sterling, in India, and hoped to have made 2000l. here for them. And that this is told by one that sold him one of the bags, which hath nothing but rubys in it, which he had for 35s.; and that it will be proved he hath made 125l. of one stone that he bought. This she desired, and I resolved I would give my Lord Sandwich notice of. So I on board my Lord Bruncker; and there he and Sir Edmund Pooly carried me down into the hold of the India shipp, and there did show me the greatest wealth lie in confusion that a man can see in the world. Pepper scattered through every chink, you trod upon it; and in cloves and nutmegs, I walked above the knees; whole rooms full. And silk in bales, and boxes of copper-plate, one of which I saw opened.
Having seen this, which was as noble a sight as ever I saw in my life, I away on board the other ship in despair to get the pleasure-boat of the gentlemen there to carry me to the fleet. They were Mr. Ashburnham and Colonell Wyndham; but pleading the King’s business, they did presently agree I should have it. So I presently on board, and got under sail, and had a good bedd by the shift, of Wyndham’s; and so, …
I eat a horse
making it all into one sandwich
a man can pepper every love
and nutmeg whole rooms
full of despair
Erasure poem derived from The Diary of Samuel Pepys, Thursday 16 November 1665.
Madre Paradójica
Orphan: from Late Latin orphanus, from Ancient Greek ὀρφανός (orphanós, “without parents, fatherless”), from Proto-Indo-European*h₃órbʰos. Cognate with Sanskrit अर्भ (árbha), Latin orbus (“orphaned”), Old High German erbi, arbi (German Erbe (“heir”), Old English ierfa (“heir”)
Is there a name for the condition of having
always known you don’t own the body you come into,
from the moment you’re lifted out of the tunnel
and held up by the ankles to make that first,
long-drawn-out wail? The hands of the midwife,
the hands of the nurse taking the body’s measure,
counting the number of fingers and toes, testing
the apparatus of the ears— It doesn’t seem
important whose names are typed into the form
if one can substitute for another, if the body
from which you’ve recently been cleaved was,
after all, surrogate for another. What name,
if any, will you be able to call her? And,
as you grow, how will she be able to staunch
the heavy pull and pain as the body stops
producing the milk, as the walls of the womb
shrink back into themselves and everyone
carries on as if nothing happened? And the new
body to which you are assigned, the one
you are instructed to give the name “mother:”
how does it manage the work of rearing and housing
what is and isn’t part of her? In sleep, in dreams,
all of us reach for the other. Awake, all of us
stand in the circle of our perfect solitude.
Artisanal death
Up and all the morning at the office, busy, and at noon to the King’s Head taverne, where all the Trinity House dined to-day, to choose a new Master in the room of Hurlestone, that is dead, and Captain Crispe is chosen. But, Lord! to see how Sir W. Batten governs all and tramples upon Hurlestone, but I am confident the Company will grow the worse for that man’s death, for now Batten, and in him a lazy, corrupt, doating rogue, will have all the sway there.
After dinner who comes in but my Lady Batten, and a troop of a dozen women almost, and expected, as I found afterward, to be made mighty much of, but nobody minded them; but the best jest was, that when they saw themselves not regarded, they would go away, and it was horrible foule weather; and my Lady Batten walking through the dirty lane with new spicke and span white shoes, she dropped one of her galoshes in the dirt, where it stuck, and she forced to go home without one, at which she was horribly vexed, and I led her; and after vexing her a little more in mirth, I parted, and to Glanville’s, where I knew Sir John Robinson, Sir G. Smith, and Captain Cocke were gone, and there, with the company of Mrs. Penington, whose father, I hear, was one of the Court of justice, and died prisoner, of the stone, in the Tower, I made them, against their resolutions, to stay from houre to houre till it was almost midnight, and a furious, darke and rainy, and windy, stormy night, and, which was best, I, with drinking small beer, made them all drunk drinking wine, at which Sir John Robinson made great sport. But, they being gone, the lady and I very civilly sat an houre by the fireside observing the folly of this Robinson, that makes it his worke to praise himself, and all he say and do, like a heavy-headed coxcombe.
The plague, blessed be God! is decreased 400; making the whole this week but 1300 and odd; for which the Lord be praised!
a death made
of dirt and prison stone
made from hour to hour
till it was midnight
made drunk
made of work
like a heavy-headed ox
whole but odd
Erasure poem derived from The Diary of Samuel Pepys, Wednesday 15 November 1665.
Thread
Tell me again about the uses of anger,
about the ways in which we’ve decided
to refuse to feed the best, softest parts
of ourselves to the animal with many heads
guarding the gates, the dark shape hunched
at the center of its lair— What is the price
for rising above the weeds, for coming
out from behind the ruins to show
our faces, be fully visible in the light?
Once, we used to cower before the beast.
Once, like owls and other creatures
we masked our movements with night.
But then the moon showed us other ways
through the labyrinth; it said: Take
the red pulse at your wrist and don’t
lose it. Let no one ever take it away.
Disastrous
Called up by break of day by Captain Cocke, by agreement, and he and I in his coach through Kent-streete (a sad place through the plague, people sitting sicke and with plaisters about them in the street begging) to Viner’s and Colvill’s about money business, and so to my house, and there I took 300l. in order to the carrying it down to my Lord Sandwich in part of the money I am to pay for Captain Cocke by our agreement. So I took it down, and down I went to Greenwich to my office, and there sat busy till noon, and so home to dinner, and thence to the office again, and by and by to the Duke of Albemarle’s by water late, where I find he had remembered that I had appointed to come to him this day about money, which I excused not doing sooner; but I see, a dull fellow, as he is, do sometimes remember what another thinks he mindeth not. My business was about getting money of the East India Company; but, Lord! to see how the Duke himself magnifies himself in what he had done with the Company; and my Lord Craven what the King could have done without my Lord Duke, and a deale of stir, but most mightily what a brave fellow I am. Back by water, it raining hard, and so to the office, and stopped my going, as I intended, to the buoy of the Nore, and great reason I had to rejoice at it, for it proved the night of as great a storme as was almost ever remembered. Late at the office, and so home to bed.
This day, calling at Mr. Rawlinson’s to know how all did there, I hear that my pretty grocer’s wife, Mrs. Beversham, over the way there, her husband is lately dead of the plague at Bow, which I am sorry for, for fear of losing her neighbourhood.
people sit in the street
begging for dinner money
I used to crave the stir
of a great storm
now I hear the way the dead
fear losing our ‘hood
Erasure poem derived from The Diary of Samuel Pepys, Tuesday 14 November 1665.
Study: Interior; a weekend in New York for the CBA Letterpress Chapbook Prize Reading; and 8 years of writing at least a poem a day!
Study: Interior
~ after Remedios Varo, “Icono” (“Interior”); Óleo y nácar incrustado/madera; 1943
Of the insides, we know only
the feel of invisible pulleys,
the ways those tethers feel
connected to the milkiness
of moons or doors that shut
and open according to
the quality of light or
landscape. Light pours
down a stairwell tinged
with the green scent
of fields and farms. Where
are we in that checkerboard
of overlapping days and nights?
There are windows and doors;
wheels, elaborate contraptions
that are more than just wings.
Light, air, motion, the density
of darkness: even in this world
we’re made to succumb to the laws
of physics— to land a machine
that’s clearly made for transport.
*
Today marks the 8th year of my daily writing practice— I’ve written at least a poem a day since November 20, 2010; and Dave Bonta has generously shared space on Via Negativa, where I’ve been free to post and archive the earliest versions of these poems, which at the outset I wrote in response to Dave’s posts at The Morning Porch. I also use what I read of Dave’s posts here at Via Negativa, and everything else at large, to help jumpstart poems. At least four full-length books of poetry and three chapbooks have come out of this daily engagement with words and poems.
After all these years, I think I’ve found a working and comfortable rhythm to my daily writing practice. I look forward to that part of the day when I can write my daily poem/s— it is time that feels like a reward I give myself, and it gives me the incentive to try to finish up as many items on my To-Do list in order to get to it more quickly.
Some of the most valuable things I’ve learned are simple, but they’re not always easy to do: learning to write against the “noise” of everyday life; learning to write wherever and whenever I can find even a precious half hour relatively free of work and other distractions; learning not to obsess about those “perfect conditions” that we sometimes think are the only moments when writing can happen. Writers, and I am no exception, are always wrestling with things like that “impostor syndrome”— which is really rooted in the idea of some supposedly higher standard against which one is made to continually measure oneself and one’s achievements in order to feel validated or “true.”
This past Friday, I was in New York for a reading and the launch of my chapbook What is Left of Wings, I Ask. During the small reception, one of the audience members asked to see my book The Buddha Wonders if She is Having a Midlife Crisis (which I’d also read from), then one of the poets there asked if it was my first book. When I told her it was my 13th, she turned to me with such a look and said something to the effect of “why did they let you join this contest then?”
So in my case, impostor syndrome doesn’t exist in a “purely” literary or artistic context. As a writer of color, a woman, and an immigrant, I can’t count how many times my credibility and output has been called into question, even after I’ve done everything that’s required, and often beyond. Once I was also told I should not list on my resume that I have four National Book Awards, because it “is misleading”— even if I also clearly indicate these are from the Manila Critics’ Circle in the Philippines— “since no American writer has won but one National Book Award” (which is by the way untrue because several men have won the National Book Award for fiction more than once, including William Faulkner and John Updike; and Jesmyn Ward made history by being the first woman to win the National Book Award twice).
*
In any case, the reading part of the program itself was a good experience; we had a warm and receptive audience, and it was a gift to listen to the two Honorable Mention honorees, Elly Bookman and Jason Baker, whose work contest judge Natasha Trethewey described thus: “There is a compelling voice in these poems rendering the ordinariness of our days extraordinary. A ‘furious rhythm’ undergirds the poems in Mixtapes Were Made [Baker]. And the deft play with language is more than wit; it’s a kinetic force that pulls the reader toward each new revelation and delight. Even more arresting is the way Stay Mine [Bookman] reminds us that the senseless tragedies of our world are commonplace— and in that acknowledgement, a necessary grappling for meaning.”
It is such an honor, and I’m very grateful to former US Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey for selecting my manuscript for the 2018 Center for the Book Arts Letterpress Chapbook Prize. Natasha wrote, “What Is Left of Wings, I Ask is a lovely, piercing book of distances, the longing engendered by displacement, resilience in the face of sorrow, of ‘gathering darkness,’ and the nature of home—what it means to leave one for another. These are poems rooted in a haunting and quintessential American experience.”
It was wonderful to share the event with some people who mean a lot to me: my youngest daughter Gabriela, my old friend Myrielle Falguera from Baguio, and my former grad student and now anthology co-editor Amanda Galvan Huynh and her partner MD Huynh. It was also great to meet in person poet Aaron Fischer and his lovely wife Lauren. And of course, after the event, we ate our weight in fabulous Indian food and ice cream at Pondicheri, and congee with toppings at Congee Village; and went for the obligatory Shake Shack burgers and fries, after a long leisurely afternoon at the MoMa taking in the Charles White retrospective exhibit.
Necromancer
Up, and to my office, where busy all the morning, and at noon to Captain Cocke’s to dinner as we had appointed in order to settle our business of accounts. But here came in an Alderman, a merchant, a very merry man, and we dined, and, he being gone, after dinner Cocke and I walked into the garden, and there after a little discourse he did undertake under his hand to secure me in 500l. profit, for my share of the profit of what we have bought of the prize goods. We agreed upon the terms, which were easier on my side than I expected, and so with extraordinary inward joy we parted till the evening. So I to the office and among other business prepared a deed for him to sign and seale to me about our agreement, which at night I got him to come and sign and seale, and so he and I to Glanville’s, and there he and I sat talking and playing with Mrs. Penington, whom we found undrest in her smocke and petticoats by the fireside, and there we drank and laughed, and she willingly suffered me to put my hand in her bosom very wantonly, and keep it there long. Which methought was very strange, and I looked upon myself as a man mightily deceived in a lady, for I could not have thought she could have suffered it, by her former discourse with me; so modest she seemed and I know not what. We staid here late, and so home after he and I had walked till past midnight, a bright moonshine, clear, cool night, before his door by the water, and so I home after one of the clock.
order in one hand
joy in the other
playing with her smoke
by the fireside
I only see a bright moon
in the clock
Erasure poem derived from The Diary of Samuel Pepys, Monday 13 November 1665.