The matriarch sits on a bench
in the park as pleasure boats glide
on the man-made lake. In lieu
of a crown, she wears one of her late
husband’s hats. The brim is narrow,
just like its band. It seems to perch
like a squat grey bird with no head
on her head, so it can’t make
a sound. These days she sings,
with no help, the same string of words
over and over, as if remembering. As if
remembering what they could mean.
The flowers on your coat don’t keep still
~ after Armando Valero, “The Little Singer”
Day after day brings a panic—
stampede of mothers and children
and goats along a fence, involuntary
movement of arms shielding faces
from a violent spray of gas.
Which is to say, some dreams
seem more extravagant than
others, and yet there are those
among us who will walk for weeks
to touch one. Above, the planets
teeter in their own fire. Nothing
lasts. Or rather, everything ceded
in the end prevails. The goat bleats
and the yellow bird bugles to the moon.
You don’t see or hear the cost of this
pleading so I will illustrate with
the shape of my arms, with hands
making the gesture for warding off
what wants to kill or maim us all.
Aftermath
A partially found poem. “[T’boli Marivic Danyan] inherited the ceremonial dagger of the tribal chief, or datu, from her father, along with the campaign he had fought for almost three decades against a coffee plantation on community land.” ~ Jonathan Watts for The Guardian, July 2018
She tended to the bodies
peppered with gunfire, menfolk
who had been working in the corn—
She tried to change the clothes
of the dead, to put part of her
husband’s brains back inside
his skull so he was fit for burial.
Along with her father and husband,
she lost her two brothers.
The soldiers shoot first
and ask questions later,
if at all. As far as the eye
can see, forests cut down
by logging companies. Coffee
plantations where the ancestors’
resting places used to be. Now,
she is chief of a village with no
guns, fighting for its rights. Who
remembers the time when birds flew,
populating the canopy as if with fruit?
Distance
is what you learn about stars:
how they burn themselves out,
long before you ever get
the messages they’re sending
through light. One day you lift
your head, and it is many years
later: twenty, thirty. You feel so far
away from where you started,
can barely retrace the exact
steps it took to get here. If so
many things have changed, how
come others continue to expect
the opposite? You look at pictures
of yourself from another time: girl
in blue pleated skirt and white
blouse, girl with a white veil.
There are people you haven’t
spoken to in ages, still going to
the same corner bakery for bread
rolls in the morning, still
bickering over who gets the biggest
share of anything. All that too,
you want to put time and space
between. There was a time you thought
you might be able to change old wood
for new, chart a different course
for others. A mistake: each thing
must spend itself until all its light
is gone, even if it doesn’t know it.
Amnion
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.
Dream, poem
Who says to write
a dream is to cheat
on the poem? Neither
has the ironclad
solution. Or
both delight
in invention.
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.
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.
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.
It isn’t gone yet if it can open
~ after Armando Valero, “Memory of a Dreamed Blue Flower“
It is autumn again and we gather
the leaves that fall seemingly without
ceasing. The painter looks at a scroll
of vines and paints their likeness
on panels of orange silk, as if to say
there is another world where all we love
could go on living; where we won’t
have to hold up our hands in surrender,
or hold them over our hearts as if we know
the great ache of what is coming—
your watch, resting undisturbed under a film
of yellow pollen, the hour hand gone,
the minute fixed at four o’clock; my dress,
its rows of embroidered volutes fading
against a field of rubbed velvet.
You want to pluck the last surprising,
misplaced bloom of the season but I
won’t let you. Come away— let’s
think of it there, fixed on its branch,
throat all the way open as we walk
back into our lives and work,
arms linked or swinging.