It's the last day of May...

...and I still haven't been able to write the "last" poem of my collection, the one I theoretically want to end my book with. I've revised some old ones and even written one new draft, but I'm putting so much pressure on myself to end things with a bang that I can't seem to get it done yet. Maybe this has something to do with the end of summer (and the final episodes of Temptation Island, The Contender and American Idol---yes, I'm still a reality show junkie), and the closing down of my favorite Katipunan area restaurant Eyrie (goodbye hungarian sausage spaghetti and turon con caramel a la mode), and the beginning of June and the need to immerse myself in the rain amidst all things tinged with grayness ("Gray, then, was the only truth in the world." --Stephen Dunn) where shadows sometimes collide and find temporary shelter.

A paragraph from Auster's City of Glass:

Later perhaps I will do something else. After I am done being a poet. Sooner or later I will run out of words, you see. Everyone has just so many words inside him. And then where will I be? I think I would like to be a fireman after that. And after that a doctor. It makes no difference. The last thing I will be is a high-wire walker. When I am very old and have at last learned how to walk like other people. Then I will dance on the wire, and people will be amazed. Even little children. That is what I would like. To dance on the wire until I die.

Metaphor Meowing

meta-perch
Originally uploaded by nayav.

Blog-world, meet Metaphor---my half-Siamese half-Persian furry
purring machine, king of the kitchen, shelf percher, bathroom
sleeper, TV watcher, fly chaser, corned beef thief, toe sniffer,
hair chewer, occasional cuddler. Do I even need to mention that
Metaphor's male? Hehe.

Summer Poem # 5

Monet Refuses the Operation
Lisel Mueller

Doctor, you say there are no haloes
around the streetlights in Paris
and what I see is an aberration
caused by old age, an affliction.
I tell you it has taken me all my life
to arrive at the vision of gas lamps as angels,
to soften and blur and finally banish
the edges you regret I don't see,
to learn that the line I called the horizon
does not exist and sky and water,
so long apart, are the same state of being.
Fifty-four years before I could see
Rouen cathedral is built
of parallel shafts of sun,
and now you want to restore
my youthful errors: fixed
notions of top and bottom,
the illusion of three-dimensional space,
wisteria separate
from the bridge it covers.
What can I say to convince you
the Houses of Parliament dissolves
night after night to become
the fluid dream of the Thames?
I will not return to a universe
of objects that don't know each other,
as if islands were not the lost children
of one great continent. The world
is flux, and light becomes what it touches,
becomes water, lilies on water,
above and below water,
becomes lilac and mauve and yellow
and white and cerulean lamps,
small fists passing sunlight
so quickly to one another
that it would take long, streaming hair
inside my brush to catch it.
To paint the speed of light!
Our weighted shapes, these verticals,
burn to mix with air
and change our bones, skin, clothes
to gases. Doctor,
if only you could see
how heaven pulls earth into its arms
and how infinitely the heart expands
to claim this world, blue vapor without end.

Summer Poem # 4: one of my favorite Lawrence Raab poems

Great Art
Lawrence Raab


There's so much I don't want to look at,
big religious scenes especially,
big historical battles,
almost anything, in fact, containing
large numbers of people.

Three or four people—that's the right number
for a painting. Then you can think
about what they might mean to each other,
why they're standing around that beach
at sunset, walking toward that mountain.

Or they're at home: a woman sewing, a child
playing, a dog, a man at the door,
much more ominous, I'm sure, than the artist
intended. And I like that, imagining
this isn't what I was supposed to feel,

the way I'm pleased with small imperfections,
stains and wrinkles, erasures particularly,
where you sense the artist changing his mind.
And sometimes a shape's been painted over,
although the ghost of it remains.

In Vermeer's Girl Asleep at a Table
she leans on one hand, dreaming
perhaps of love. Behind her there's a mirror
in which nothing is reflected. Once,
x-rays have shown, this was a portrait of a man.

And we would have understood, given
the conventions of the time, he was the subject
of her thoughts. Why take him away?
It's better, I want Vermeer
to have decided, not to show that much.

Let her keep her dream to herself.
Let the light be our secret.

Dandelion Wine

And here's an excerpt from Bradbury's Dandelion Wine, because I've been thinking about summer and endings and last poems for several days now:

Douglas and Tom and Charlie came panting along the unshaded street.
“Tom, answer me true, now.”
“Answer what true?”
“Whatever happened to happy endings?”
“They got them on shows at Saturday matinees.”
“Sure, but what about life?”
“All I know is I feel good going to bed nights, Doug. That’s a happy ending once a day. Next morning I’m up and maybe things go bad. But all I got to do is remember that I’m going to bed that night and just lying there a while makes everything okay.”
“I’m talking about Mr. Forrester and old Miss Loomis.”
“Nothing we can do; she’s dead.”
“I know! But don’t you figure someone slipped up there?”
“You mean about him thinking she was the same age as her picture and her a trillion years old all the time? No sir, I think it’s swell!”
“Swell, for gosh sakes?”
“The last few days when Mr. Forrester told me a little here and a little there and I finally put it all together—boy, did I bawl my head off. I don’t even know why. I wouldn’t change one bit of it. If you changed it, what would we have to talk about? Nothing.”
“You just won’t admit you like crying, too. You cry just so long and everything’s fine. And there’s your happy ending. And you’re ready to go back out and walk around with folks again. And it’s the start of gosh-knows-what-all! Any time now, Mr. Forrester will think it over and see it’s just the only way and have a good cry and then look around and see it’s morning again, even though it’s five in the afternoon.”
“That don’t sound like no happy ending to me.”
“A good night’s sleep, or a ten-minute bawl, or a pint of chocolate ice cream, or all three together, is good medicine, Doug. You listen to Tom Spaulding, M.D.”
“Shut up, you guys,” said Charlie. “We’re almost there!”
They turned a corner.
Deep in winter, they had looked for bits and pieces of summer and found it in furnace cellars or in bonfires on the edge of frozen skating ponds at night. Now, in summer, they went searching for some little bit, some piece of the forgotten winter.

Summer Poem #3, or Because Janis' "Piece of My Heart" Makes Me Shiver

The Penalty for Bigamy is Two Wives
William Matthews

I don't understand how Janis Joplin did it, how she made her voice break out like that in hives of feeling. I have a friend who writes poems who says he really wants to be a rock star---the high-heeled boots, the hand-held mike, the glare of underpants in the front row, the whole package. He says he likes the way music throws you back into your body, like organic food or heroin. But when he sings it is sleek and abstract except for the pain, like the silhouette of a dog baying at the moon, almost liver-shaped, a bell hung from a rope of its own pure yearning. Naturally his life is exciting, but I sometimes think he can't tell the difference between salvation and death. When I listen to my Janis Joplin records I think of him. Once I got drunk & sloppy and told him I feared artists always had more fun and more death, too, and how I had these strong feelings but nothing to do with them and he said Don't worry I'd trade my onion collection for a good cry, wouldn't you? I didn't really understand, but poetry is how you feel so I lie back and listen to Janis's dead voice run up and down my body like a fire that has learned to live on itself and I think Here it comes, Grief's beautiful blow job. I think about the painter who was said to paint with his penis and I imagine one of his portraits letting down a local rain of hair around his penis now too stiff to paint with, as if her diligent silence meant to say You loved me enough to make me, when will I see you next? Janis, I don't care what anybody thinks or writes, I don't care if my friend who writes poems is a beautiful fake, like a planetarium ceiling, I want to hold my life in my arms as easily as my body will hold forever the silence for which the mouth slowly opens.

weekend workshop

Spent 2 days in Batangas with Joel and other speakers at a journalism/creative writing workshop for high school kids of the Oblates of Saint Joseph schools. I ended up sleeping for two nights ALONE in a room with FOURTEEN beds arranged headboard to headboard. Well, ok, I wasn't quite alone---3 cockroaches, a beetle, several mosquitoes and a few bedbugs kept me company. (At least there wasn't a dead maya ON the ceiling fan, as there was in Joel and Alvin's room.) Two free-roaming cows were sleeping outside the window. When I woke up, I could smell cow dung.

We ate breakfast and dinner with the nuns and Lolo---an old, senile, French priest who could speak Filipino. He would bang his spoon against his cup and mutter something under his breath. We thought it was murder, murder. Then we heard it as mother, mother. He'd look at Alvin and say Aba aba aba, ang yabang naman nito. He tried to hand me his red pill---Gusto mo?---offering it like a piece of candy.

I suppose when you're senile, it doesn't matter what country you're physically in, you feel like you will always be a foreigner, newborn.

* * * * *

I can't teach high school. Yesterday I raised my voice a few times and huffed impatiently at slow or inattentive students who seemed like they didn't want to be there. Tough luck. They got Miss Sungit and Mr. Comedy to critique their poems.

* * * * *

This is a haiku written by a young boy named Tonton:

Since my house burned down,
I now own a better view
of the rising moon.

Ang ganda, ano? The 2nd and 3rd lines are surprising, given the premise of the 1st. And the word "own"! Nakakatuwa. When we asked, out of curiosity, what led him to write the poem, he stood up and said, "Kasi po dati nasunog yung tindahan namin sa palengke, tapos..." His eyes welled up. "Na-realize ko po na kailangan maging optimistic pa rin, lagi pong may pag-asa..." He laughed while crying, which made us all laugh. First time I've "made" someone unintentionally cry during a workshop...

* * * * *

I have high hopes this year. Something grand is bound to happen. I'm willing luck into my life.