Vigan

VIGAN

Let us go to the dry land where hundreds of years ago, tobacco leaves broad as parasols hung from the dark rafters of wooden sheds riddled by sunlit rapiers.

Let us visit the town, your hand in mine, touring the passage of time, nodding inwardly toward our own thoughts as if they were pedestrians, as the sun gradually sheathes his sword and dusk heavily casts a shadowy blanket.

Let us enter the house of old stone and weathered wood, greeted at the doorstep by sharp complaints of aching hinges and grousing floorboards, as in the fronting street tiny whirlwinds of dust and gravel and bits of leaves explode like fluttering insect wings.

Let us ascend the gleaming stairs, shuffle off our shoes, one after the other, lean forward above a window overlooking a wide boulevard lined with cobblestones hot as bread and, shutting our eyes to slowly turning fans of radiant heat, inhale sumptuously, our nostrils stung by cooked air like ground pepper.

Let us make our way to the window of the house in the town in the dry land where hundreds of years disappearing, hardy fields flourished like shining children of the day watered by the tireless sun. 

Originally published in Eastlit (December 1, 2014)

Also published in Vigan: the Telenovela (February 8, 2015)

Tampuhan (1895) by Juan Luna

Work

WORK

Work springs from bed, time ringing,

Switches off alarm, not clock, world,

Ticking, spinning, running, rushing—

Undresses, showers, splashes—

Sun, birds, window—towels, fluffy, dry—

Dresses, belt, tie, mirror, brushes hair,

Bounds for egg, rice, coffee—

Brushes teeth, brushes hair again,

Hops in car, drives, slows down, traffic—

Rain, wipers, left, right, metronome—

Signals, turns, parks, jumps out—at last!—

Guard, elevator button, fourth floor,

Hello, good morning, sits down, breathless,

Switches on computer, types—tik, tak,

Tikkity-tak—gets up, coffee maker—almost

No one here, checks calendar—holiday.

Originally published in Boston Poetry Magazine (September 4, 2014)

Virginia Woolf, a pioneer of the stream-of-consciousness technique

Noise

NOISE

Soon silence will have passed into legend. Man has turned his back on silence. Day after day he invents machines and devices that increase noise and distract humanity from the essence of life, contemplation, meditation.

—Jean Arp, Arp on Arp

Construction is ongoing, banging away next door.

Metal clangs on metal, a pump machine loudly whirs.

Chop saws, screaming spirits, slice steel bars.

Sledgehammers thud solidly, breaking apart concrete.

Gravel fills apertures, ears, shuffling downward inside.

Dust and cement puffs, dry, burning in the sun,

Waft by, gray fumes at the volcano’s edge.

Mixers pour concrete, molten dough, into wooden molds.

Workers, perched birds, fashion steel bars into cages.

Walls grow layer by layer like a multistory cake.

Doors and windows appear as rectangular frames.

Jutting into the light, the first steps of a staircase ascend.

Drying walls glisten, soon to be lacquered with smooth finishes.

Day by day a building rises out of rubble, transforming—

A lady fastening a glittery brooch, a gentleman adjusting a silk tie.

Originally published in IthacaLit (September 27, 2014)

Combo (1970) by Antonio Austria

The Clock

THE CLOCK

We divide the clock

Into pie segments

To show, self-indulgently,

We are masters of time.

Serving up plates, we

Apportion hours a la carte,

Spearing minutes with a fork.

Wistfully, we sip on seconds.

We park our legs high

On a chair, lean back,

Saying, this year I will do this,

Next year that.

But time yields to no master:

Heedless brute, it is an

Inexorable mule,

Spinning sun, ruthless.

Only a cosmic force,

Colossal as stars collapsing,

Warping space like plastic

Has the arm to rein in time,

Rearing neighing stallion,

Bull kept at bay.

Time answers to no one.

We answer to time.

Already it holds us

On a leash, shortening:

We strain forward;

It pulls us in.

Helpless fish,

We must forsake fruit

Just beyond our reach.

And we are bound to tell time

Our narrative when it ends.

Now the clock strikes:

Bells ring, sonorous,

Pure as childhood,

Shining as youth,

Florid as love,

Perfect as wisdom
…the spring runs out.

Originally published in The Furious Gazelle (September 19, 2014)

Grandfather clock face, Marines' Memorial Club & Hotel, San Francisco

Winter Solstice

WINTER SOLSTICE

December 21, 1989

I am prisoner to conversation with an old man with a broken nose, mute with catarrh, sedentary and limping.

The window is squealing like a small animal, trapped.

Outside in the empty parking lot sits an abandoned car, dried out extinct turtle.

Dryness scrapes skin off the flaking season lying lifeless, electricity gone dead.

Clouds cast to the ground feeble eyes of a pallid man.

Trees written in charcoal thrust into the sky, exclaiming, “I am turned into a pillar of salt!”

Winter breaks its stony face against the hammering wind,

Dust and rocks mix with air,

Grass grinds like pebbles underfoot.

A warm room withers faster than a disconnected leaf.

Memories scatter twigs across the carpet.

Deaf to clapping, hooded thoughts wander.

Only blue sparks crackle in recognition.

Originally published in Turk’s Head Review (November 11, 2014)

Winter Gloom (2012) by Andrey Samolinov

Nocturne

NOCTURNE

I am a lover of the moon and silence,

Silence milky as the moon,

Moon radiant as silence.

Silence is silver fish in black water,

Moon, bright flour and hot yeast,

Rolled into a fist,

Exhaling as it rises.

Push night against day,

Leave a small opening

—the moon.

Feed the wind

So it lies quietly,

Rising with effort

—silence.

Faraway plume of white smoke,

Twilight crossing the border,

Comet in exclamation,

I see, not hear.

Heartbeats quickened by grief,

Engine roar beyond the wall,

Secrets spoken in a dream,

I hear, not see.

Blinded by the moon, I call out in my heart to silence striding into blackness beyond earshot.

Originally published in Boston Poetry Magazine (September 4, 2014)

Moonlit River (2007) by Greg Seman

Divina Commedia

DIVINA COMMEDIA

To Thomas Merton

I read your Seven Storey Mountain, noting your allusion to Dante.

You told us the story of your very gradual epiphany and conversion.

Your journey, as you describe it, began at Prades, France, born

To a sober American mother and an ebullient New Zealand father.

Painfully, you remembered your early years of spiritual alienation,

Punctuated by a delicate sorrow at your parents’ passing away.

Deceived by the false freedom of young adulthood, you lived

For a time as a wastrel, harrowing the hell of profligacy and desolation.

Yet all was not lost, drawn as you were to spiritual messages

Hidden in monastery ruins, timely theology, and sundry grace.

Of all things, a biography of Hopkins the poet played the tipping point.

Baptized to your joy, you matured in your desire to become a priest.

The Franciscans rejected you—no doubt, a good dose of humility

Softening you to discern the “True North” of your Trappist vocation.

Purified, you finally arrived, stumbling, atop Mount Purgatory.

Having washed in the waters of Lethe and drunk your fill of Eunoe,

You tarried, a new creature singing psalms, waxing ecstatic.

Then off you went again, ascending fitfully past the spheres.

The wisdom of the sun in the fourth sphere drew you constantly,

Tugging as low tide at the denizens beached in your intellect.

Habitually, you retreated to the seventh sphere of Saturn,

Peering in contemplation at your soul reflected in a glass, darkly.

Dropping by Mars to take up the pen for justice, you instigated

The question of whether contemplation is in deep truth action.

Delirious, you even dallied for a space on the inconstant moon.

This favor I now ask is within your power as Beatrice to grant:

Accompany me as a guide to the Empyrean vision of Paradiso.

Originally published in Cutbank Online (October 9, 2014) under the title, “Long Way From, Long Time Since: To Thomas Merton from Gonzalinho da Costa”

Thomas Merton by John Howard Griffin. Used with permission
of the Thomas Merton Center at Bellarmine University.