Carnivalesque

Life is a carnival..
It is better to live singing.
Amores Perros

This grieving is unrelenting.
We cannot wipe away

what flows and flows into the red river
where the ferris wheel rests our fears

as it goes up the high heavens
blue and calm, the color

of what goes down so that in rain
as in the drenching of this recurring pain

this one in words, deep in the sense
of things, we remember for always

what goes on today when the clowns
of our people, the clowns of our writing,

they tell us what we keep for the saying
so that in Time, this lie they utter

will come on to tell us the color of lie,
one that goes on and on so we stop

once in a while, gather all that we can,
and summon the will to ride

on horses that go round and round
like this game they play in this land.

They write poems, these clowns
they write of their greatness made

of bubbles and smoke and sin,
these two lovers who die sinning.

This is the carnival here, as it were,
when writing is in the saying,

like depending on the rain for loving.


Hon, HI

Danza con la profesora, 1

For Manang Perting Asuncion. But you will never read this poem any longer.


And we danced, danced our troubles
away, two of us in that crowd

so early in the late afternoon of our
difficult lives. Together with the poets

of our people we invited ourselves
to come into your embrace

those hours of our renewed
desires to see you

come fully alive. We know you had those,
the cancer cells at stage four

gnawing at the quilt of goodness in your heart
eating up all the tropes you keep deep

in your mind, so secret and so public
we know you talked to the flowers

of your garden in Los Banos now
adorned with the gift of your love.

It is your poetry we have come for,
we say, in that holy hour we woke you up

from your siesta time, your brother, ours too,
the host of our drunken wishes to see you

once more, revisiting the rare seeing
that we give each other in delight

you with your fresh laugher,
us with the surprise we respond

to your sense of life. And then
we dance, just the two of us, first my steps,

nervously tentative against your writer's grace,
your baglan's ancient movement poised

as if you were a hill sanctified,
there to leave the offering of small graces

like a sarukang erect and tall before the light
turning purple and then dark amber

in that Bayombong of our singing
we did for the first time. There would

never be another time, this ceremony
of community, your verses into mine.

You will edit the dictionary, you say,
and I talk back: Do not police your language

do not censor the truths of what makes
our people procreate the belated blessings

of the gods we have kept hidden
from our pharisaical poet's lives.

No, you say, I keep the vibrant sentences
as well, the raw judgments of our more

knowing, more confident vision of pasts
to tell the next story of our people

with or without those who give us
the lock, the key to be thrown away

for us to kowtow to the approved
nouns, verbs, adjectives, and lies.


Hon, HI