PLACELESSNESS
PLACELESSNESS
1
The insights of Art are at the cusp of yes and how.
This means that there is no truth, only stones on the pavement.
Epiphanies have become pleasant
exchanges with friends: The air is studded with lights,
and then the air has been filed neatly in the steel
cabinet of the mind, aired out again
when remembered. Dust always on the verge of settling.
2
Art, of course, has been confronting virtue
since forever. This is why its collective ambition justifies its existence.
his experiment has among its variables faith, another abstraction that begs
sensory detail. Therefore the use of symbols:
tongues of flame licking at the spirit until it is pink and raw,
or else a strain of avian possession.
Scenes in a narrative, in which conflicts like
incomprehensibility or alienation ensue.
3
But always the desire for truth,
that which can stare down all impertinence, lip, cheek.
When we say truth we also mean goodness.
Show us how to be good, or show us what good is not:
commands that need an address: the implication behind a finger,
with three jointed into self-reference.
4
Villains, for instance, are no more villainous than the rest of us.
Not evil but entitled or aggrieved and proactive. We have become
considerate, because we are afraid for ourselves.
Language, in this case, offers its version of mercy.
Bette Davis: “Evil people, you never forget them. And that’s the aim of any actress—
never to be forgotten,” and “My mother told me to always say good things
about the dead. Joan Crawford is dead. Good.”
How easy it is to equivocate, now that the quest
for virtue has been replaced by irony: not a question but a punch line.
5
How nice it would be to live in a world that does not need
irony, the personal history of limit implied by it. Something catholic
is on its way. It draws near. We say this as
a kind of joke, although what we want is to be taken
to task for our doubts. We want secretly to be duped.
PLACELESSNESS
Let be be finale of seem.
Wallace Stevens
There virtue is.
From the sky, electricity.
A point of interest.
Possible subject.
Distance, then fiction.
What splits the milieu, between lit and unharmed, now
a concern, now a paragraph.
In the real world, a bird streaks: from coincidence
to complication.
Watch how this mounts to an exclamation.
Or ellipses.
In which case, the need to start again.
There.
No. There.
Mark Anthony Cayanan teaches writing and literature courses at the Ateneo de Manila University. He was a fellow for poetry in English at the UP National Writers' Workshop in 2007. His works have appeared in Ideya, Sunday Inquirer Magazine, among others, and have won for him a Palanca Award in 2009 and an honorable mention for the Maningning Miclat Award in 2007. He is in charge of the literary section of Kritika Kultura, a refereed academic journal of ADMU.
