HOMO VIATOR
We shall not cease from exploration/And the end of all our exploring/Will be to arrive where we started/And know the place for the first time. - T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets, Little Gidding
Sunrise on a highway ridge baffles us.
This could be sundown elsewhere by the bay
in Poro Point, a merging of origins, east or west,
a cycle of living and dying on the reef,
a coming and going on the harbour of fishing boats
and war machines, a pot of stirred calm and tempest
really, where remembering and forgetting are sides
of the same coin—memories made, buried, raised,
extinguished or lived again in a string of moments
that defines the journey of a man as symbol
of a moving object, wandering back and forth,
from nothing to something, something to nothing,
a Brahman-Atman, Alpha-Omega, being-non-being,
body-mind and soul all in one simple brownbag
of wonder and questions. Quite like that silly
white-tailed squirrel wandering, wondering
where it last buried a nut or a memory of one,
as its quaint prompter of an imitation of life,
a movement here, a movement there, all
really meaning a stillness of finding where
the end is one’s beginning and also his end,
a circle at last where the hole defines
life’s next of kin. One arrives home to ask:
Is anybody home?
INTERMISSION
…often there is no word/ for such intermissions./ …A homing— the way you cup/ the back of my head in your hand… - Luisa A. Agloria, from "Interior Landscape, with a Frenzy of Wings", Via Negativa
There is no word for such intermissions.
A rendezvous at some theatre wing,
a random counting of all the lost days
when you traveled to parts unknown,
a quick embrace, prolonged gazes heavy
with unspoken desire. O, I know this
was a homing—the way you cupped
the back of my head in your hand—
you are back, but you have not returned,
so, love, while the curtains are down
tilt my face toward the crack of light,
find my hungry mouth, fill my empty
arms before the final act opens, or even
before they send in an old, tired clown.
DRINKING THE DARK WATER
If you braved the stygian stink of Ilog Pasig and sang songs
While harvesting floating tulips, debris, or stray crayfish
For some foregone repast before it turned into River Styx
- IF: Earth Poems, A. B. Casuga, June 2010
Five or six juncos at a time flutter down
to drink from the dark water of the yet
unfrozen stream covered by their lilac perches.
Elsewhere in the shantytowns of Haiti,
children jump into murky canals—
what’s left of them unburied by debris—
swim with the flotsam and carrion of dogs
and carcasses of swine felled by temblor.
Their raucous laughter and irreverent
hallooing mock UN relief workers mixing
purifiers, quinine, chlorine, into tanks filled
with dark water to supply the infirmary
nearest the canals with drinking vats
for the sick and dying, cleaning liquid
for strewn sputum, faeces, excreta galore,
and at end of day dark water for the
naked boys and prancing girls to swim in
with the floating carrion and lilies of the marsh.
The trill of snowbirds fluttering down
to drink from the dark water covered
by their lilac perches are dirges elsewhere
in the dark water canals of a wounded Earth.
ALBERT B. CASUGA was nominated to the Mississauga Arts Council Literary Awards in 2007. He won the national Philippine Parnaso Poetry Contest in the '70s, and first prizes in the Mississauga-Canada Library Systems Literary Contests in 1990 (for fiction), 1996 (for poetry), and 1998 (for poetry). His works have appeared in the Philippines Free Press, Graphic Weekly Magazine, The Sunday Times Magazine, Poetry Magazine (Maryland), Philippine Writing (edited by the late NVM Gonzalez), A Habit of Shores (UP Press, ed. Gemino H. Abad), among many others. He publishes a literary blog at http://ambitsgambit.blogspot.com.
We shall not cease from exploration/And the end of all our exploring/Will be to arrive where we started/And know the place for the first time. - T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets, Little Gidding
Sunrise on a highway ridge baffles us.
This could be sundown elsewhere by the bay
in Poro Point, a merging of origins, east or west,
a cycle of living and dying on the reef,
a coming and going on the harbour of fishing boats
and war machines, a pot of stirred calm and tempest
really, where remembering and forgetting are sides
of the same coin—memories made, buried, raised,
extinguished or lived again in a string of moments
that defines the journey of a man as symbol
of a moving object, wandering back and forth,
from nothing to something, something to nothing,
a Brahman-Atman, Alpha-Omega, being-non-being,
body-mind and soul all in one simple brownbag
of wonder and questions. Quite like that silly
white-tailed squirrel wandering, wondering
where it last buried a nut or a memory of one,
as its quaint prompter of an imitation of life,
a movement here, a movement there, all
really meaning a stillness of finding where
the end is one’s beginning and also his end,
a circle at last where the hole defines
life’s next of kin. One arrives home to ask:
Is anybody home?
INTERMISSION
…often there is no word/ for such intermissions./ …A homing— the way you cup/ the back of my head in your hand… - Luisa A. Agloria, from "Interior Landscape, with a Frenzy of Wings", Via Negativa
There is no word for such intermissions.
A rendezvous at some theatre wing,
a random counting of all the lost days
when you traveled to parts unknown,
a quick embrace, prolonged gazes heavy
with unspoken desire. O, I know this
was a homing—the way you cupped
the back of my head in your hand—
you are back, but you have not returned,
so, love, while the curtains are down
tilt my face toward the crack of light,
find my hungry mouth, fill my empty
arms before the final act opens, or even
before they send in an old, tired clown.
DRINKING THE DARK WATER
If you braved the stygian stink of Ilog Pasig and sang songs
While harvesting floating tulips, debris, or stray crayfish
For some foregone repast before it turned into River Styx
- IF: Earth Poems, A. B. Casuga, June 2010
Five or six juncos at a time flutter down
to drink from the dark water of the yet
unfrozen stream covered by their lilac perches.
Elsewhere in the shantytowns of Haiti,
children jump into murky canals—
what’s left of them unburied by debris—
swim with the flotsam and carrion of dogs
and carcasses of swine felled by temblor.
Their raucous laughter and irreverent
hallooing mock UN relief workers mixing
purifiers, quinine, chlorine, into tanks filled
with dark water to supply the infirmary
nearest the canals with drinking vats
for the sick and dying, cleaning liquid
for strewn sputum, faeces, excreta galore,
and at end of day dark water for the
naked boys and prancing girls to swim in
with the floating carrion and lilies of the marsh.
The trill of snowbirds fluttering down
to drink from the dark water covered
by their lilac perches are dirges elsewhere
in the dark water canals of a wounded Earth.
ALBERT B. CASUGA was nominated to the Mississauga Arts Council Literary Awards in 2007. He won the national Philippine Parnaso Poetry Contest in the '70s, and first prizes in the Mississauga-Canada Library Systems Literary Contests in 1990 (for fiction), 1996 (for poetry), and 1998 (for poetry). His works have appeared in the Philippines Free Press, Graphic Weekly Magazine, The Sunday Times Magazine, Poetry Magazine (Maryland), Philippine Writing (edited by the late NVM Gonzalez), A Habit of Shores (UP Press, ed. Gemino H. Abad), among many others. He publishes a literary blog at http://ambitsgambit.blogspot.com.
