I do not write poems. Not with the directness of the sun in any desert. Not with their scorching absolutes; their blinding truths. I shut my mind in. There in the dark where I will not be found out. No laser beams to shine on my ugly sides. The gnarled roots of my existence: dried remains of a carcass that was once my body. The same one that was once possessed of a heart and a brain pecked on by vultures wearing the clothes of friends.
Of lovers I have no memory. Only strangers come to lounge at my table and bed for rest and conversation. Strangers who, content, then discontented, went back to spouses children dogs estates.
There would be mornings when the mirror reflected a pretty thing. Tall. A surprised look upon her face. A shimmer on her hair, curly behind the ear and cropped just so and ever undone. The skin glittering soft. Too thin too young to look all those lived years. The long bitter days. It was just the right amount of light coming in through all the windows. The same sunlight would by and by cut through the same face and breasts and bleed the hand at the table and all the unguarded places.
I no longer hold my life any more precious than I would the fishwife’s next door. Her eyes! Popping out of their sockets as she stands sideways to watch me scratch dirt. Bent on the low stool I made. Knees apart. Splayed toes crawling out of hiding. Dibble in hand. Wedging in thin stalks of sweet potato into cement-laden earth.
There would be salvaged lines yet. A long time hence when the bones shall have crumbled into dust. For now I hold soil reclaimed from among packed sand and gravel layered over clay. Boon and bane of the reconstruction years when cavalries of revolutionists subdivided into couples and families and moved into apportioned lots and corners the size of a cow’s dunghill. Fenced in. Gates grating as people sneak in and out of each other’s lives.
I converse with cats and fishwives. Sneaks from hell! This one, come lately, is starchy with gossip. She likes to stand askance as I crouch hacking at the coconut with a bolo she walked the roundabout way from her kitchen to my side of the fence to lend. On other days I would have wielded a cleaver at her face like she were finished cadaver. That she is. But today I let her have her way. Look the terror that she felt as I whacked and cracked open the shell in the palm of my hand to reveal before her staring eyes and open mouth not the hoped-for-milk but rotting flesh. It spilled through my fingers like pus on a leper’s stump alive with worms. The same godforsaken nut the househelp back of my fence threw into my debris-laden garden. She must have been told by that hereabouts what they cannot eat up as young meat is salvaged to be squeezed dry for milk.
The couple she serves are second-lifer Catholics. Their two children in private schools. In their youth they tracked mountain trails tubao-strapped, knapsacks on their backs. Told the peasants the story of The Foolish Old Man. Taught the students about the life of Norman Bethune. Their kitchen window my unwalled fence curtained and screened from where noises rise on early mornings without sleep. The clatter of cups and dishes wake me on days without coffee or bread, their own hunger days of corn grits and cassava tops dipped in vinegar and salt now riverbeds away. A gauntlet to keep poverty off their children’s way. Their days at the barricades and the purge they escaped a closed book unfit for the young to read like men’s magazines hidden in the attic or kept under the bed. The clip-clopping of my typewriter’s keys and the heavy falls of books on the floor horsehooves and gunshots warping their time zone.
Their goodly neighbor has a son whose father they hid from her. She was a contemporary, a Gabriela cadre once now making a living balancing checkbooks and padding cash receipts for multi-donor NGOs peddling peace. Her brother she would like me to marry. Ask him to sleep in your bed on days that you’re away, she liked to tell me, better to keep the house safe and you have free-service security! The brother himself thought so well of himself by me having been asked once to fix my door and bedroom window for a cup of coffee and a little fee. He mistook my wood-hacking ways as female industry soliciting male company. She herself must have thought he was more than good enough. Could strum the guitar and belt out a Don McLean on top of his peasant origins, just like me, to say nothing of his time with the people’s army. It was an honor otherwise well-bestowed, I being by then a has-been writer-activist whose last caller was a taxi-conveyed married-looking fag with a grocery bag.
Why don’t you sleep with your pathetic brother? I found courage to say to her one day. Her chicken eyes blinked at me, only then suspecting butchery. Now she wouldn’t part with a hundred and would rather ask her househelp to trust me to repay a pinch from their laundry money. Some mornings of digging dirt her brother would perch atop their evergrowing fence to heckle me with spittle. Pthwak! went his sticky charge. He would spit every after looking my way.
I hack and stab at buried rocks.
I saw you at a party. You stretched there
like a cat, all sinews, your laugh
Skyward, the garden a kingdom captured.
“I do have summer affairs,” you proclaimed,
In answer to a query about your years.
I saw vermillions flying. Houses crumbled.
Churches keeled over. Your brother looked at me.
He took us to his new house. You monk-like
Heading the procession. The ladies did their number,
Gushing here, pointing there. We trooped to
His bedroom upstairs, candles in hand
The canopied bed lying white and speckless
In the middle of everything. With no doors to lock
And no walls to turn to after making love.
I saw a woman going mad. Hiding among legless gowns
Hanging in the cupboard spiked with shoes.
I saw her counting abacus at the study table with no books.
I saw you kissing your sister-in-law. Your white
Little fingers on the side of her face, your lips
An inch away from her mouth. I saw her turn
Tender. Saw in her moonface the spread of a thigh.
Poet. Everybody calls you a poet.
And you can’t even get out of those your little feet!
In my sleep I hear them pitter-patter close behind me
As I ride the avenues from block to block
Aboard my weatherbeaten oversized shoes.
How your brother looked at me
He handed me my two-hundred dollar typing fee.
I would not do, would not do, his eyes said.
For him or for you.
