this is how i found the poet

photo by Germelina Lacorte



by Quennie Wang Yuni

This is how I found the poet.

One day when I was talking to Karen about writing again, she said that her poetry was a one-time thing—like she had a one night stand with the muse who left before she woke up the next morning. Of course, Kian was there to console her—almost as if she had always wanted to be a full-time mother.

Then I asked her to find me a poet—not one who is long dead nor someone we would have to invent. And no, not like the fictionist I met when I was too young either. Yes, we were fascinated by his stories that won several Palanca and other awards but growing up made me forget why. I no longer love how he writes—dry but earnest. Besides, I do not want to break another heart like that.

The ones after him were far more poetically challenged. I was on my tippytoes like a Love Girl Scout who lives in infinite hope until I decided to take a break (yes, the self-imposed dating hiatus). We could not really blame amateurs for leaving my heart in shards, could we? They spoke the language of dreams in another tongue—like photography, music, film, technology, law, money, science, etc.—and I was too lazy to take their language lessons seriously. When they tried to tread on my dreams by attempting to write, I drifted—and once, even fled. I must warn you though that if you ask them, they most likely will tell you another tale.

As I started to plan for the search, Karen wandered into my poet wonderland with a huge sign that says:
“He is not the poet. I AM the poet.”
~Sheilfa (when asked about her lover eight years ago)

I smiled after reading which prompted her to add, “The search for the poet is futile. You should date an accountant. Really, look at Carrie. Her Mr. Big is a financier because she is THE WRITER. Never mind that she is fictional.”

And like most of our conversations, this ended in laughter—the kind that makes the muse forget that we had broken up.

in the rot and welter of unmade loves

I asked her to call and she never did. So I said the hell with it, I don't wait for nobody.

Then on my way to buy a call card something happened. I was from down the school basement of this university looking for this friend the school wanted to hang and not finding her among the trees, I went across the road over at Marco Polo to get a book from another friend doing a conference there. First thing that greeted me before I could walk into the hotel was this tall lean white woman standing askance in the driveway, in her ruggedly rolled up blue shirt zipped up to the neck and her rumpled cropped head, an arm across her chest, her other hand holding a cig. Her head turned toward me and she looked me up as I approached.

Then she smiled, rather sourly, sucking her cig in between her teeth as she fixed her gaze at me with a look so hard that...Godalmighty, was I sexually aroused? I cocked my head and mocked a yell, my voice a crack hysterical. Hey! you're looking at me! She chuckled, pink tongue wetting her cracked lips, her eyes dancing wolves in the cold frost. I reached the door weak in the knee and when I looked back at her as I gave myself to the lady guard who groped my sides and my front for anything incendiary in my person, she was still watching me, smoke swirling about her face.

my house in a shambles

You poison kings and generals messing around your bed,
but not an orphan rat hiding among your treasure vault.
You can't go that low.


No idea what set it off, maybe a case of terrible maladaptation to a loss after loss: my tiptop acer laptop self combusted after I fell back into a river while doing a research I wasn't so happy to take on. Around the time it had started to rain, too, and the roof over my head, repaired several times over before, was dripping again, making pools on the floor and wetting the books and the notebooks I heaped in a paper box under my bed. Then as though those weren't disasters enough, a stinky mouse got to visiting my closet.

In the beginning, one had to manage. You knew someone finished off by a rat: Or maybe not by a rat but something else: the boy husband ditching him and the comrades laughing off his back. A hard blow it was that one atrophied: he could not lift his butt to get to a doctor perhaps thinking that leptospirosis seemed as good a cause as any other to die of, so there, wasn't he a spectacle, Bayan NCR sending a statement read at his funeral draped with a red flag to the effect that he elevated faggotry to respectability by getting front page coverage of their partido-officiated wedding. Wouldn't one get sick when they're dead with that.

Forswearing death and publicity, I emptied my locker out, brush brush, soak with soap and water, then padded the holes through which the little pest must have gotten in. But alas, it was only paperboard I used, so no sooner had the paste dried on my fingers than mousie got to nibbling through again. I found black dried droppings, not just under the stove and around the tipped plates on the kitchen table, but also in my box of underwears. Gutted the locker clean another time, more furious washing, then on to the mall for a mouse trap, gritting my teeth at having to succumb to another atrocious lie: some icky glue for some panicky runner to step into. Damnation: the awful invention only managed to stick in your clothes and fingers, Rattie just skittered through the whole layout and has moreover moved to the gay literature department, its litter now all over your boxes of poems, paperbacks and like perishable excretions. Poison is out of the question; unpolished brown rice mixed with chicken gravvy and Baygon? That's simply horrid, outrageous. Graceless, too, and unaccounhtably stupid, immoral. You poison kings and generals messing around your bed, not an orphan rat hiding among your treasure vault. Can't go that low, Baby.

You filed a complaint at your landlady's office, a cornerstore fronting their house, only slightly implicating her cat-hating ways. Weren't she the one who made you dispose of your teener cat at your sister-in-law's charge? “I would need wood to caulk the seams and the rot in the timber. And by the way, the ceiling, too, there's a new leak right by the peg hanging my clothes everything under the bed's wet that all I do all week is mop.” She made out like she heard, and you waited for action, but all you heard from day to day was the husband's ever rising voice, gimme this gimme that, where's my other sock, where's the food in the pot get off that rack you brat. A few days later, you'd catch her sneaking out of the gate on foot, knapsack on her back, her three-year old daughter in one hand, in the other a plastic bag. It's not cars and houses alone that make a marriage tick, you knew that, ages back.

You stayed out most nights, a way to walk out of one's own vexed life. Dust accumulated on the surfaces of things, on the caps and lids of food uneaten, on the little jars and cabinets of one's will. You got to frequenting your friend's house where chaos reigns even more supreme. A huge plush sofa occupied center stage around which everyone had to slink and bad days would be when the ex-husband and call-in father telephoned and asked who's in? In the offices, you noted that the population of laptops outranks the number of the employed, and none of them as hardworking as you once were. You excused yourself out of their sorry lives and checked into net cafés, sitting around your old haunts, sipping hot chocolate and staring at the quaintly empty street at three in the morning while the waiter and the guard slept with their heads on the nearby table. Soon you were ruining files, retyping pages here, losing a bluetooth device there, later your memory stick, then your earphones.

You walked home.

You set out to bribing the neighborhood cats. Your friendship with the lot, it so happened, stopped at your doorstep. You stooped down to pick one and they hissed and scampered around. How skittish they had become. Their wives and babies kept on disappearing: not so many folks could live with the racket they make, the rough and tumble on the ceiling, their noisy lovemaking, the crash of pots and dishpans, the devastation of the trash can. Elsewise, they're so easy to tame. Leave the door open, feed them as you eat, let them saunter around, let them sleep at your feet. Soon, they'd be in your bed, on the shelf between rows of classics, on your desk on a loose sheet, the presumptuous bastards.

You never knew what happened to the little rat. Once on your way to the bathroom, you smelled death. But of course. Five cats in a room? What rat wouldn't jump over to their end? Somehow you feel bad the sorry thing didn't die the way you would have preferred for it: in between the fangs of a merciless cat, gnawed to the bone, shred after shred.

Old Man Peter

It's just him with some of the usual failings, I know. Nothing against me. Nothing against Shirley. Nothing against anyone. My annoyance has nothing to do with what he did or did not do for his crazy wife and crazy children, but more to do with what he did not do or say for me and my crazy life. Because, of course, like him, like anyone else, I am just interested in myself and nothing else matters as much as my momentous fuckover life. And that's his fault by me. But of course, how could he, by God, with his troubles and life's emergencies, capped by a hospitalization a few months back from which he might have not emerged alive, and Shirley forever fucking the world with his money, the children he was otherwise too old to look after and do laundry and ironing for, his work in Wollongong and the human rights journals he sometimes had trouble writing for, his unwritten books and the interview transcripts which he wants to finish by himself, his friends in the movement asking for more and more of him when all he could scarcely afford really is less and less.

And so when he thought of you at all, of course, it is more as one of the many things he comes by as he tries to search hell for a way to deal with his life's toughest trial: Shirley. In what way can you help him, in what terms could you come useful, say – say to see to his affairs while he is away; to make sure that Shirley could not hurt him some more in the only way she can: financially, that is, even if he has no finances to speak of, or precisely because he has no more for Shirley to want and profit from some more. That you yourself would need anything from him, professional, political – that one never occurred to him. Once he appeared in your trial where you stood him, thanks to a nice advice from your lawyer-employer friend who didn't even know that the law to which she should be appealing your case did not apply and therefore could not help you fuck be her.

How sad that about everyone is so encumbered with the most important problem to deal with: the self; one's small life. The small self as the big burden, says Kate Millett, who was betrayed, turned in by the very friends and comrades who God knows probably were just jealous of her years her money her property and just wanted to stomp their feet, a way of reasserting parity, she had no right to think of herself an artist and shoot up by them and so they turned her in to the psychatric ward where they themselves were more than fit to be in, to be sedated and straitjacketed for life, if they knew what they deserved. That is the very function of friends, Peter said one night in the kitchen that he was making coffee as I made out to wash the dishes, Gwen smoking her life away in the veranda. To betray you. You should expect that of friends. How consoling it all sounded then. And now that is probably how he feels towards me, that I betrayed him. For allying with Shirley's fucked-upness, or at least for refusing to take his side, for refusing not to defend Shirley's Goddamnalmighty life. For refusing to make a hero of him or at least paint the good man that he undoubtedly is.

So I have this resentment against him, too, for being not thoroughly enlightened, not thoroughly socialist or feminist enough? For being a man who for all the good that was in him, did not know how to listen, is not ever capable of listening, to what is said by those who did not make history, who did not make books, who did not make or were said to be did not make revolutions?

But who is ever thoroughly anything?

Whoever is ever.

Bob Dylan, Agnes Smedley and me

>

A letter home

photo by jon roberts




Dear Anna.

I'm sorry if I didn’t get you right the first time. What I get for not looking back.

Pigcawayan is a long way back and since family I was closest to -- my mother, my grandparents (two sets) and an aunt-- are all departed, there’s nothing there left that I love except the graveyard, which I heard will be bulldozed in a little time soon. High school wasn’t so happy a time for me, you know that, and I have little to connect with as far as my high school classmates and friends are concerned. I have a few good memories of people, can't remember if you were one of them. But one day, I will go back to Pigcawayan. So much of me is buried there.

When you said you’ve read all of me, it was like oh, so someone from down there reviewed my career and had taken a peep at the shape of my soul, too? that should be nice. Our country should know a bit of us before we depart, don’t you think so? But understand that I’m rather long estranged from home and I’d like to believe that I had gone continents. I am honored by your good appreciation of me but if you knew what I know, you wouldn’t like me very much. Happens all the time, even with those who swore fealty, sad planet this.

You want to know something? I don’t miss them.

I want to excuse myself from whatever it is you want of me. Besides, I love someone. She’s okay by me. The rest would be excess baggage. But more than anything else, I love my art, my writing. Beside all that she’s nothing too.

I will probably die alone, my shadow high above these walls. How glorious.

baliwasan grande, a reprise

photo by talisa





Remember the cat they dumped at our gate? Who would have thought it would survive? Then a couple of nights after, we heard it wailing among the crash of tinplanks. And then no more. That was your cat, Shi, you said into the dark as we quietly coaxed ourselves to sleep. Between the two of us, I was the one who was a streak messianic, always out to bring dead cats back to life. You were the one who always knew better, knew who will live and who would die.

Of course we never saw that cat again.

Later Gigi gave you a gun. How we laughed at it. Paltik. We said we could not fire a shot through all this rust! But how he made so much a show cleaning it. For the children to see. They liked to clamber up our fences and hang by the branches of the guava tree to watch us. You went to Zeni’s house across the street carrying the gun in your hand. That hushed them. The doctor has a gun! And even Zeni laughed, politic that she was.

Then I collared a man. How An-An shouted at them in the name of Allah. Don’t you know a little respect? She yelled. Are you doing this because she is a Christian? Later, Zeni would tell us that they went out and fired shots into the air. But I was so furious to listen and be frightened. What I felt then was, her young niece did so much better than she ever could by me. For I couldn’t remember a time when Zeni or anyone of the cadres I knew ever spoke up for me and I hated her cavalier defense of the offended distinct Moro culture. Iba kasi ang kultura ng Moro, she kept on yammering. I could have struck her if I were a rod. It was An-An I wanted to embrace and cry to, tell her that that was the first time someone ever stood by me against a tribe. But I didn’t. I was afraid she would smell my loneliness, my bereftness, and doubt me.

Soon, I would leave Zamboanga, without making leave. You said that was a good decision. I could have killed someone there, or I could've gotten myself killed. I said I couldn’t stand the quality of the anti-communist anti-Christian talk I was made to listen to. Said I couldn’t stand Moro nationhood, if that was all there is to it. Shirien would later relay to me the censure. You could have talked things out with them, he said, they would have understood, accepted any explanation you could have offered them. I did not tell him that leaving doesn’t need any reason or explanation, could not tell him that understanding and acceptance is the last that I wanted from anyone.

In Marawi twenty years later I would visit your mother and I couldn’t find the old hearth of the home I once knew. Tita Aida was forever wiping your car’s windows, forever testing your car’s battery, and I could not, for the life of me, understand why anyone in that freezing cold climate would aircondition their bedroom. I promised myself to not ever go back there and to not ever talk to you again.

Now Gigi is dead, leaving behind with me a nylon rope to make revolution with. I am honored by the gift. But I cannot even organize a forum without Gabriela’s minions barricading at the gate. How they buggered me. Had me bought and resold. Made me walk their dogs.

I feel irrelevant. I feel important.
I feel blasted, I feel blessed.

But I must have known, even then, that I will live.