LA NOCHE DE LAS ALMAS*

LA NOCHE DE LAS ALMAS*

Chloe had an angel costume, and Louis was disguised as a hamburger. --- Halloween Night 

She was dressed like an angel.

She did not have to, and could

have gone trick or treating in

her pink pyjamas, sleep marks

all wrinkled up on her gentle

face, like the blanket creases

tightly wound over her head

to rid the night of bogeymen. 

Last year, he was Chewbacca,

why not a hamburger this time?

I said, any which way you go,

my boy, they will see your face,

and leave their Halloween

doors swearing they’ve seen

a King Burger angel wagging,

lettuce and bacon sagging,

cooing rather tremulously:  

Trick or Treat, give me

something good to eat!  

Roaming the cul-de-sac, my

cherubic tandem would have

looked too good to anyone, but

they’d have to eat their hearts out.

--- Albert B. Casuga

10-31-11

*All Souls Night

SENSES IN THE MORNING

SENSES IN THE MORNING

Even harsh and disturbing sounds get transformed when anticipated mayhem fail to happen. A bright sky scuttles the first frost of winter, and from a distance, the gecko-rhythm of hammers pounding on surfaces that need mending for the season's turn, could echo Wagnerian cymbals; to these old ears, almost a tinkle from Duchin. All in spite of cold weather.

I would have felt immensely pleased sipping my tea, save for the trill from the kitchen: Clean the chimney, laddie. You don't want me to die coughing, do ya?

--- Albert B. Casuga

10-28-11

Prompt: The first frost fades under a white sky. I’m noticing how at a distance even a sound like the banging of a hammer becomes a sort of music. --- Dave Bonta, The Morning Porch, 10-28-11

A WAILING WALL

A WAILING WALL 

Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant --- Tacitus*

Either way, distance finds me

looking up or down this cliff,

an unlikely sanctuary I escape

into aching for scarce solitude. 

How can one be alone among

the darting seagulls? Or silent

with lost memories jarred by

blasts of breaking waves below? 

Here, gods revel in their haven

of whistling winds and clouds,

down there fishermen cackle,

chewing sargasso, guzzling gin, 

while their thrown nets fill up

with flotsam floating around

moss-gowned boulders staring

at the sky like dark green eyes. 

Is it this vast and empty space

between that scares me now,

when I should be murmuring

secrets to messenger winds? 

I would scream unbearable

pain, holler down bitter anger;

I must share muffled grief,

loosen taut shackles of despair. 

Either way, I find wailing walls

in air, water, rocks, and wind;

like Job I weep for peace, hope

to gently fall in the cup of palms 

waiting to catch my carrion

now carved out of a shattered

world of faithlessness and fear,

unable to hold on to life or love. 

On this piece of jutting rock,

have I not found the little place

where I could reach His Hand

quickly were I to fall, either way?

---Albert B. Casuga

10-28-11

* (Where they create desolation, they call it peace)

(The quote from Tacitus was used earlier by Simeon Dumdum Jr., a Filipino barrister and a poet, in his Facebook post.  Poet and university professor Mila Aguilar posted the cliff picture in her Facebook entry.)

PLANNING FOR A TREEHOUSE (Voices From Three Generations)

PLANNING FOR A TREEHOUSE

(Voices from Three Generations)

(For my Grandchildren)

We will see so/ little of the world that it is/ important for you to see this/ tree, to envision rooms and/ stairs where there is only air/ and leaves, to place the first/ board against the bark. --- From “Treehouse for God” by Hannah Stephenson, The Storialist, 10-25-11

1.

Come summer, we will build

another treehouse on an oak

overlooking the creek, there

is more of you now to gather

remnants we can put together. 

Nothing bigger, but higher,

maybe closer to the clouds,

nearer to the stars, away from

the giggling girls next door.

We will see less of the world. 

2.

Or more of it below: yelping

dogs lining up for the lift-leg

tree astride our river bank,

are easy slingshot targets off

stouter, steadier branches. 

O, and there is soldier-boy

doing it with the wife round

the clock since he came back

wounded from Iraq, Libya,

and all on the eastern crack. 

3.

Shush, buddyboy, that’s not

what treehouses are for. What

are they for, gramps? To espy

on sparrows, robins, jays, owls

talk to each other on sundowns. 

So, if we build it a bit higher,

we can also build a treehouse

for God, can we not, gramps?

Why ever for, laddie? He is

everywhere. But nowhere near? 

4.

Cool. A treehouse for God on

the river bend. Then, maybe,

just maybe, we can visit him

anytime, gramps, ask for help

for starving kids in Somalia. 

Hook him up on a telephone

line, strings and cans and all,

and maybe Dad can provide

Him with a Bell Internet link,

alert Him on the Facebook! 

5.

So he can stop all killings and all

and punish priests who molest

altar boys and girls, and...Whoa!

Whoa, boys, we are building a

treehouse, not His jailhouse. 

Could we build one for God,

anyway, gramps? We got boards

and plywood and shingles and

nails, and...borrow mom’s cross,

to protect Him in His treehouse. 

6.

Winter is almost here, boys,

we need to firm things up here

so it would not fall off. We will

build another come summer

on that oak bent over the creek. 

(He wipes clammy sweat off his

forehead, winces at a strange jab

of pain on his chest, tingling on

his arms.) Time to climb down,

boys, before we nail Him down,

again.

--- Albert B. Casuga

10-26-11

THE TURN OF A SEASON

THE TURN OF A SEASON

That dead oak leaning on the towering pinetree
is a postcard image for the season’s turn. Dead
things are cradled still in the limbs of the living. 

There is not much of this anymore, anyway, in the woods
or in the occupied streets of New York, where the withering
would rather take down what stays green. Green as money. 

This is the way things end: crash crack crawl curse or cry,
no one will open the windows for you. You might just be
the ghetto prowler robbed of his savings, body and soul, 

his mortgaged house foreclosed, his drugs in mob market,
his kids in foster homes, his wife back on striptease poles,
his fingers itching to squeeze a trigger, to put some holes 

into the temples of “others” who revel at dinner tables
over glazed Thanksgiving ham and turkey, bright homes
heated cozily on winters, instead of his throbbing temple. 

The mumbled dread of class wars in the city is not yet here
in the woods where dead oak trunks still lean on limbs
of towering pinetrees whose leaves remain green as money. 

On my porch, while I sip my tea, I feel it is too late to pray. 

— Albert B. Casuga
10-25-11

Cool air, bright sun and silence, save for the rustling of cattails and the creaking of one dead oak cradled in the limbs of its neighbor.--- Dave Bonta, The Morning Porch, 10-25-11

DON'T OPEN WINDOWS HERE!

NO ONE OPENS WINDOWS HERE

Something, somehow, has gone away
from a place we call home: windows,
doors to open to collect homing kin
at sundown, like perching birdlings,
have more bolts added, some boarded
up, children hectored into staying away
from doors. Keep those doors shut!
Some n—hs (racial epithet) have guns
blazing. It does not take much these days.
It does not even take a country’s revolt
to crack those pistols of thieving thugs;
here, they might as well be toothbrushes.
So, stay indoors, lock your doors, you
don’t have to plead like Khaddafi: Don’t!
No, don’t even think about Occupy! Don’t!

--- Albert B. Casuga
10-24-11

Reports are mixed— Drug bust, car chase; one caught, one still on the loose; or all of them now in jail. Your wild agitation diminishes, but never really the fear; and the sorrow as well for a world where no one opens windows to let in the night air anymore.--- Luisa A. Igloria on a home invasion near her home in Norfolk, Virginia, posted in Via Negativa, 10-23-11

COME AWAY: POEMS ON WHERE AWAY IS

COME AWAY: THREE POEMS

Throw it away, / we say, but where/ does this directive/ lead. Where is/ away. We know it/ suggests distance/ and removal, that/ the thrown thing/is no longer visible/ or retrievable. --- From “Away” by Hannah Stephenson, The Storialist, 1—20-11

1. Away

It does haunt one’s reverie

like an old melody’s refrain,

it is a way but not away. But

where is away? A memory,

perchance a lingering pain? 

Distance-given right to know

erases world’s away, rebuilds

them only as far as a pebble

skips and skims over eddies

on roiled water: See old faces? 

Etched on beach sand, away

is a heart pierced through

by an arrant arrow called Luv

and a spray of trickling angst

named Will or blood bubbles. 

Or a nodding gran chanting

on her beads wishing shadows

on her walls at sundown might

jump out where they grow tall

and call out: Granny, I’m back! 

Maybe an unreachable land,

then, endlessly dark, no sun

creating rainbows, no showers

lads and lasses run through

naked and free, cold but happy.

2. Monologues

When are you coming back

from the front, son? Sometime

soon, before mom fades away?

Where is this Viet Nam? Iraq?

Afghanistan, Pakistan? Somalia? 

Will you take the midnight train,

Betty, and be home Christmas?

Me and the gang, we will throw

a party at the Metro, wait for you,

gulp suds for every train whistle. 

I guess he will not be around

for my umpteenth birthday, mom.

You invited him, did you not, he

and that woman in Denver? I

just have to wait by the window. 

Is grandpa going fishing with me?

Like last summer, he will drive in

on his old Studebaker, clanking

with a loose tail pipe over cobbles

on our street. Will he? Won’t he? 

I will not be away for a long time,

not too long. Before you know it,

some 10,000 sleeps from now, we

will be bowling again in St. Peter’s

Alley, cracking lightning and thunder.

3. Overture

Come away then, come away, while

we can, let’s run through valleys,

swim the rivers with the catfish,

slalom down those snowbound hills.

Come away, Love, to some place away.

--- Albert B. Casuga

10-24-11

A Photo by Bobby Wong Jr.

CANONS FOR THE CIPHER

CANONS FOR THE CIPHER

(Poems for my Father)

(For Francisco F. Casuga+)

O, Father. Time overtakes us, and/ We cower in our darkened rooms.  

RETURNING TO THE ROOT

“Will courage Redeem stupidity?” -- Nick Joaquin

There is a manner of returning to the root

that explains the virtue of a hole,

its quietness the petering circle:

the canon of the cipher indicts us all. 

And you, rocking yourself to an eddy,

drown the death wish: O that grief

on sons’ faces could tell you all.

“Will courage be visited upon my children?” 

It is this cut whittles the tree down,

not of consumption but of fright

that bereaving is one’s splintering

of children’s bones. Death is our betrayal. 

They are sons gaping as grandfathers die

shapes the gloom of the breaking circle.

They who knew the frenzy of the bloodcry

must never return to find sons become spittle. 

ONCE UPON A SUMMER SOLSTICE


There is a scampering of grace in the dry woods
and a pulse upon some soliloquy:
it is the rain come as a smooth and forbidding lace
upon the cup of the dead and dying weather.

It is past the season of the grub.

The flirt of the monsoon upon the arid lap of Nara
is caked on the thick napes of children
dancing naked in the mire of the fields,
gaping to catch the fingers of the rain,
slithering like parched serpents guzzling raindrops
cupped in the hollow of gnarled father’s palms.

There will be no songs, for the ritual is not of birth
but of death as summer dies in Nara
and with it every titter bursting from a child’s mouth.

The rain becomes a bloody plot.

A HOMECOMING

Tanqui’s supreme conceit is its dread
of withering grass in the month of the frogs
when rain, like fingers in the night, tread
the lesions gangrened on a hillock’s carrion,
carcass of a season mourned
as the briefest of them all.

“The rain is on the hill, the dry pond
is red with clay, the gods are back!
And so must I --- shadow of a past long gone ---
weeping, running through these deserted streets,
crouching now in mud pools of childhood fun
when songs were chanted as songs for the dance.
A dance for the grass! My limbs for the grass!
I must dance for Tanqui’s singed grass!”

He dances hard, his body clean and gleaming,
but Tanqui’s rain is on the ashen hill.
Neither his dancing nor his lusty screaming
will stop this dreaded withering.
Tanqui’s conceit is stranger still
when songs are sung not for her lads and lasses
but for this stranger who, dying, has come back
to dance for black grass, dance naked
for Tanqui’s withered pantheon grass.

THE NIGHTMARE

1. 

Halfway, between this river stone and many rocks
after, Nara shall have gone from our echoes-call.
We have wandered into a sunken mangrove

and wonder: Is it as silent there? Are there crabs there?
What quiet mood is pinching bloodless our spleens?
This is another pool –-- navel upon the earth.
Always, always, we cannot be grown men here.

After the white rocks, after the riverbend,

Nara becomes the dreaded dream.

We have put off many plans of soulful revisiting ---

we will go on re-stepping beyond the white stones,

each step becoming the startled rising

into a darkened city farther downstream

where we once resolved never to die in.

2.

Do we wake up then afraid of Nara?

But rising here is the nightmare come so soon,

treason in the daytime, maelstrom at night: 

The nightmare was of cackling frogs

and serpents rending skulls and cerebrae

of kitemakers who sing while termite logs

burn and children, chanting the Dies Irae,

mush brainmatter, pulling out allegory

like unwanted white hair, stuffing black grass

where brain was, casting tired similes

into dirty tin cans where earthworm wastage was: 

River swells drown us where, surfacing,

we wake up knowing our days have become

termite nights and decaying metaphors. 

--- ALBERT B. CASUGA

Revised and reposted October 22, 2011, Mississauga

THE CLOTH STAINER

THE CLOTH STAINER

The shirt I’m wearing/ is made in Bangladesh, Turkey, or the Philippines,/ where clotheslines crisscross sky: sleeves and bodices/flail in salt-laced wind— weft of signatures whose/ facing edges I’ll button and wear against my skin.--- From “Shirtwaist Elegy” by Luisa A. Igloria, Via Negativa, 10-22-11

Two of her ten children drowned in that river

retrieving rolls of cloth grabbed by current

swollen by monsoon rains; rescuers found

them upstream near the Bay wrapped snugly

in the newly coloured sheets as if they simply

stole sleep and took a nap when they could. 

 

When the Giant Tiger supplier from the city

asked for his stained raw materials that day,

he found the old woman starting to colour some

new rolls all over again. He said he would not

wait, and paid another gaunt stainer, bundled

his purchase, and threw it hurriedly into his truck. 

Laundry day today. The shirt I am throwing into

the hamper, could it be from that roll in Bangladesh?

--- Albert B. Casuga

10-22-11