Ambit's Gambit (A. B. Casuga Litblog)

TAKING A BREAK. TAKING STOCK.

2012-01-22T08:47:00.000-08:00

TAKING A BREAK. HOPE TO TAKE STOCK, TOO.

SEE YOU IN TWO WEEKS!

A SENIOR MOMENT: LUCY DOES NOT LIVE HERE ANYMORE

2012-01-21T11:52:00.000-08:00

LUCY DOES NOT LIVE HERE ANYMORE

Caminare. Fare una passeggiata.
Eh, come stai? She shot back looking askance.
Perched birdlike on her stroller, she inched
Her way to the middle of the cul de sac ---
Where I tarried, a wide wave our ritual,
I called out, Come va, Nonna?

Her andador tilted off the cobbled strada,
She stared blankly, but smiled nonetheless
In the courtly manner she never failed to show
To neighbours and strangers alike.

Her sallow skin becomes her regal face,
I thought, but the same face furrowed,
Her eyebrows arched impatiently then;
She demanded: Are you the police?
Or are you my son with a Florida tan
Hiding as usual from me? I called them
From 2441 because I could not find
My house, nor my keys. Was just walking,
Was just enjoying the sun for once.
Crazy Calabria weather. Rain. Sun. Wind.
Sun. Snow. Cold. Hot. Aiee... who are you?

“2441 is your house, Nonna. And you have
A daughter who will be here tomorrow.
And this is Mississauga. I am Alberto
With the nipotes Chloe and Louie at 2330.”

Aieee...dolce angelo! My angels.
How are they? E come va, amore mio?
Caminare. Fare una passeggiata.
O, com `e bello, O sole bello!
But you will help me find my home,
Won’t you? Won’t you? Amore?
A lilt on her voice, she flirted rather coyly.

---Albert B. Casuga

ALBERT B. CASUGA: CRUISE FARE 2: HOLOCAUST IN MY MIND

2012-01-21T11:41:00.000-08:00

ALBERT B. CASUGA: CRUISE FARE 2: HOLOCAUST IN MY MIND

CRUISE FARE 3: BRAZILIAN LOVERS

2012-01-21T11:33:00.000-08:00

UMBERTO AND EDO DE BRAZIL

--- It rained at the Grand Anse beach in Grenada. Writer’s Notebook on the Cruise

Hurriedly, furtively putting on her top piece,
she looked triumphantly nubile coming out
of the make-do change nook of towels held
by her Umberto to hide her from sparse beach
traffic gaze --- gauche stares from a hawker
of fun would have been de rigueur in Rio
when they were young, but she must now
twist and turn to cover a sag-here a bag-there:

El triumfo de vejez! Nuestra juventud perdida !
Aiee, que lastima ! Aiee, hermosura perdida !

She would have wept, but the Viejo beside her,
is once again her swain, coaxing her: Venga!
is all she needed to rush into the lapping waves.
Venga! Queridisima mia! A lass again, halloing
again at the water’s bite: Come, Umberto! Come!

But the mountain cloud bringing the first rain
after a searing summer has overtaken her glee:
Lluvia! Lluvia! She cried, bewailing the sudden
leeward burst. Bolting out of the roiled sea,
no longer Venus-like, she scampered --- her
caballero in tow --- to the thatched shed,
pell-mell shelter from an abrupt summer rain.

Was it the surprise of a wayward downpour
stopped her from her frolic in the sea?
Or was it the intruding pall ruined her mark
of the sun, gone from the sky, gone from the sea?
Lluvia! Lluvia! She warned anyone who cared
to listen --- the beach frolic rolled unabated.
Under the windblown shelter, she asked him:
Por que? Dime, amor mio, por que hace llover
cuando estamos contento con poquito alegre?
Con poquito de luz del sol ? Con tiempo poquito?

He shrugged as he shook the water off his ears.
Put your clothes on, Edo. The rain won’t stop,
might have been what he wanted to say when
she asked: Why must it rain when all we need
Is a little sunshine? In such a short short while?

--- ALBERT B. CASUGA

ALBERT B. CASUGA: THE WRATH OF DAYS DESCENDING

2012-01-19T17:36:00.000-08:00

ALBERT B. CASUGA: THE WRATH OF DAYS DESCENDING

A CRUISE FARE: THE VIEUX MADAME, 84

2012-01-18T20:00:00.000-08:00

A CRUISE FARE: THE VIEUX MADAME, 84

She held on to the shorter side of her skirt,
a Creole form of rainbow radiance raw on rays,
and took the proffered hand with a shy smile.

Her descent is uneventful save for all the eyes
riveted on her, the sole fare from an island shore
where fishermen glean enmeshed smelt
on day-long-heaved nets hitched to catamarans
docking light with empty baskets from a sea
that is now without fish or even fishermen.

To banter from ferry passengers tendered
ashore from cruising ocean liners, she mutters:
En Français, s’il vous plait. Non parle Anglais.

The boatswain gently cautions her to mind
the gangplank shuffle: Regardez ca!
On parle de vous, Madame.
Amused, she responds : Pourquoi pas ?
En fin, a quatre-vingts, gens remarquez!

They saw her looking away into that vast sea,
a half-smile cancelling a frown on her face,
quite like wishing away an unwanted memory.

Parlez-moi de votre voyage, mon cher,
the proffered hand asks past the gangplank.
En Anglais, mon ami: Et ees a long journée,
she says, pointing her cane rapier-like
to some lost horizon. Un voyage solitaire.

She laughs weakly, whispering:
Alors, Monsieur, a la prochaine. Bon chance!
She pulls her wind-blown skirt down and giggles.

--- Albert B. Casuga
01-18-12

A ZERO POINT: WITHOUT YOU

2012-01-17T19:56:00.000-08:00

A ZERO POINT

There will be a world with no you in it, / and it won’t be lopsided here without you.... Forever, you will never come back. ---Hannah Stephenson, “Fraction”, The Storialist, 01-17-12

He said it first: after this death,

there is no other. It is peremptory.

But a world without a memory,

is as final as it can get without you.

Will it be a place where love is free?

Magical, except you can’t come back.

The pictures will be on the walls,

as mute as the hooks they hang on.

They will not talk to you, they can’t.

Even if they could, they would not.

Even if you have become the cobweb

wrapped tight on the broken frames,

you would not have been there. No.

You are not part of the furniture.

Like dust in abandoned houses, you

will inhabit the nooks and crannies,

and would not be disturbed until

termites take over. Too late then,

because you are not even a remnant

of temps perdu, you are lost in time

and in space; even among the stars

and black holes, you are not there.

Like the sound of a single hand

clapping, you will not be heard.

The first death is always the last.

---Albert B. Casuga

01-17-12

STAYING ALIVE

2012-01-15T09:14:00.000-08:00

STAYING ALIVE

The clock’s hands never run the other way.---Luisa A. Igloria, “Oracle”, Via Negativa, 01-13-12 and To the unrepeatable life, the poet writes—/ a hymn of gratefulness…---by Luisa A. Igloria, ViaNegativa, 01-12-12

Because what we now have is a life

we will never have again, something

as unrepeatable as living or dying,

we drink to it as often as we turn down

an empty cup, and learn to forgive

what was given or not noblese oblige,

coming as we do to this strange place

without as much as a warning or even

our consent. Because we did not plan

to be born, is it too vexing to learn,

perhaps to revel in the myriad acts

of loving, and in return be grateful

to perform the surprising magical art

of shaping life, nurturing it, finding it

where no one would lead us, blind

as we are to this fire in our weak loins

that was left behind by a rushed maker

like a spare screw, and we had to find

where it would fit snugly, divinely apt

and delicately, deliciously, our manner

of staying alive when dying is better?

--- Albert B. Casuga

01-14-12

LOVE POEMS IN FOUR SEASONS: FOR VERONICA

2012-01-14T15:18:00.000-08:00

LOVE POEMS IN FOUR SEASONS:
FOR VERONICA

Four decades and nine years ago, Veronica and I embarked on a journey that we are happy to look back at. The journey goes on. In these poems, milestones mark our way. We will remember.

1.Growing Old Together

LOVE IN THE BUTTERFLY GARDEN (2009)

--- The female carries the male butterfly on her back while they reproduce, and then the female eats the male while waiting for the pupa to become another butterfly, and then she dies shortly after. --- Bohol Butterfly Farm Guide Felix.

1.

How a butterfly farm can turn
an upside down imitation of life,
haunts me still this side of art as life
or life as art as transfixed visions
of what we must be now:
like the gravid mariposa luring its mate
in a flight of duty -– she must bear
the male of her specie on her back
while they consummate a dance on air
not unlike our act of mating ---
she enamouring her mate
with scents purloined from blossoms
as, conjoined, they flit from flower to leaf
tumbling on air in ecstasy
not unknown to us when wild and young
and brave with joie de vivre,
for they must breed their kind
in a chrysalis of quiescence hurriedly,
urgently, before an inexorable end
where the male must be consumed
as her victual while clinging
to bramble branches bearing her pupa
seen to us now, voyeurs of unfolding
beauty and arresting splendour,
as the preening papillon bestirring
the dry air into a flutter of magic
sprung from throes of death and dying,
for she, too, must soon perish
after this function of issuing
a magnificence that for us can only be
borne of love and loving, yes,
perhaps also onto death and dying.

2.

The poet’s refrain, “how do I love thee”,
is supercilious here, cher ami,
it cannot match the male butterfly’s sacrifice,
nor this mariposa’s dying
to bear life, beauty, and splendour.
Alas, beauty is an omen here.

2. Coming Full Circle

A RIVER'S RUSH (1985)

--On a cruise along Lachine, Quebec

It is the river as mother to the sea
Entraps us into this womblike feeling of ease;
It is the river draws us to this discovery
Of need, our quiet helplessness.
We are the river ran its course
Into an engulfment of restless sea.
How far have we gone from our rivered Nara?
Or how long have we gone astray?
Does the river current come full circle
From the breaking waves of sea?
Do we meet each other, dreamlike,
In the endless stream of the world’s Lachines?
When do we come back as rivulets
In some hidden rock spring?
The river runs full circle, and we discover
We have not even halfway met.
When will my currents break into your rocks,
You distant sea, you entrapment of need
And engulfment of ease?
When will the sea create the river?
When will the river create the sea?
Where they meet in the trickle of a little garden,
Who laves the riverstones?
Who laps the greening shores?
The river’s rush is also our question.

3. The Dreaded Maelstrom

DIES IRAE (1970)

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.

4. Kite Seasons We Remember

REED LAUGHTER* (1962)

(For Lourdes Veronica Lim, University of Santo Tomas, Manila, 1962)

1.

There is an old haunt, Im-nas,
Where I am singer and kite-maker emeritus
Trumpeting reed laughter after the wind
On the rib of delivered rice:

It is the kite season in Narra, remember?
Time for the kite-song, remember?
Blow, Apo Angin, blow,
We whistle for the wind.

For us, sky-struck or one with this bird
Loving mate and leaving earth on the wind,
Winged: ravishing the sun, unblinded,
We wingless and simple wait for the wind.

We while kiting comatose away lifting crags
That room the secrecies of mating frogs.
They hop with surprised grace angered by
Blushing by.

2.

Veronica, you and I, child and kite,
We shall wait for the wind:
If I were the kite, fly me to the sky,
To the bird on wing.

Should I, descending, rip my fibre
On the thorns of a fig tree
Or the curse of its flower,
Do not abduct me: I perish there.

Thinking of you: Veronica-Im-nas,
And I am kite now, inured and waiting
For the wind to ravish me free.
It is the kite season in Narra. Remember?

--- ALBERT B. CASUGA

*(From "Narra Quartet", Narra Poems and Others, 1968)
Im-nas is Ilocano for Beloved
Apo Angin is Ilocano for O Wind

TWO JANUARY POEMS: (A DEATH IN HAITI: FABIANNE GEISMAR, 15); A LULLABY AT SUNDOWN

2012-01-12T19:29:00.000-08:00

FABIANNE GEISMAR, 15 : A DEATH IN HAITI

Shot dead for stealing mirrors.
---Headline, The Toronto Star, Catastrophe in Haiti, Jan 20, 2009, Pg. 19

While the temblor's carrion burn
in common graves unnamed,
you have a name to go by, and
will have confreres wail to mourn
your falling on brittle rubble,
mirror clutched as you would a rag doll
if you had a more innocent childhood,
if you even were a lass in pigtails
or braids or ribbons or princess veils,
and did not have to scrounge for food
or even think that a purloined mirror
is a prize too precious to die for.

O, Fabianne, would you have seen
a flushed reflection of the fairest face
this wounded city has haplessly hidden
in unforgiving debris of shattered grace?
Or would you have recoiled from scars
on scars that faces become inured to
seen through cracks of shattered mirrors?

Mississauga, January 21, 2010

A LULLABY AT SUNDOWN

At sundown, on my hammock hour, I hum a lullaby.
And I become the magus among the cattails chanting:

O give me a home bursting with laughter and song,
O give me a nook to hide and hold quicksilver dreams.

In their crannies, I shall wrap them with sunflowers;
In icy snow chambers, I shall save slivers of sunlight

To keep them warm. I shall be the rabbit popped out
Of the magus’ cone hat, I shall jump and disappear

Into their hideaway taking the darkness with me.

In their lairs and treehouses, I shall bring dry flint

And candlesticks and all things bright and crackling;
I shall be with my wee ones and darkness be damned.

--- ALBERT B. CASUGA
Mississauga, 1-20-11

HER SOLITUDE

2012-01-11T19:55:00.000-08:00

HER SOLITUDE

The flannel blanket was her armour.

“It shielded me through nights I needed you
to protect me from the onslaught of day
when I had to rise to know if our children
were all home in bed. Where are they?

“Did they perhaps fall from some cliff

and you were not there to catch them,

nor were they there to fall into your arms?

Where were you? Where have they gone?

“Even the sunrise scares me.

“I beg for sunsets now and nights to hide me
from the rush of day when I ache to see them
home and you beside me asking how I

made it through my day. But where are they?

When will you come to take me home?”

The blanket has shrunk and, threadbare,
it could no longer keep the intruding light away.

---Albert B. Casuga

01-11-12

A PRAYER

2012-01-10T19:54:00.000-08:00

A PRAYER

(For Marie)

I’m moved to get down on my knees./ I’m not even sure what is there.---Luisa Igloria, “Rezar”, Via Negativa, 01-08-12

Dark days will always be with us,

but they, too, will pass, like wind

blowing through gloomy rooms:

look at her fleetingly smile at you

when you hold her to your chest,

the dove-like cooing telling you

how warm it is to curl into arms

that will always be there to hold

and enfold however cruel days

become, however bereft of grace

struggling to live becomes. Look

at her gaze at you long enough

to manage another smile before

she looks away and closes her eyes

to sleep feeling you will be there

when she opens them again still

singing her a lullaby, her smile

never once leaving her tender face.

It is when you are moved to get

down on your knees and pray

that, if this were your final day,

you would still have her cuddled

in your arms smiling at what you

have begun to doubt is still there

holding us all in his steady palms.

---Albert B. Casuga

01-10-12

ON THE FREEWAY

2012-01-08T20:11:00.000-08:00

ON THE FREEWAY

It’s time we found the highway,
we seem to be driving in circles,
and the breaking circles are obscured
by the constantly hugging low clouds
that wrap around legs like children
pleading: Don’t go away, don’t go!

The highway sounds close, the hush
has broken into the steady hum
of the scrambling city---we will be
there before sundown, and get on
with put-off plans to ride down
those highways: We cannot go back.

The freeway sounds close,
the shimmering air smells of carbon
burning away the creeping clouds
that have waylaid us on our rush
to get out and not come back
to old houses and blackened ponds
too distant to remember. It is late.

---ALBERT B. CASUGA

DOWN THE SLOPE

2012-01-07T20:02:00.000-08:00

DOWN THE SLOPE

(For Francisco F. Casuga+)

Yet all the precedent is on my side:/I know that winter death has never tried/The earth but it has failed;.../It cannot check the peeper’s silver croak. --- Robert Frost, The Onset

I would run down the slope and catch myself
a rolling ball of snow before it falls into the ravine,
but walking through the silently falling snow
at the trail is a choice for these creaking knees---
no more gossoon games defying gravity for me
or flying off the hillside edge into fluff below
among the stiffened bramble and wild apple tree.

There’s warmth in the silence of falling snow:
I feel his gentle hands on my nape, I hear him,
I ask him if he would drink a pint with me
if I had reached beer-guzzling age before
he’d make his final trek, before he’d leave,
but I hear his whistling for the wind instead
and tug at his wayward kite now puncturing
some sombre summer sky in San Fernando.

O, how I’d run down the barren slopes to catch
his fallen kite among the burnt logs of the kaingin,*
but these are flakes I find myself catching
and whipped out twigs that break the silence
of falling snow. O my father.

__________

*Clearings made by burning forests

--- ALBERT B. CASUGA

In Memoriam: Francisco Flores Casuga, b. January 9, 1921

HOMESICKNESS

2012-01-04T19:46:00.000-08:00

HOMESICKNESS

Homesickness hurts/ because it will always be unrequited. ---From “Heartland” by Hannah Stephenson, The Storialist, 01-04-12

Mudfish between fingers, rice stalks

whipped by whistling monsoon wind

on our thin backs, rain-pelted faces:

you cannot look back at them in anger.

But you do. You have lost them forever.

You can never be there again. Forever.

You will go back to the old schoolyard,

but you will not find the desk you carved

her name on, hearts, initials, arrows,

all gone from sandpapered desk tops,

dark paint covering the deepest cuts

like healed cankers, mended wounds,

scars of the rawest longing for the girl

who had the longest hair, wiliest smile,

cleverest excuses for going home late,

“O, we cleaned the blackboards and all.”

Are the moss-gowned shore boulders

still there? The rocks in whose crevices

you buried secret vows to always be there

for each other in this place, this town?

That tamarind tree in whose branches

your kite got caught, rended bamboo

ribs cracked you wept over until she

stilled your quivering shoulders in her

arms, is it still there between the hills

you named after her, body parts you

were too scared to call were like hers?

Does the tree still bear its tangy fruit?

There will be more questions. Will you

find the answers you need to go home?

You will even ask the trees, if you must,

but even they will no longer talk to you.

---Albert B. Casuga

01-04-12

DO NOT DISTURB

2012-01-03T18:30:00.000-08:00

DO NOT DISTURB

You are noisy/ even when you are silent, / the world is dripping with/ Do Not Disturb signs in/ languages we don’t even/ recognize as languages. --- From “On Eggshells” by Hannah Stephenson, The Storialist, 01-03-12

It is easy enough to hear silence

at the edge of the woods. It is loud.

Your pounding heart is not there

beating sense into your dulled mind.

They just jump out like shadows

on walls, turn their backs, ignore us.

On its own, one whines with longings

struggling to spill out, uncorked,

from unguarded gaols of feelings

that have lain fallow, rotten carrion

of desire tardily unbound, love gone

still, a truant finally nailed dead

on broken beds creaking under cold

sheets that will never find heat again.

The other, a slug of a mind, stays mute,

until it is egged on to scream out a pain

in its pure form: a memory of loss,

a raw betrayal of troth. Cut, cut clean.

Out of the woods, on his way home,

it was easy to read on the locked cottage

door an absent sign: Do not disturb.

Silence has its sharp language. It is clear.

--- Albert B. Casuga

01-03-12

IN SEARCH OF MEANINGS

2012-01-01T19:56:00.000-08:00

Photo by Dave Bonta, Via Negativa

IN SEARCH OF MEANINGS

We point our dishes at the farthest stars, / searching for any crumb of meaning. / Who but the most downwardly mobile, / undocumented aliens/ would turn unjaded ears toward the earth? ---Dave Bonta, “After Rilke”, Via Negativa

Missing the many splendored thing

is one way of looking at this search.

How really far out there do we need

to fly, or espy for the god particle we

seemed to have lost in the process?

Why look behind the stars or in them?

Did we not lose our angels coming off

the crib or the direst cranny for shelter?

They do not grow with us, nor guide us.

Absconding, they quietly creep away.

Courage and devilment open our eyes

to what stories we could live with or by,

or what places to board up or occupy.

Orphans at birth, we are alone at death.

What we mean here is what we make.

The womb is a meaning we cannot do

without: our final breath is a call:

Mother, hold me. Our first cry is a call:

Mother, love me. And then we grow old

shaping up all excess purposes and ends.

The tomb is yet another meaning we

scarcely begin to understand before it

pulls us to its urgent demand: living

to die trying to live while dying is easy

may yet be the meaning we struggle for.

---Albert B. Casuga

01-01-12

TWO POEMS FOR THE NEW YEAR (2012 B.M.A.)*

2011-12-31T20:00:00.000-08:00

ARDENT WISH

That night will come, fully felt, indelible,
there will be no key to turn on the door:
it was always with me in my breastpocket
where it is easy enough to feel, the throbs
underneath it urging me to take the path
home where you said my stenciled footsteps
can still be traced even with the early snow
on the cobble stones. I shall retrace them.

—Albert B. Casuga
12-31-11

POST POSTSCRIPT

If leaving were easy and found myself
in a hereafter, I might find these words
for you (if thoughts and our pillow-talk
could still cut through the walls-on-walls
of dark nights and blank sheets stiffened
into cold knife-edged shields guarding
against our talking to each other again):

“Leave the window open, let the branch
grow close to it, you will find me there
scrambling among bridges of moonlight,
starlight, sunlight, even flickers from your
turned-down lamps, singing those little
songs I always sang to keep the fine rhythm
of my pats on your thighs, caresses to put
you to sleep on warm nights you thought
were not made for slumber or some such.”

---Albert B. Casuga 01-01-12

*Before Mayan Apocalypse

"Ardent Wish" is a response to Luisa Igloria's "Animus", and "Post Postscript", poems published in Dave Bonta's Via Negative on 12-31-11.

IN SOMALIA, A BETHLEHEM: TWO MORE CHRISTMAS POEMS

2011-12-30T08:37:00.000-08:00

IN SOMALIA, A BETHLEHEM:

TWO MORE CHRISTMAS POEMS

Suffer the little children to come unto me, and forbid them not: for of such is the kingdom of God. --- St. Mark ch. 10 v. 14, the Holy Bible

1. Los Ninos Inocentes

Heaven can wait. Hell cannot. Cut them

like flotsam and weed-traps wrapping

bloated carrion beelining toward the sea.

What controls cannot contain, infanticide

could quickly provide: terminate them,

abort before a trimester germinates more

burden, stop the plague of life on a dying

planet. When echoes of children’s laughter

could no longer be heard in a muted valley,

the elusive peace and quiet would be there,

no duties to rear, no grain shortages; wars

will cease from an attrition of warriors,

old soldiers wither in unstocked barracks,

the draftees will stop coming. They have all,

all perished, in abortion camps, in famine

camps, in evacuation camps, in flood camps,

in garbage dumps and landfills, God’s Act

stamped across records to avoid insurance

runs. The boys have been massacred before

in the hills of Bethlehem, and the pillage

written about in Gospel language as the day

of the innocents, now los ninos inocentes.

Why can’t that be done again? No in vitros

will be possible, nor will it be allowed either.

Do not copulate, depopulate, depopulate!

Pill boxes will bear this mandate, absent

the plea for missing kids, more is better.

Hell will be heaven on earth, death is life,

and nothing will be everything. Zero sum.

Wrath descended, Apocalypse has come.

2. Somalia’s Bethlehem

Sometime in the gloom of this dread, a hill

of burning sand replaces the stable manger,

and Somalia’s desert becomes a new world’s

Bethlehem. In its famine zones, a limp baby

struggles to stay alive. Minhaj Gedi Farah,

starves under a mosquito net in the world’s

largest refugee camp, “even his mother

has given up hope that her baby boy, Minhaj,

would survive,” reports the Associated Press.

But magi and shepherds alike did not need a star

to lead them back to his tent. No gold, no myrrh,

nor incense gifted, just a mix of Plumpy’Nut,

AP calls a “cute name for vitamins and minerals

saving Minhaj. Three packets a day of the peanut-

based paste help a child gain up to two pounds

in a single week. It doesn’t require cooking or

refrigeration...Today, Baby Minhaj is thriving,

growing from seven lbs. in July to 18 pounds

in October, 2011.” And our world will not give up,

on all that is innocent. Not this boy, not all Earth’s

boys. No massacre will cut them down again,

nor troops to slay them in brutal Kenya camps.

There will be time enough for a Calvary, but not now,

nor Minhaj need be a redeemer. Mankind in his tent

will not be taxed for the sturdiest crucifying lumber,

all they need are 21 packets of Plumpy’Nut at $10,

and a deluge of epiphany: they are this brother’s keeper.

--- Albert B. Casuga

12-29-11

LITTLE QUESTIONS

2011-12-28T19:14:00.000-08:00

LITTLE QUESTIONS

But neither plaster, nor/ marble, nor stucco rooms/ end your search for/ the end of the rooms/ or a roomless door.---Hannah Stephenson, “Next Door”, The Storialist, 12-28-11

There must be a little door

that will not end in a room.

Space is all. Is there an end

to these rooms? An exit

into a free space all my own?

I require a room-less door

to step out of when leaving

would finally mean being

unbound, no walls to fence me

in, no house to shackle a home.

For what would a sky be for?

Why would suns set over hills?

Suns rise from the edge of seas?

Why do springs expand to falls?

Why is beauty is own excuse?

Whence come this splendour,

what does it mean for a flower

to bloom? When all questions

have been answered, where

ends he whose end is a question?

Or are answers simply next door?

--- Albert B. Casuga

12-28-11

THE QUIET DISTANCE: TWO OTHER CHRISTMAS POEMS

2011-12-27T11:25:00.000-08:00

Photo by Bobby Wong Jr., Philippines

THE QUIET DISTANCE

(For Mother on Christmas 2011)

At night, in sleep, my right/ hand cups my cheek; from habit I turn/ toward the window. Behind night’s/ lowering net, miles and miles of quiet. --- From “Because it is Years since I Last Saw You, Mother…” Luisa A. Igloria, Via Negativa, 12-25-11

1. Her Noche Buena

Did you wake up for Noche Buena?*

Lit the balled candle on the belen?*

Do you still put those candles away

for another Pascua de los muertos?*

I can almost see you cranking open

the heavy lid of that narra trunk

at the foot of your bed where his

picture stands sentry while you sleep.

How long did it take you this time

to rearrange the animals around

the manger? Reposition, you’d say

but they’re always in the same place.

The lamb snuggles closest to the box

you stuff with dried grass for hay,

the ass farthest, the horse between.

Why? I would always ask while I,

insolent tot, handed you the wrong

fauna at a time. You would laugh

at how San Jose landed on your palm

when you asked for the donkey, an

angel when you yelled for a shepherd,

a magus when you barked for a burro,

and on and on until you’d pitch me

the hard-packed ball of saved candle

drips from father’s grave on the one

other fiesta you’d get up from sick bed

for---but Noche Buena is a rare treat:

you’d eat pan de sal, a whole banana.

2. Her Belen de Pascua

“Para mi fuerza, para mi belen de pascua,”*

you would sheepishly explain an appetite

we plead for each day you’d remember

father building the manger with you long

after he had the last laugh when, like me,

he would give the dingiest animal figure

instead of a king, a shepherd, or an angel,

and simply did not get up from a crumple

laughing at you when you threw him

back the make-believe cow dung, manure

for the grand project of a straw stable

that father said was wrong: it was a hole

in the city of Petra in that Bethlehem hill,

and there were no inns to take Him in.

You buried him with that Belen de Pascua,*

Mother, and could not quite remake one

you would delight describing to a devil’s

detail to polite and knowing neighbours,

who would drop by to gawk at your porch

where the only clay image in its right place

was the baby in the manger whose name

you kept on muttering was father’s name.

On nights like this, I scare myself, Mother,

with the spectre of the quiet distance.

---Albert B. Casuga

12-26-11

*Noche Buena, Christmas Eve; belen, Christmas manger; Pascua de los muertos, Feast of the Beloved Departed; Para me fuerza, para mi belen de Pascua, for my strength, to build my Christmas manger.

Photo by Bobby Wong Jr., Philippines

LIKE A TENDRIL

2011-12-22T18:21:00.000-08:00

LIKE A TENDRIL

Tendril wound through my hair; small whisk of breath: I love your ambiguous arrivals. Reminder of what might leap into flame, thicken into honey, should I rub my two hands, stone and flint, together.---From “Morning Song” by Luisa A. Igloria, Via Negativa, 12-21-11

Would the tendril creeping through my hair,

crawl down my face and touch my mouth

to draw this quivering breath, a gentle whisk

of air caught in a billowing web of gossamer,

an invitingly silken grope of fingers, drawing

me, enfolding me, burning with raw desire?

Mornings are unbridled questions like these,

and will not find answers soon, until I leap

like a flame scorching your enfeebled loins

that they may dance again, quake or shiver

again and find me waiting feverishly there

where nothing moves but you amid my fire.

Dare I follow you to places you have gone,

or run to? Must you salve your wounds alone?

I ache for your return, yet I never know when.

Like the tendril sprouting quietly in unknown

directions, will you crawl into what is warm?

Fill my eager arms? Crowd our empty room?

--- Albert B. Casuga

12-22-11

JUST A WOMAN

2011-12-21T07:23:00.000-08:00

JUST A WOMAN

Use it as/ a cup from which to drink today / like a woman who isn’t a mother: / just a woman, just a girl who wants/ to sit in this chair with no need / to get up real soon, who wants warm/ light to love all of her back, who/ wants a sip of cold clear water. ---From “Song Without Strings” by Luisa Igloria, Via Negativa, 12-20-11

Warm light on the back are familiar fingers

but they will not be back as caresses again.

They can only unravel bandages of wounds

that will not heal but will not feel any pain.

I am done with them. All feelings betray us

before they become clear: they sap courage,

and quickly turn into skeletons of passion.

I want to be a woman, not a chair to catch

torn and tired bodies that need mending.

I, too, hanker for strength from the strong,

unquenchable hunger I could eagerly satisfy

when it finds its harbor and home in a place

I, and only I, can shape or rearrange or own,

or drink like a glass of cold water to cool me

down when I have no more need for loving.

---Albert B. Casuga

12-20-11

THE MANGER: A CHRISTMAS POEM

2011-12-19T19:13:00.000-08:00

THE MANGER

No light shines that is not itself a road/ No other door opens except in dreams.---From “In Dreams” by Simeon Dumdum, Jr.

This fire must burn fiercely to build the road

that ends at the foundling’s darkened cavern.

Blind eyes will discover how only hearts can

find where the flame has been lit to crackle

through endless nights of endless dreaming

for an advent that is also the final leaving:

How long will this journey take to open doors

that will take him in? Why are they all closed?

A peasant woman and her bewildered lover,

huddle around a trough of dampened feed,

and cannot hear their fears drowned by hope

that their wildest nightmare of an unborn

child would be a prince of peace whose light

is all he could offer the wounded and the poor.

For these afflicted, the light will all be roads,

to his kingdom where dreams are also doors

to a bountiful garden carved from twin hills

of birth and crucifixion. Bethlehem is Calvary.

---Albert B. Casuga

12-19-11

TASTING SNOW

2011-12-19T16:59:00.000-08:00

TASTING SNOW

A pair of Carolina wrens—one in the lilac, the other in the dead cherry—flit from branch to branch, tasting the new-fallen snow.---Dave Bonta, The Morning Porch, 12-18-11

Snow on those branches, lilac or cherry,
will not mask the taste of autumn chill.

Frozen twigs are just as brittle as dead
vines on the mottled lattices blown off

from their rotten moorings. Will nails
hold them down at next riveting? How

firm will their hold be on these trellises?
Even this abandonment will not last.

That bush will bloom again, the tree rises
again to restore those spattered perches.

They cannot die those who have sprung
from the earth when living is still in style.

— Albert B. Casuga
12-18-11

SENIORS DREAM OF CHRISTMAS WITH OPEN EYES

2011-12-18T17:59:00.000-08:00

A Christmas Message delivered at the Sampaguita Senior Citizens Club 2011 Christmas Celebration, December 17, 2011, Mississauga, Ontario, Canada

My friends, fellow seniors, ladies and gentlemen.

My wife and I are delighted to have been graciously invited to your annual Christmas celebration. Sometime, or the other, we were here with you, happy to remember a holy and happy day. I remember, too, that I was likewise asked to give an “inspirational” talk before I sit down for a sumptuous dinner. (If I have learned any lessons in public speaking, it is never a good idea to delay dinner on one’s account; particularly a speech.) I am doing the same thing, today---not the same presentation I had last year, thank God---but I will not disturb your digestive systems this time by reciting some of the poems I write to keep my mind working. However, should it stop working in the middle of my talk, please remember to throw some leftover bread in my direction to remind me I am addressing a live audience and that I am not talking to myself in public.

Such, alas, is the misfortune of growing old. But that is a harsh term, isn’t it? Growing old. In my old country, nobody grows “old”---“kalabaw lang ang tumatanda---only carabaos grow old,” the old proverb quoted by seniors more often than not reminds us urgently. Therefore, I will not use that term again. It is more poetic, indeed, to use the disguised endearment: “in the twilight of our years.”

Whose twilight, though? We are not done yet with this Earth that God has given his beloved Son, Jesus, to save and to die for. We may be at a stage where we can say with the poet William Wordsworth, “Though nothing can bring back the hour of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower, we will grieve not, rather find strength in what remains behind.”

Bring back the hour of splendour? Glory in the flower? Why, we have not stopped falling in love ardently, nor loving fiercely. We have merely toned it down by living and loving wisely.

At the risk of sounding like a Don Quixote attacking the windmills, let me repeat what surveys keep on saying: 1. Seniors remain as the most capable buyers of goods and services---from croissants to coffins; 2. By 2016, 60 % of Canada will be seniors; 3. The most influential voting block is the senior sector—no Prime Minister nor the smallest politician has yet dared to ignore this; 4. The leader is wise, indeed, who would nourish the undiminished influence and aspirations of the nation’s seniors, because they are the natural repositories of the wisdom, ambition, and conscience of the human race.

So, my friends, “in the twilight of our years,” what remains behind? Our collective strength is preserved. Each “grandpa, grandma, abuelo, abuela, nonno, nonna, grandpere, grandmere, mami, papi, apo lakay, apo baket, Baak, Impo, Nanang, Tatang--whatever or however we are now addressed by children, grandchildren, and great grandchildren---bear the insignia of caring, rearing, raising, shaping, enriching (yes, with RESPs, too for the grandchildren), and above all loving the inheritors of this Earth that we are stewards of. We have the strength and abiding courage to hand down this planet to our children, their children, and their children’s children in its most progressive, peaceful, and productive state yet. With heads held high, we will keep this promise.

But have our leaders been supportive of this promise? Have they proven faithful to this pledge? Unfortunately, we are still witnesses to wars, famines, discrimination, abuse of natural resources, corruption, and rank indifference to the duties and responsibilities of being human. Man’s inhumanity to man is still rampant. I submit, my fellow seniors, that these are things we can still correct.

Paulo Coelho, a Portuguese poet and novelist, and recently a Facebook friend, wrote in one of his posts: Keep your eyes wide open, if you want to dream. We do dream---each day that this great Gift of life, this Earth, this Paradise regained will be there nourishing our human specie until the consummation of the world when we all go back to our beginning who is God and know him only for the first time.

We see what neglect can do to our borrowed home, this wounded Earth. Because we dream with our eyes open, we will still adorn this home with the beauty and peace that it deserves. We will not dream of days gone by, we will dream of the wonders that are yet to come.

In the meantime, do we still realize what dream comes true all the days of our lives? That we still receive the greatest gift of all from God, his Son who died for us that death itself will no longer have dominion? So that we can dream still with our eyes open, of a Happy Christmas---(Never mind a White Christmas---no snow please---we seniors have thrown our shovels but an evergreen Christmas to mark the everlasting freshness of the Christmas of our Youth)---when we visited Christ’s manger in our hearts, and kept him warm, like we were two babies warming each other up in that cold, cold manger.

Do you remember that story of the boy in a German orphanage sometime in 1994 who drew two babies in the manger? When asked by his American Peace Corps teachers, why? He said: “I told baby Jesus, I have no Mama nor Papa, so I don’t have a place to stay. Then Jesus told me I could stay with him. But I told him I couldn’t because I did not have a gift to give him like everybody else did. But I wanted to stay with Jesus so much, so I thought about what I had that maybe I could use for a gift. I thought maybe if I kept him warm, that would be a gift. Jesus told me: “If you keep me warm, that will be the best gift anybody ever gave me.” So I got into the manger, and then Jesus looked at me and he told me I could stay with him...for always. Little Misha found someone who will never abandon nor abuse him, someone who would stay with him---FOR ALWAYS.”*

If we dream with our eyes open this Christmas, will we dream of one with Jesus Christ back in the manger with us?

My friends, thank you for this opportunity to address you, and we wish you all a Holy and Happy Christmas!

--- ALBERT B. CASUGA

Dec. 17, 2011

*Courtesy of Rev. Fraqncisco R. Albano who forwarded this from the Secretariat of the National Clergy Discernment, 12-17-2011 (Author Anonymous)

Click Image to zoom in to the Text

HE DREAMT WITH OPEN EYES

2011-12-16T14:55:00.000-08:00

Photo by Reuters/Beck Diefenback

HE DREAMT WITH OPEN EYES

(For Steve Jobs+)

Dance a digital dream, and spin a web

around this globe where everyone knows

if you floss your teeth, or pick your nose,

if you still venture out of your craven cave.

Did you earn enough to buy a paperbook

that made you a little prince of a pauper,

when learning meant to read or to hunger

for that leftover burger, or die in a nook,

coupling with a book, ranting of a stable

boy, romping in hay, dung, and cackling

hen with the Lady of the Manor, stripping

bare all that is noble, her drawers on a table?

Dance the jig of the devil astride the tombs

of the slovenly, slothful, and obtuse writers,

who bartered their dreams with publishers

stuffed with ducats, scribblers with crumbs.

Dare you now liberate these dumb brothers

who dream with closed eyes, sing rhymes

like drooling mutes, or untinkling chimes?

Internet, iPad, Kodo, Kindle, their druthers,

you dreamt them with open eyes and saw

that nightmares are only for the blind,

all who dream with closed eyes, the kind

who cannot see behind walls grass also grow.

--- Albert B. Casuga

12-15-11

DREAMING

2011-12-15T19:32:00.000-08:00

DREAMING

Keep your eyes wide open if you want to dream---Paolo Coelho

The ones we talk about or ache to recall

the morning after, we call nightmares.

A love-sick, maudlin, slobbering goodbye

in the tight-pillow-hug tearjerker dream?

It was not a dream. It is a stifled desire,

a constipation “devoutly to be wished”.

Shrinks shrank these into Freudian blots

on the balance sheets of love and hate:

You want to run as wildly far away as you

could, id permitting, haunches allowing.

One needy life is enough torment; free

yourself then from this strangled trellis,

where hanging like a wanton leaf is not

the twin of hanging on but dangling still

until hurts can no longer wound you,

nor gentle caress save you. You are a stone.

No fall can sever you from tangled vines

that summer burns, nor frost cripple you;

you would not even pray for the spring

to bring sunrises and sunsets to heal you.

Open your eyes and dream that loneliness

becomes you; you are strong and alone,

omni soli, semper. Will courage redeem

you then from the stupidity of being brave

and alone? And when you sleep, will you

remember to open your eyes and dream?

--- Albert B. Casuga

12-15-11

SOUNDS OF LONELINESS

2011-12-14T18:53:00.000-08:00

SOUNDS OF LONELINESS

Solitude’s silver and blue/ arrow streaks toward you, lodging like a piece /of ice under your skin.---From “Walking”, Luisa A. Igloria, “Via Negativa”, 12-12-11

I walk alone in its corridors,

like I am one of the planks,

clean, clear, but cold floors

stretched endlessly, blanks,

empty but will always be full

of the sounds of loneliness:

spoons and forks fall, their

clangour strangely cutting

through the night when

the dinner table is cleared

quietly away, the children

could not make it. Eating

leftovers just isn’t the same

anymore, the leche flan still

golden, caramel and cream

browned on the edges will

harden overnight in a freezer

dear to them as “old geezer.”

Morning tea on a bare porch

is absently left to cool off

in a squat cup left untouched

on a receiving table now left

trembling from traffic fare

on the rousing old highway.

Maybe they will call today,

maybe they will still see me

after turkey day. Christmas!

O, will they be here at last?

The cup tinkles, I look away,

a twig has fallen into my cold tea.

---Albert B. Casuga

12-14-11

PORCH TALK ON THE APOCALYPSE

2011-12-13T17:26:00.000-08:00

PORCH TALK ON THE APOCALYPSE

Sun through a skim of clouds. A nuthatch and a downy woodpecker trade anxious, nasal notes between the faint shadows of the trees. ---Dave Bonta, The Morning Porch, 12-13-11

N: Think this winter will be our last? Mayan 2012, remember?
DW: Nah, might just be a peep at the God Particle by a savant.
N: What’s with the peppy, sunshiny, head-in-the-clouds cant?
DW: Been pecking on wood all my life! What’s with the dander?

N:      Not enough nuts or weevils as it is. Why end it all? It’s futile.
DW: Boredom. Renewal. Occupy. He’s hinted these for a while.
N:      Occupy. Uh-oh. Come back to reclaim this neck of the woods?
DW: Final Coming. Like Advent. Last trip, like. He’s tired. Pissed.
N:      Like driving scruffy tenants out for punching holes on walls?
DW: More like ozone layer holes. Global warming, oil spills, Nuts.
N:     They’re already murdering each other. Wars, famine, Woods.
DW: He’s got to have the last say. He wants them to say: We repent!
N:      What’s the point? Couldn’t he consider his love well spent?
DW: Don’t know about you. I would like to bore a few more holes.

—Albert B. Casuga
12-13-11

HER BAPTISM

2011-12-11T20:08:00.000-08:00

HER BAPTISM

(For Marie Clementine)*

Was it cold water poured on your head

that jolted you into a cranky howl?

Who dared break your noontime sleep?

A kindly old man with a blank cowl

said he has simply prepared for one

not there who would bring fire instead.

I baptize only with water, but he for whom

I cry in this wilderness, whose shoe straps

I am unworthy to untie, he will use fire.

Was it this fire from the fireless fount

that roused you then from your slumber,

where you must have giggled and played

with the elves that sang you a lullaby?

It is the flame of my father’s spirit I burn

you with, sear you with his eternal love!

Was it his ardent caress then that woke

you up to a quick cry of surprise not pain,

was it his outstretched hand on your head?

Did he touch you, Marie, on your brow,

and asked: Will you be my lamb and follow

me, build the campfire to warm my flock?

It will be very cold tonight at the stable.

Was it his gentle palm on your face then,

that eased your angry yell into a tender sob?

Was he there, Marie? Did he smile at you?

---Albert B. Casuga

12-11-11

*Baptised as a follower of Jesus Christ at St. Francis of Assisi Parish Church, Mississauga, Ontario, Canada, December 11, 2011, in the presence of her parents, Martin Lalonde and Adele Frances Casuga, her godparents, Alvin Kwan and April Veronica Casuga-Kwan, her grandparents Albert and Veronica Casuga and Roger and Therese Lalonde, nine Casuga-clan cousins, aunts and uncles, and family friends. Deacon Rev. Mr. Don Roberts, on behalf of Parish Pastor Rev. Joseph Grima, officicated.

THE UNWRITTEN SONG

2011-12-10T19:34:00.000-08:00

THE UNWRITTEN SONG

You are learning/ to call to what you love, to see it returning.---Hannah Stephenson, “You Can do It”, The Storialist, 12-07-11

When the going is good, I would like to go

quickly and quietly like the kettle’s whistle

at tea time, hunched over a writing desk

daring to write that still unwritten song:

The one that gets arrested in my dry throat

when I sing you to sleep, and you could not

or would not, afraid you would find me gone

in the morning, like most mornings we had

before we grew too old to stay longer in bed,

snuggling, counting the rings on the phone

before the children, now the grandchildren,

would put the intruder down and wonder

how we are waddling along, bum knees on

your right and mine on the left. Would you

want us to buy your croissants today? What

about the bok choy, and the other greens?

This is as good as it gets, cold keys to pound

on, little words, cathedrals of thought,

wind on the pane, a houseful of memories,

quiet pictures to talk to on the walls, tunes

tinkling on the piano sans rhyme or reason

except to dust the keys off from imagined

dirt stuck by sticky children’s fingers who

raid the shelves of uneaten brittle cookies

and marmalade. Aiee, cochino, por Dios!*

She would wail in her pained stentorian

dirge, mourning over violated piano keys

that remain untouched, unplayed, silenced

perhaps when arthritic fingers coupled

rheumatic knees, backs that recall pangs

of Calvary, and those kaleidoscopic visions

of ghostly shadows peopling porch walls,

bouncing, dancing, trembling like puppets

on a string, undefined, indefinable, strangers

come to visit us, and we do not know their

names. When the going is good, I will go

quickly and quietly, humming that song

I said I will write for you before I go.

--- Albert B. Casuga
12-10-11

*God, how filthy!

WHEN GOD CALLS: A BOOK OF MEDITATIONS BY POET-PHILOSOPHER ALEJO VILLANUEVA JR.

2011-12-09T17:48:00.000-08:00

WHEN GOD CALLS---AN EARLY CHRISTMAS GIFT

My family received an early Christmas gift today from Rev. Francisco Albano. All the way from Ilagan, Isabela, Northern Philippines, where he is Rector of the National Shrine of Our Lady of the Visitation of Guibang, Guibang, Gamu, Isabela. A book wrtitten by my compadre, Poet-Philosopher Alejo Villanueva, Jr.!

I am beside myself with joy to receive this from a friend who was always in our Christmas list since we left the old country some 33 years ago. A book from a dear compadre, godfather of my daughter, April Veronica.

I plan to review the book subsequently to share Alejo's reflections on a "journey to the heart of Jesus." Also appended here is a repost of my April 9, 2009 post on Alex and I, and how deeply he has influenced my manner of looking at the warmer things of the heart and the finer things of the mind and spirit.

(Click on image to Zoom in on Text)

A PHILOSOPHER'S SMALL TALK

(Reposted from my April 9, 2009 blog entry)

Small Talk at a Coffee
Shop in Montparnasse

Io non mori, e non rimasi vivo.
-- Dante Alighieri, Divina Commedia

Black coffee, Alejo, has its way of distinguishing
anguish from angostura now that prattle
of Sartre, Camus, and Berdyaev has stopped
on a pin’s head: the blackness is proof of the battle
come as the gadfly disturbing the teacups
where they, unthinking, rattle; we, unfeeling, bleed.

“Me? I take mine with cream.” It is this need
makes one prefer a dash of milk to a dash of pity.
Fancy the hole on the doughnut where the hole
lasts only where the dough surrounds it. Fancy,
what makes you think you’re not a doughnut?
“Ontological dimensions of fear, I say.”

Fear of the bole whose business it is to stand tall?

Or of some blank wall?

With the hole there and the coffee black,
where begins the trembling for the clock?
Time in. Time out. Man becomes, then runs out.
What makes you think you’re not a man? Doubt?
“I suffer; therefore, I am alive.” But when life ran out,
one did not die, yet nothing of life remained!
One takes coffee with cream, an empirical scheme
of distinctions between man, doughnut, and dream.

A cup ennobles indignities; the fact is it empties
what makes itself itself into a hole not unlike the
doughnut’s, waiting to be filled, but filled with pain.
To be metaphysical, like the sky empties itself of rain!
Like it was afternoons and the coffee guests absent,
No prattle here of Heidegger nor even of Kierkegaard.
The tables have not remained silent
since then, Alejo. The cups have even trembled.

-- ALBERT B. CASUGA
(1968, 1972, 1990, 2009)

Why all the dates under my byline? The poem has reincarnated in quite a number of forms, I have had to re-write it until I was happy with it. In my A Theory of Echoes and Other Poems UST Publishing, 2009), I said I finally liked its last rewrite. I will not be embarrassed by it.

It was a languid afternoon, after classes at the Benedictine college where we taught -- Alejo Villanueva Jr., chairman of the Philosophy Department, and I dropped by a coffee shop at Ermita in the art district of Manila. Would I want to sit in as a revalida panelist for his philosophy majors who were taking their oral examinations? Why not? I accepted his invitation, flattered that a literature major/philosophy minor baccalaureate would qualify me to pass or flunk Philo majors. That tied down, he engaged me in his usual "small talk" -- Camus and existentialism, Heidegger, Kierkegaard. Alejo spouted insight after insight, and I felt like these venerable philosophers and writers were with us sipping coffee.

What does it mean to be human? Why do we exist? What do we exist for? What makes one think one is alive? Gripped by despair that there were more moronic philosophy students in his classes than in our time when we would shoot the breeze with parnassian thoughts, he would bite into his endless doughnuts and I would remark that it took him only one bite to get to the hole of the doughnut and three others to finish it off. Relax. It's only philosophy.

But you have poetry to wax eloquently about in your lit classes, he would remonstrate. Dialectics in mine are as lethal as cyanide to my bums! They would rather march in the streets. But Betrand Russell did that, too, I would placate him.

It was past suppertime when I got home, the children in bed. Seeing the missus already in her slumbrous Parnassus, I sat down to compose the first version of Small Talk. I submitted this first form to fulfill a graduate school writing assignment in Prof. Ophelia A. Dimalanta's Creative Writing class. One of the Philippines' finest poets writing in English, Prof. Dimalanta's good rating of your submission would be a treasure -- she thought my poem, A Philosopher' Attempt at Small Talk at an Ermita Coffee Shop, was good, "except for words like ontological -- not as "magical as seagull."

I ran off with the poem, got it published by Sunday Times editor Gloria Garchitorena Goloy, and the poem's life would never be the same again.

Small Talk was one of the poems I collected in Narra Poems and Others, a book that got me through the graduate class despite my almost zero attendance (I would be there only when I would read a submission to poet Dimalanta's class). She subseqently wrote the introduction of the book together with my fellow Ilocano, University of the Philippines Poet-in-residence , the late Alejandrino G. Hufana.

At the 1972 Dumaguete Writer's Workshop in Silliman University, I was asked by Dr. Edith L. Tiempo, workshop director now Philippine National Artist, to present the poem for discussion. What did it mean, all this prattle?

It was poet Wilfredo Pascua Sanchez who ventured: "It's small talk. You know, namedropping of filosopos and talk about holes and doughnuts, life and dying, coffee and rain. Nice afternoon merienda." Giggles.

He smirked as he got himself involved in poetic hermeneutics. Cavalier, I thought, but that was it! Life as a doughnut. To make up for what was considered smart-ass interpretation, Pascua Sanchez offered to lend me money when I ran out of beer allowance during the workshop. I don't remember if I paid him back.

I revisited Small Talk in Canada when I got In a Sparrow's Time (1990) published. The lines were all flushed left and all started with capital letters. Like most poems at that time.

At that workshop, a priest attendee, Rev. Frank Fernandez, spoke about lines determined by "breath span" (what you could say aloud without losing wind) -- I thought I would use that measure and rhythm (including internal rhymes) in its latest incarnation in 2009. After all, wasn't Small Talk a dialogue between two breathlessly prattling philosopher-manques and poet wannabes?

Alejo became one of the most virulent critics of the martial law president after that coffee shop rendezvous. His bylines were all over the magazines criticizing leadership from the barrel of a carbine, at worst, a government propped up by monkeys in uniforms!

He wrote a book on Proletarian Philippine hero Andres Bonifacio, taught in more schools ran by religious orders, Jesuits, Benedictines, nuns. Gave up on them later, became a successful marketing executive and entrepreneur, and, the last time we saw each other, he was still fulminating about Philippine politics that he even got mad somewhat with the late Senator Raul Roco, his own compadre and our San Beda College colleague and friend. Roco ran for the Presidency later, but my philosopher-poet friend and compadre (he was godfather to one of my younger daughters), Alejo Villanueva Jr. must have wept inconsolably when Roco died during his campaign and a movie actor Joseph Estrada would win but ultimately jettisoned by revolting Filipinos (in the second People's Revolution) for corruption. Angry, Alejo would always manage to rationalize disasters: Voters deserve the leaders they elect.

He ran for City Council in Manila some time or the other, but did not make it. Always the poet-philosopher, he came out with a small book of poems and meditations (a la Mao Tse tung?), but I left for Canada and probably did not deseve an autographed copy "for leaving our country, our beloved native land." I wonder if Alejo found another coffee-buddy to engage in big "small" talk with. He never wrote back when I asked for us to "correspond in the twilight of our years, even if it were only through these damned new-fangled e-mails."

"The tables have not remained silent since then, Alejo. the cups have even trembled."

THE ACCOUNTANT

2011-12-08T17:49:00.000-08:00

THE ACCOUNTANT

Sunny and cold. A nuthatch lands on the dead cherry and begins a close inspection of the limbs, dapper as an accountant in his gray suit.---Dave Bonta, The Morning Porch, 12-08-11

Almost invisible, he plods quickly through carrion
piled helter-skelter on the bulldozed hillock. Dead
heads, dead eyes, dead limbs, dead legs, dead dead
form wreaths on the gaping holes in graveyards we
now know: Kampuchea, Maguindanao, Somalia,
Libya, Uganda, Nigeria, Botswana, Russian pogroms,
Mein Kampf railroads to the Herr’s crematoriums,
killing fields: he was there, “been there, done that”,
his austere and remote account of his unique job:
counter of the dead, keeper of the books, master
of the morgues, “keep them coming while we could,
death shall have no dominion.” Nor a condominium.
Like the nuthatch, he walks with a limp in his dark,
gray suit, shrugs, leaps over the dead cherry and
stifles a long, deep yawn, and fixes his ledger pages.

— Albert B, Casuga
12-08-11

LOOKING AT RAIN

2011-12-07T19:35:00.000-08:00

LOOKING AT RAIN

Rain. I’m mesmerized by the driveway puddles, how rings of ripples form and overlap, each raindrop magnified at the point of termination.---Dave Bonta, The Morning Porch, 12-07-11

Two ways of looking at rain

as an allegory or metaphor:

rain, rain, go away children

want to play! But we tore

through the walls of rainfall

naked, deliriously, gleefully

screaming for the sky to fall

on our tender loins, scarcely

touched by wind and fingers

carved coyly into cane leaves

that lash and tickle derrieres

poised skyward, athwart as if

to mock a voyeur leering in

some hidden crack of clouds,

to espy these glistening skin,

patches that pass for clothes

on the backs of carousing

children lost in their singing.

Before long, the rain stopped.

Into lives some rain must fall.

Songs ended. And we grew up.

Rain became our quiet call

to clear our driveways of debris

from torrents that shredded

twigs of their foliage, cut a tree

in a sudden storm we dreaded.

---Albert B. Casuga

12-07-11

A TOY PISTOL

2011-12-06T20:04:00.000-08:00

A TOY PISTOL

Toys and stuffed animals feed/ our first experiments in truth/ and desire--the dolls of our youth/ are pets, children. We call/ to our toys, and they all/ leap up, paw at our jackets/and faces. The racket/ of our own loneliness is loud. / We crave a friendly crowd. ---From “Toys Are Us” by Hannah Stephenson, The Storialist, 12-05-11

My first toy was a pistol whittled from a branch,

and from the windows of abuelo’s grand house,

I must have aimed and shot at as many cousins

who would yell for me to put on a pair of pants,

and come down to play with boys not dolls. Pistol,

I would yell back, I will shoot you, kill you all!

It had the shape of a Tom Mix shooter, a whittled

branch, really, cut and shaped by a drunk uncle

who said he would make me one if I quietly stole

the gin from father’s drawer so he could share

the ten-cent coke bottle with me when the gun

is done, and I could ride away on the banana stalk

horses with a gun to cut down all the little injuns

across the road who have been crowing all day long

for me to come down and shoot it out, their bows

ready to sling their arrows and pebble bullets

with their slingshots. Be sure you have pants on,

it will protect us from your gas-bombs, ass bombs!

From those windows, I raised hell and rat-ta-tat;

I did not know it was only a quiet “bang” or “ping”

for a pistol the size of a pretzel. When I came down

to finally play with them, mother said my asthma

was gone, thank god I was ready to attend school,

learn to read and write, recite poems for abuelo

or sing old Spanish songs I barely understand

so he would get up from his rocking chair and

shout down the boys to leave me alone with dolls

or pistols before some stupid presidente would

consider me old enough to join the guerrillas

and like a pea-sized idiot get myself quartered

by Japanese bombs. My first toy was a pistol,

but now on my dotage not unlike my abuelo’s , I

have nothing but contempt for guns and wars

even to defend a homeland; all I want and pray

for is be able to play with my live dolls who coo

and smile, and giggle, and before long say abuelo.

Before long, I am sure, they, too, will be pistols.

--- Albert B. Casuga

12-06-11

OCCUPYING THE GARDEN

2011-12-02T18:06:00.000-08:00

OCCUPYING THE GARDEN

What do I want, what do I need? Later, I tell myself, later. There’s plenty of work, the hours full of obligation. But I know I am not virtuous: I am always my hunger. ---From “Hunger” by Luisa A. Igloria, Via Negativa, 11-30-11

What if this place were made only for the other?

You are yourself, but you are also others’ other.

Were you conceived for yourself, or for a specie?

Someone must extend the process of evolution.

Your first act out of the womb was to let out a cry.

Was it not to alert the birthing other you’re here?

And you will bring joy to a union forged in dreams,

but you could always be the unwanted obligation.

What if you were the inevitable happenstance

come from the aches of groin and gravid reasons?

Are you an issue of love or lust? An afterthought?

When did you start to even aspire to be yourself?

Dare you grow then to even ask: What do I want?

What do I need? Selfish angst? No. Must-ask ones.

One cannot give what one does not have, operatio

sequitur esse. Find and feed your hunger to know

what you are here for. Are you a brother’s keeper?

Or does a lover keep you? Either way, a hunger.

If you were for the other, you must be provident;

but fill your tills first before giving a ruddy cent.

Is your neighbour the village thief? Love him.

Clothe the naked, as you would with a fig leaf.

Before long, you would have guessed how little

you are without the other, and learn to whistle

in the dark, and wait, and build, and gather

behind walls, until, one on top of the other,

you begin to climb beyond your pauper space

to occupy a lost garden, a haven, as your place.

---Albert B. Casuga

12-02-11

Photo by Bobby Wong Jr.

ECHOES

2011-11-30T19:35:00.000-08:00

ECHOES

All is disposable,/ except for that which/ persists. The echo/ unhinged from/ the sound that/ threw it. ---Hannah Stephenson, “Aftermath”, The Storialist, 11-28-11

How far will an echo go

before it peters out to

leave its source’s halloo

sounding thin and hollow?

How long will this echo

last in hallways that throw

peels of joy that follow

a escape from deep sorrow?

Is it a will-o-the-wisp, too,

much like the brief flow

of warm breeze over snow

that won’t melt nor thaw?

Everything here must go.

All is disposable. But echo

that ripples here through

time is an eternity or so.

Am I not after all a shadow

of that maker of a rainbow,

who sent a dove not a crow

to fly from that ship’s bow?

Am I not truly God’s echo?

Echoes shape corridors lean

leaving them a cipher’s silence

not unlike the axiom of a day:

All things go up to fall the way

fractured birdwings fall, violence

met in the loins of wind.

Lean corridors shape echoes,

silence ciphering them, leaving

a day axiomed as not what is unlike

the way the fall of things strike:

violence on the fractured birdwing,

winds loyned with zodiaqual zeroes.*

O THAT A FALL MUST GO
GO MUST A FALL THAT O

THE WAY A COMET’S TAIL
TAIL A COMET’S WAY...

---Albert B. Casuga

11-30-11

*Loyned – being the sound of echoed “loined”; zodiaqual, is “zodiacal” (from arcane to new).

HER SMILE

2011-11-28T19:28:00.000-08:00

HER SMILE

(For Marie Clementine)

To mean anything,/ a container must store/ a visible substance./ We destroy them, melt them/ all together, make them/ into new versions/ of what they were already,/ fill them again./ Bottomless refills...From “Bottomless” by Hannah Stephenson, The Storialist, 11-21-11

Hija mia, donde esta su sonrisa bella?

Where is your lovely smile, my child?

As if on cue, a pair of glistening eyes

brighten her quick grin flashed on a

fistful of face now suddenly larger

than the gaping windows around her.

Barely dry from the ripples of a womb,

how could this infant speak a world

of adoring mime, a soundlessly gentle

smile that might as well be the sunrise?

Is this the hidden world of a refilled

vessel, a venerable ghost in a new cup

of meaning come back to remind us

whence we come, a happy other place?

There and here are a plenitude of grace,

where nothing is destroyed, where old

is new and a tandem of the eternal,

sprung from a gyre’s ever spinning cycle.

A lover’s smile perhaps from a past

that is always present; a stored glass

brimming with what it already held?

Is this, therefore, a bottomless refill?

Like a roadside cafe’s vending, does this

offer our parched lips with moistened

remembrances of ever tender kisses

that we slept by, warm and gentle still?

De donde esta su sonrisa bella, hija?

Whence come your lovely smile, my girl?

---Albert B. Casuga

11-28-11

A WAITING GAME

2011-11-27T19:53:00.000-08:00

A WAITING GAME

This is the game/ we keep engaging in, Finding/ a Good Stopping Point by/ Seeing Clues in the Universe./ Tell me when, that’s us,/ grinding, waiting. Say when. ---Hannah Stephenson

Looking for a good time to stop,

is to stop looking like slumping

on a fallen trunk or a trail rock

jagged and jutting out of the bluff.

Morning walks get longer along

empty spaces before familiar curbs

signal a turn to what we wait for:

the final bend. We are back home.

“HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME.

Now Albert is coming back,

make yourself a bit smart.”* Eliot,

of course, said it for me earlier.

How long ago was that, when I

read those Wasteland lines? How

long have I waited to use them?

Is this a good time, yet? I waited.

Because we have seen the clues,

because we have seen them all

already, I feel it is time to stop

waiting, sum up the bill, and go.

What was I given to bear the pain

of knowing that I did not know?

Or build a home I could not live in?

What tools must I now return?

In summing up, I will discount this,

in the game of haggling for a place

back in the Garden. Our stay here

was overpaid. We waited too long

for that room with a better view,

that terrace with a canopy of roses,

and blue birds trilling on the sill.

O, for a touch of that distant sky!

Next time around, if there is one,

I will be smart. I will settle only for

a room where I could see the sky

and the sea conspire to eat the sun.

---Albert B. Casuga

11-27-11

* T. S. Eliot, The Wasteland, II. A Chess Game, T. S. Eliot, The Complete Poems and Plays, 1909-1950)

OCCUPYING THE EARTH

2011-11-24T10:09:00.000-08:00

OCCUPYING THE EARTH

A pile of fresh dirt at the woods’ edge: a groundhog has dug a den under the roots of a poison ivy-throttled maple. Will he itch all winter?—Dave Bonta, The Morning Porch, 11-23-11

Places shape us if we let them, like a dug den
at the woods’ edge would define the hog’s
winter under maple tree roots, poison ivy
wrapping its trunk at ground’s access points.

How much life can be eked out of this place
when boundaries throttle the explorer’s
spirit before one has started his exploration?
Not in my backyard, you don’t. Verboten.

There is poison in the air, water, dirt, or fire
from the bellies of the earth to the fusion
chambers of atomic energy plants; death
in coal-fired stations belching black smoke
to ozone distances, drought in global warming.

Seas gobble up atolls and resort isles; diseases
even sprout from infirmaries, and hospitals
become hospices for the dying and the dead.
Why must digging the dirt out of a den
start with the handicap of poison ivy?

Why plant genius and courage in a man
when his unbridled enterprise and struggle
can only lead to disasters that make burial
grounds his enduring, grandest monuments?

There is fresh dirt on the ground: An Occupier
will be buried among the tents in the park.
He could not restart his life; he took it instead.
Like that itch would do the groundhog in, I bet.

— Albert B. Casuga
11-23-11

DISCOMFITURE

2011-11-23T16:42:00.000-08:00

DISCOMFITURE

Stay still, we ask/ our things, while we repurpose/ them. What we mean is stay, / still, we need a little longer.—From “Repurposed” by Hannah Stephenson, The Storialist, 11-22-11

Memories are needs reshaped as still points,

if they could just be pinned down to stay

whole before falling like shattered mirrors

that recompose as harlequins of fluid faces

struggling to remould beyond the shadows

and the strange masks that fears and dread

now wear as they strut about as tall desires

we pray would remain longer than a mirage

of remembrances perishing like the carrion

of dreams and endless longings to be here.

There are no signs nor arrows on this path

that could retrace those gentle and happy

days when we owned the place where we

could not get lost even if we heroically tried.

We mean to rename these streets and mark

them indelibly so we could come home again.

But those still points are never there nor still

when we need them steadier than chameleons

that we are born with, where our zero point

is neither water, nor dirt, nor fire, nor air.

--Albert B. Casuga

Posted 11-23-11

BREAKTIME

2011-11-11T16:44:00.000-08:00

INNERMOST LONGINGS

2011-11-11T08:24:00.000-08:00

INNERMOST LONGINGS

I’ve turned the bird of my inmost longings/ loose into the ether. / I’ll keep the green branch on which it roosts, / should it return. I’ll learn to live on this door’s swinging hinge, / sustain on flimsy hope. Because I/ love it so, I’ll let it take its leave of me.--- From “Aria” by Luisa A. Igloria, Via negative, 11-10-11

Should it return, I will be there by the sill
peering through drawn curtains, letting
the wind play with the chimes firmly hung
on its path. I need to be warned before I
open the door on its now rusty hinges.

I must appear unexpectant, must not look
surprised nor fazed, but gently regal even
as I welcome it back: You are home, love,
and your perch is still green like you never
left it. If you must go again, pray leave
the hinges swinging, you won’t take long,
would you? I could plan on it. But, will you?

— Albert B. Casuga
11-10-11

CHOOSING CHAOS

2011-11-09T14:44:00.000-08:00

CHOOSING CHAOS

What is the difference between/ chaos and order, anyway. / Where would we look/to measure this. The before/or after. Where do those start. --- From “Methodology” by Hannah Stephenson, The Storialist, 11-08-11

Order is articulated chaos, its desire

an old rebellion that recalls the loss

of a streamlined paradise. Nothing

is needed here. Everything is given.

Then, why walk out of this Garden?

A provident Eden where everything

grew including his wanton dreams,

of having his way: orders be damned.

How simple things would have been.

Each pebble on the pond had a reason

to be there, each star a constellation

of sunlight, each sun a starter of life.

How serenely flowers would bloom

on the tip of thorns, or water flow

gently from the cracks of dry rocks,

and ripe fruit fall on open mouths.

Everything can happen here, nothing

is everything there, a cipher is full.

How benignly would mountains rise

from the sea, and lakes from mudpools.

Would movement have moved this

conspiracy of stillness and creation?

He could not see this, nor feel the pain

of a yanked rib to make a woman cane.

A yearning rooted in his belly burned,

a lust for roaming the hidden valleys,

finding struggle with fish and grain

a surprising tug on his arms and loins.

Walking out on a promise of fullness

and unbridled abundance, did he

choose somehow to stand on hindlegs

and see whence came the thunderous

offer? You who are made in my image,

shall have dominion over all that you

see and taste, all that is still or moves,

or none but the courage to choose.

He chose to shape his own order out

of the unseen chaos of growth he

occupied East of Eden, and decided:

We will gather ourselves some fig leaves.

We will make ourselves our own image.

--- Albert B. Casuga

11-08-11

Illustration: Adam and Eve in Paradise by Jan Brueghel the Elder

AN EMPTY SKY

2011-11-07T09:30:00.000-08:00

AN EMPTY SKY

The sky has taken its place/ leaning against the wall. / It is like a prayer to what is empty. / And what is empty turns its face to us/ and whispers.../ I am not empty, I am open. ---From Vermeer, Tomas Transtromer

1. For The Buried Miners

All they could have done was to stitch slices

of their picture of the sky, its blank expanse

their thin measure of what feels free and safe.

Buried for days on end under buttresses

that could no longer hold despoiled walls

of dirt, they prayed for a glimpse of the sky.

They did not need to: even in the starkest

gloom of that dark and black tomb of gold,

they each had a share of that absent sky.

O, for a smell of that dry air in Chile’s hills!

But this black hole, now a cloying dread,

is it all that is between them and raw despair?

2. Not Empty, but Open

Where is the sky when we need it? Or do we?

Even if it is there for the taking, will it answer

our prayers? It will empty itself of rain before

we can be saved. It is closed. It is empty. Pray

to the rocks, as loud as an intoning bishop,

it throws the entreaty right back. But you hear

an echo, a whisper from an unseen face: I am

the refuge of all the winged who roam spaces

for the free and unafraid. It is your little voice.

Like those darting sparrows, your unbound

soul will storm the abandoned bolted gates,

save that these doors are abundantly open,

and have always been agape; and the garden,

once lost has always remained open, the sky

its door, waiting for all who want to till it.

--- Albert B. Casuga

11-06-11