THE CANON OF THE CIPHER: FOUR POEMS FOR FATHER

 

 

THE CANON OF THE CIPHER:

FOUR POEMS FOR FATHER

 (For Father, Francisco F. Casuga+)

 

I.  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.

1971

This was adjudged the Grand Prize Winner of the first Philippine national Parnasso Poetry Writing Contest (1971). A handsome trophy sculpted by noted Philippine sculptor Edwin Castrillo and a princely sum of a thousand pesos made me happy. Father must have returned the favour. But he was no longer around to applaud. I would not even have minded a slap on the nape. In Canada, it won the Mississauga Library System Annual Poetry Writing Contest in 1998, Adult Winner.

 

II. A SWIMMING LESSON

How much of those happy times

would you bring back, like the waves
ebb but must always rush back?

It is the sea that returns you intact

into my now empty days, windy days,
your laughter always a raw memory.

You threw me into those restless

waves, cried out a challenge: Swim!
Kick hard, swing your arms! Swim!

And I never stopped, not for hurts,

not for lost dreams, nor for losses.
You warned me never ever to cry.

11-03-11

*Culled from "Poesias Para Los Muertos" (11-01-11). I was not able to say goodbye to my Father when he passed away at the Bethany Hospital in San Fernando City, La Union Province, the Philippines. Just as well. He is still with me.
 

III. 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.

June 2009

IV. DOWN THE SLOPE

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
2013, Mississauga. Canada

 

 In Memoriam: Francisco F. Casuga, b. January 9, 1921 -- d. December 5, 1975

EARTH POEMS AND THE WRATH OF DAYS

 

 

EARTH DAY POEMS AND THE WRATH OF DAYS

 by Albert B. Casuga

It’s when I’m weary of considerations,/ And life is too much like a pathless wood.../ I’d like to get away from earth a while/ And then come back to it and begin over.../...Earth’s the right place for love:/ I don’t know where it’s likely to go better. --- Robert Frost, Birches

 

1. IF: COUNTERPOINTS

If you marvelled at the dance of the Northern Lights
Counterpointing the smouldering plumes of ashen smoke
Billowing out of an Eyjafjallajokull cradled by melting glacier,

Or quietly scanned the opal horizons of Banda Aceh swathed
In a glorious sunset chiaroscuro before the waves claimed
Atolls and infants back into the rip tide roar of that tsunami;

If you were ambushed by an unforgiving temblor that rocked
Haiti out of its romping in reggae regaled beaches turned
Into common graveyards of carrion crushed under rubble;

If you have walked through cherry-blossom-strewn streets
And smiled at strangers’ hallooing: How about this spring?
Before rampaging twister funnels crushed hearths and homes;

If you have strolled and danced ragtime beat on Orleans’
Roadhouses rocking rampant with rap and razzmatazz
Before Katrina’s wrath wreaked hell’s hurricane havoc;

If you still marvel at forest flowers as God’s fingers
And espy sandpipers bolt through thicket cramping marsh
Before infernal flames crackle through Santa Barbara’s hills;

If you have stolen kisses and felt purloined embraces
In the limpid ripples of Cancun’s caressingly undulant seas
Before the onset of the curdling spill on the playa negra;

If you braved the stygian stink of Ilog Pasig and sang songs
While harvesting floating tulips, debris, or stray crayfish
For some foregone repast before it turned into River Styx;

If you have lived through these and now blow fanfare
For Earth’s being the right place for love or maybe care,
You might yet begin to accept that Mother’s lullabies were
Also her gnashing of teeth when you wailed through nights
When slumber would have allowed her love not tantrums
Of infants grown now and “quartered in the hands of war”:


2. WRATH OF DAYS

How else explain the wrath of days descending
not into quietness but pain? Has she not kept her anger
in check for all the tantrums of the Ages: Thermopylae,
Masada, Ilium, Pompeii? Hiroshima, Auschwitz, Nagasaki?
Stalin’s pogroms? The death chambers and Holocaust trains?
Polpot’s killing fields in Kampuchea? Rwanda’s genocide?

Before it lured tourist trekkers, the verboten Walls of China?
The Berlin Wall? The Gaza Wall? Fences of n.i.m.b.y.
neighbours: India and Pakistan, Iran and Iraq, splintered
Korea, the Irelands shorn of the emerald isles, the fractured
United Kingdom where the sun has finally set on its Empire,
the still haemorrhaging American southern states crippled
and still unyoked from black history but seething now
from the African-American’s irascible entitlement ---

With Zimbabwe’s apartheid, Congo’s rapes, Ethiopia’s
hunger, Sudan’s ceaseless putsch tango, Somalia’s piracy
trade, tribal wars in Uganda, Namibia, Botswana, Kenya,
will blacks overcome someday, soon? Only if they, too,
would get munitions from Venezuela’s bottomless vaults
gurgling with black gold, aceite y petroleo, and Oil of Ages.
Lubricator of the war and killing machines, In Oil we Trust.

3. THE SPILL AND FALL

Has it gone any better? Love on this piece of terra infirma?
That’s when Mother shushed you back to sleep,
An impatient rhythm clipping away what should have been
A gently lulling melody from the Song of Ages:

Rock-a-bye, baby on the treetop; when the wind blows,
The cradle will rock. When the bough breaks, the cradle
Will fall; and down will come baby, cradle, and all.

The bough breaks, and you scream. Too late for that.
This is not a dream. The freefall is Mother’s little slip
When she could no longer hold you still, somnolence
Finally taking over, and your cri d’couer, a scream
For help, for caress, for all the love gone from an empty room.
The cradle falls, she can’t pick it up. Exhausted and utterly
Spent, she mutters in her sleep: Spare the rod, spoil the child.

Tomorrow, if it comes, Mother will prop up --- backaches
Assault her waking days now --- will step into her plimsoll
As she would her dancing pumps, oil-soaked slippers.
She will slip and fall before anyone else wakes up.
She will yell: “Damn it, who spilled oil on the floor this time?”


--- ALBERT B. CASUGA

 

 

CAMPFIRE LULLABIES: TWO POEMS

 

CAMPFIRE LULLABIES: TWO POEMS

Real stories tonight, she says, not/made-up. Like what I did, summers when /I was her age: ---From “Real” by Luisa A. Igloria

(For Diana Patricia, Daniel Anthony, Matthew Francis, Taylor Lauren, Megan Sarah, Michael Albert, Sydney Alexis, Chloe Dominique, Louis Martin, and Marie Clementine)

1. Then

Something about a canopy of stars

and the darkness among the pines
must turn them into giggling elves
traipsing among the lantern flies.
Bugs with lit tailpipes, he calls them.
She stifles a guffaw, shushes him:
you will wake the hungry bear up.
Would you want to wake up inside
his swirling stomach? He whispers
under the tangled sheet: tell me more
stories, real ones this time. About
how you and abuela stopped a bus
while crossing the street, and she
gave the yelling driver her fat finger.

2. Now/Maybe Much Later

Here we are, imp of a brother grown

beyond those yarns. Will you tell
your own boy---raucously laughing
all by himself in his dimly lit tent---
the same grandmother stories?
“Once upon a time,” will not do it,
they grow quickly beyond that.
Why not lull him instead with one
of grandfather’s hammock songs?
“When you talk to these trees,
they will always answer you: Close
your eyes tightly, we will sing to you.”
Here we are, imp of a sister, plotting
lullabies by campfire, when sons beg:
Will you tell us real grandma stories?

---ALBERT B. CASUGA

A GAME OF PONTOONS

A GAME OF PONTOONS

(For Mikey)
 

Mikey (Michael Albert Casuga who turned 12 last May 7) bested his cousins in the game of balancing on the lily pads (mock pontoons) while crossing the pool without falling into the water before he gets to the last pontoon. This ancient mariner, bedazzled by his grandchildren’s confidence and derring-do, failed to even get past the first pontoon despite their egging him on: Come on, ‘lolo! You can do it! Just do it! --- Writer's Notebook on a Family Break at Great Wolf Lodge, Niagara


He leap-frogged lithely
with tentative grace
from one drifting lily pad
to the other, an uncertain smile
creased on his elfin face:
quite like relishing
the exquisite danger
of leaping from one life
moment to another
shorn of anxiety or fear
a fall could end it all.

Would the pontoons hold
while he teeters on them
grasping for absent branches?

His final leap was also
this old heart’s leap of faith
that this lad’s leap-frogging
will end in a crash of pool
where ripples are his balm
and sinking is his baptism
of fire in a game called living
where bridges crumble
with the tottering pontoons.

---ALBERT B. CASUGA

 

Michael Albert Casuga, youngest child of my unico hijo, Albert Beau Casuga, stands on the fourth row sandwiched by his sister Megan, cousins Sydney, Chloe, and Taylor.

A SCAMPERING OF GRACE IN THE DRY WOODS: TWO POEMS

A SCAMPERING OF GRACE IN THE DRY WOODS: TWO POEMS

(For my Grandchildren)

RAIN ON THE TRAIL

There is a scampering of grace/In the dry woods/ And a pulse upon some soliloquy: / It is the rain come as a lace/ Smooth and forbidding upon the cup/ Of the dead and dying weather!--- From “Fugue in Narra’s Rain”, Narra Poems and Others, 1968


Something about running naked in the rain
recalls some lost decades withered now in
a fading trail hallooing with surprised laughter
tickled out of our backs by sudden pellets of rain.

The river! The river! Chanted my little lass
skipping to the tempo of scampering rain:

Let’s swim there, abuelo! Let’s dance in the river!
Brown and slithering over scraped-clean rocks,
the river meanders sans snails, eels, or crayfish,
emptied now of carp, catfish, small-mouth bass...

O, how we could have raucously scared the wren
with catcalls while mounting a wading caribou,
but those were noises of our lost years when
naked lads swam with dung and water buffalo.

We can’t swim here, hija mia, City Hall says clean
rivers are for clean table fish. We do have our rain.

 

A BALLERINA ON THE WINDOW

 

(For my ballerinas: Chloe, Sydney, and Taylor)

“Adios, adios, abuelo. Te Amo. Je T'aime! Mahal Kita! Luv ya!” ---- Chloe speaking in tongues.

A glimmer of a sylph on the gossamer bay,
She pirouettes and is gone into her chrysalis
Not unlike the sylvan truants that waylay
The wary wanderer among the trees,

Or the papillon flitting from blossom to bramble,
Hidden but always there, some surprise grace,
A magical fairy light to dispel the creeping pall
Coiled on the winter ennui of fallen days ---

O, she dandles dearly with her ragged ragdoll,
Caressingly delicate in a wistful pas de deux
Of her shadow Fonteyn caught in a sudden fall
By a prancing Baryshnikov vaulting off the shadow.

Was that his pas de chat to snatch her from disaster?
Quickly now, urgently now, hold the hapless Dame
As would a cat curl on the legs of its Master,
Dream now of a demure pas de bourree of fame,

While dreams still enthrall, while the dancing
Is still your language of love, of boundless courage,
While the arguments of your young body moving
To the beats of passion are still the true language

Of the good, the honest, and the beautiful:
Until then, mon amour, these decrepit hands cannot
Stop the deluge of fear, of hurt, and of the frightful
That would drown us all, before our windows are shut.

Even now, as you wave from your window,
I know you will be brave.

---ALBERT B. CASUGA

 

 

TWO WOMEN : SUNDOWN TALES AND CANDLES*

TWO WOMEN : SUNDOWN TALES AND CANDLES*

SUNDOWN TALES

 

For Lola Dora (Sra. Dona Teodora Flores Casuga+)

 

All, all of those shadows that people

my stories, abuela, have their home

in your sundown tales. My poetry sings

 

still with the rhythm of your voice, images

have been shaped before in the pictures

you etched with your face and fingers.

 

They will not be blurred by old minds

fumbling with remembrances, recuerdos,

abuela, of all that you left to sprout

 

in the moist and porous soil of our hearts

and the wild moss peats of our minds,

and every word from my pen is your word.

 

 

CANDLES AND EMPTY ROOMS

 

For Inang (Sra. Dona Sotera Martinez-Buenaventura+)

 

If you were here, I would know where you

are: you would be by the gaping window

where the statue of the Sagrada Familia

 

would be, lighting candle stubs, striking

matchsticks endlessly until all are lit,

and only the sound of struck flint remained.

 

Soon, you would be wandering among empty

rooms, calling out for me to put on my church

clothes for a walk to the Iglesia and pray.

 

However hollow those vaults were, or inert

those icons looked, the walls would vibrate

with your intoned oracion, and I’d feel safe.

 

--- ALBERT B. CASUGA

 

*Culled from "Poesias Para Los Muertos", 10-01-11. If a writer thrives on a spiritual life, these two women, my patertnal and maternal grandmothers, were the wellsprings of that large portion of my life.

TWO MEN IN MY LIFE*

TWO MEN IN MY LIFE*

COIN RACES

For Lolo Candro (Don Alejandro F. Casuga+)

 

Calling it a day at the old Mercado,

do you remember me running to you

snivelling at the tail end of every race?

 

Kin of all sizes and wile would beat me

to all the coins in your trouser pockets

where you kept them as gold for the best,

really, the most agile and the fastest

hands, the greedy and the needy, but you

said you knew I was simply the slowest.

So you had the small pesetas for them,

but you always saved the peso de plata

for me near your heart: your chestpockets.

AN ARTISAN BY DAY

 

For Lolo Jose (Don Jose Buenaventura+)

 

I would look at your fingers, abuelo, if you

were here crouched by my easel, my paint,

my oil, my bastidores. They are my fingers.

 

We hardly knew you, save that illustrados

from the city would look for you if they

needed the latest design in haberdashery.

Don Jose, make my shoulders look broad,

Don Jose, I need to appear commanding;

Don Jose, please look away from my wife.

Swarthy as your Basque roots, your eyes

blaze beyond your gaze; an artisan by day,

an artist and lover, abuelo de mis sueños.

--- Albert B. Casuga

11-03-11

*Culled from "Poesias Para Los Muertos" posted 11-01-11 to highlight two great influences on my art and my other life as a politician and academic: my maternal grandfather, Jose Buenaventura, and paternal grandfather, Alejandro F. Casuga. The etches are how I remember them in my mind's eye.

MONSOON RHYTHMS: TWO POEMS

MONSOON RHYTHMS: TWO POEMS*

 
(For Lila Shahani, Who Finds Hope in the Rain)

RAIN DANCES

Lluvia! Lluvia! It was a chant
sung at the top of our voices,
croaking like frogs hopping
from the rice paddies. Rain! Rain!

Naked, our hallooing was no match
for our scrawny bodies carousing,
running through the monsoon
downpour like scampering chicken.

The rain at the edge of the woods
is not the same rain where we got
lost like cascading lilies rushing
through boulders at the field’s edge.

Rain rips foliages off their branches
like surly gardeners cutting off twigs
from blackened trees and bushes
to prepare for a long, dreary winter.

Lost in autumn’s mayhem, yellow
leaves reel in a wild wind dance
pitching them off to unseen crannies
to rot in the rain like all things must.

But it is not this dying we rue. Lost,
gone in the fall of discarded days,
we scarcely remember rain dances
where we were naked, free, and happy.

— Albert B. Casuga

 

A DIALOGUE ON RAIN DANCES

We even have rain dances, Stick, to pray for rain.
But we still have our little deserts despite that.

The Hopi have it, the Navajo, the Igolots. The lot.
Mayans, Aztecs, and all the prayers they have got.

In the old country, tots still sing that song while
they halloo in the rain, bathing naked in the rain.

“I’m singing in the rain, just singing in the rain.
I’m happy in the rain, just happy in the rain…”

Why can’t I recall those Gene Kelly lyrics? Dang!
Oh, to feel that downpour on my face again!

In Ranchipur, they un-learned rain-prayers.
Monsoon scares even the farmers and fishermen.

Grade schoolers have even learned another ditty:
“Rain, Rain, go away, come again another day.”

Schoolhouses float in floods brought by monsoon
rains from Indonesia to China. Now Australia.

It’s summer at last, but does it have to be humid?
Poor chap over there has a dour face. He gazes

at his garden, at the portion given to all that moss,
looks back at stunted buds on his rotting trellises.

Like a sad farmer who has lost a crop. Like a sad
father who needed the money to send a kid to school.

“Into each life, some rain must fall…a rolling stone
gathers no moss,” my roused errant friend snapped.

Tracing a searing Gobi in that man’s countenance,
I grabbed its scruff and mumbled: Shut up, Stick!

—Albert B. Casuga

*These Poems were prompted by a post written by Lila Shahani, Assistant Secretary (for Communications), in the Philippine Government.

 

..."He missed the darker magic of the city at dawn, right after the rains -- sky still phosphorescent -- when, once again, everything is washed anew. When children run in the streets and every dim-lit corner is already rushing with the mad flow of exuberant, occasionally exquisite, life.---Lila Shahani, FB post, May 26, 2013

 

A SYLVAN WHISPER OF GRACE

 

A SYLVAN WHISPER OF GRACE

Of what use is a tree if it did not give solace?

She hugs the first one she meets on the hill.
Would she hear its sylvan whisper of grace?

Why can’t a man be like a tree? It is as still

As it should be having listened to all the pain
From that first time he felt her rise to fill

A space that must not be there, a little gain

From what was promised at that first garden:
Loneliness shall not grow where he has lain.

Why can’t a woman be like a tree? It is when

She shelters all from the injury of struggle
That staying alive is the least worry of men

Who must strive to enliven a home for all

As a tree is to a nest or a kite’s port of call.

---ALBERT B. CASUGA

 

Photo Credit: Joanna Allas, Philippines

FEELING FANCY FREE: A LOVE POEM THAT COULD NOT WAIT

 

FEELING FANCY FREE: A LOVE POEM

THAT COULD NOT WAIT

There is nothing but trees for miles from where Allen and Margaret Berrington’s silver Chrysler Sebring was found on Wednesday afternoon. . . .A pair of dirtbikers found the Sebring, out of gas, and Margaret, 91, deceased, three kilometres down the road. . . .Mounties later found the body of Allen, 90, nearby, concealed by a small embankment. How they got there, and why, is a mystery. - - - Kevin Libin, National Post, Friday, June 4, 2010

 

 

 

Something about the spring sun slicing through
Shadows of maple and birches cuddling the road,
Their branches creaking like stretched backs do
When pulled erect from a burden of stoop, load
Of the years fallen off as derelict leaves gone
With the lashing wind, roiled into an uproar
Of rain and foliage --- something about the sun
Caught in her ruddy blush and now gossamer hair
Has sprung a sprightly pull on his flaccid arms
And he was going to enfold her again, trolling
Their road song again: O leggy Peggy in my arms,
O lovely Peggy in my arms! And hear her trilling
Again: Al of my dreams, I love you, honest I do;
Oh, what can I do, I love you so. I love you so.
But something about the spring sun on their faces
Was all he could recall, the sky, and empty spaces.

 

--- ALBERT B. CASUGA