From “Melismas”

Flip the pillows, orient your body to the east

when you lie down, slip some ginger roots inside your pocket

when entering the battleground.

Ban attempts to take a bath before gambling,

after going to church, during the San Lazaro feast,

forbid the overlapping of two

rainbows. Criminalize the gifting of handkerchiefs,

sharp and fat objects, instruments

that are pulsing. Awaken everyone’s innate humanity.

Let every person plead his case for

the world’s dismantling. But, how would you go about

possessing me? How would you marry my indecision

with your confusion? If you were the moon and I

the earth, how do you propose we become one body and not be

destroyed? How would you distract me

the moment I realize that we are falling

in a well, that we are just flecks in the eye of hell,

that we are tumbling down a pit piled high with daggers, spears, cutlasses?

Crystal-clear words, maybe. All those early hours in the morning

when I find myself walking down alleys,

ideas I should be rattling off at the top of my lungs

in the hopes of rousing people, take a peek

through the window slats, wear a shawl, put on

shoes, and join me in yelling

until we wake up the whole town,

until the people of this whole country stir from their pretend

sleep, and begin noticing how

the sky publishes every single one of their wounds

onto the vacant spaces of the night. If not

for those walks, I would have gone crazy a long time ago.

It would have long ceased for all of us the song

of the shore, if only we had been more heartfelt in our

singing. But, really, why? Is it because we are busy calculating

the extent of the wreckage, because of the sudden turbulence

of the waves in the high seas, because of the sporadic

appearances of balls of light in the corners

of the city, in fish markets, in districts where kids

sleep in tight clusters? Emergence that implies

all that has been happening is bound by laws whose aim

is to divert our attention from death. Like searching

for the mouth in the rear of the thunderhead, like the folding over

of fingers to imitate the composure of a forlorn bud

of flower. And, based on the outlines of consequences

of our infidelities, we shall emerge in the after-

life as fractured airplanes. Boulders

forming a breakwater against the storm, washed-out houses, confessionals,

ropes for use as a hangman’s noose. It seems

the late afternoon now has nothing to hide, majestic are the clothes

of the atmosphere. Carrying their respective despair

clouds mingle with nightfall.

It appears the world may cycle back. Return to its beginning.

Rock gardens. Souls that,

because of frailty, have clung to the pretty good-naturedness

of things. Diminutive shrines. Chamber of a folk healer.

Diamonds with luster none of us can tame.

That fire that reveals itself as

a rainbow whenever reflected light strikes

a woman’s cheek. Because imagination

is the foremost poison. Concrete plans of action

you can only devise when you are in the middle of an accident,

terms of endearment to attract

good fortune now that we are looking for

a place to escape

the Season of the Ten Thousand Waves of Sorrow.

And because these situations call for

immediate responses, I will have to say over and over

my claims: the rain is red,

the rain’s red body undulates,

the rain sneaks into rivers of red

and lakes of red because it knows nothing

about exhausting its energy.

What drives us to keep pretending is new

every morning, we ramble on whenever we choose to come clean.

Filled with promises as fine as sandy silt,

filled with miracles lingering in every corner

for the perfection of our unbroken seduction.

Faces exposed to that one sun with shimmering gilded

rays, rays that are meant to make giddy

with their radiance everything that they touch. Even if we end up

in a wretched state, there are rooms reserved

for us by God, we will not be tainted by

deathly pallor. Librettos loaded with the names of storms.

Mountains shapeshifting into a curtain. Premature complaints

of flesh. Murmurs from the parts of the body

that urge on to span the limits of power

of the mind to turn the line of sight into an electrifying

reality, panorama of the rear-ended bodies

of water, a passing rain scrounging

for strength so that it can show before it wanes

how it is able to painstakingly match its various little

droplets to the unsullied sighs and inhalations

of those who are beginning to lose their minds. My love leans closely

to place her lips next to my

ear (and now I am molten brass, alley

engulfed by rhododendrons, smoke restless

while floating while scrambling to settle down

to its own stable shape before finally disappearing) and sings

a parting song: la la la, la la la, la la la, la la la.

Translated from the Filipino

Notes:

This poem is excerpted from Melismas, published in 2020 by OOMPH! Press, an international literary press publishing contemporary poetry and short prose in translation. www.oomphpress.com.

Source: Poetry (April 2021)