nameabledays Archive One

Book Design by Donat Alvarez; Cover Design by Ed Cabagnot, from a painting by Santiago Bose (courtesy of the Glenn Bautista collection)

(Following is the author's self-intro for his third poetry collection)

This book began in good weather,

…when I wrote the first poem, in balmy December, but the monsoon always catches up with me. Mode and marker of my writing cycles (of poems, since writing for livelihood cannot allow cycles), the monsoon’s onset coincides with my fertile periods—for mooning, that is, when every crumb of sense or memory becomes a seed that can sprout in the season’s sodden grey. But I wanted a name for the sun in this waterlogged archipelago of ours, as it bounces off all sundry shining things, calling out the name of everything it touches—in its doomed spell of dryness, clear skies and kite fights (their strings steeped in a paste of boiled starch packed with the ground glass of busted fluorescent bulbs, a concoction called bidro, with which to cut the vital cord of the other kite), in windy March and April, that would only be surprised by the downpour of Agua de Mayo. The monsoon always catches up with me. Even the harsh noon sun ends up glowering behind clouds that dim the afternoon siesta imposed by grandmothers on little boys who are left alone in the house after the other siblings had left for school, when the housewife mother had gone for a game of neighborhood entre-cuatro, and the radio in the dead hours before Tia Dely mocks me with Jo Stafford’s lugubrious crooning of “No Other Love.” I was the Count of Montecristo of Siesta. Perhaps that’s how poems are made in this our sun-baked/soggy country (mine at least, poem and country). The monsoon always catches up with me. I wanted to remember sunlight, try to make a clearing for it in my memory, in the blurred boundaries of our seasons, but the streets flood with the carbon-stained cocktail gurgling out of the canals, sloshed by the rotting imported second-hand buses stalled in the gridlock induced by cloudburst. And so trapped behind windshields or under leaking waiting sheds, memory wanders off—into far Legazpi or just along Edsa, if it can nudge itself through the lurching traffic, into either end of the highway, up the gleaming new Nlex beyond laharland into pine-scented Baguio (once) and storm-tossed Batanes, or down envious Slex awaiting rehab, into landslide land and coconut- and Magayon-land, only to end up in storm-tossed Catanduanes or at land’s end in Matnog—all wet, smudged, tainted like bickering politicians. And so, country and city, provinciano and ciudadano, jolog and university-educated, clerk and office boss, “resign” and “stay,” “reject” and “reaffirm,” join in a splashing melee, in an eternal blood-feud wreaking its demented vendetta all over the place. No one is spared. Not the street urchin or the town fool who is impervious to elections and states-of-the-nation. Not the taong grasa or the limousine passenger whose states-of-the-soul are simply impervious. Not the smug poet, most original sinner of all, who spoils everything by his every utterance (his words strip things of their purity, or violate them by clothing their nakedness), and then everything starts begging to be written, and the poet—permeable fool of the monsoon—is back to his misery. Or ecstasy (whichever side of the road you’re on—either is a chortling drain). The monsoon always catches up with me. 