nameabledays Archive One

Daraga Church, the Stone Church on the Hill. Not because it is a religious place, but because it is both a living artifact of our Spanish heritage and of my young pagan pleasures—where a young soul grew old fast, or where an old soul drank from a fountain of youth unendorsed by small-town conventions and Catholic upbringing.


SOMETIME MORNINGS SESTINA

Sometime mornings, passing
On the side road from Bicutan (on the way
To my day job’s daily reckoning),
I catch myself imagining I just caught
A glimpse of sea shimmering at my left,
And Mayon looming at my right.

Partly hidden by clouds, it claims its right
On the memory and I get lost passing
The ramshackle shops that hide the railroad at my left.
At once I am climbing a hillside of acacias, on the way
To the stone church at the top, caught
In the winding turns of time’s reckoning.

Strange how everything becomes a reckoning
Of past and present: like left and right
In mirror images, and the traffic caught
In-between, as if in a dream, always passing,
As each morning never fails to spill away
In harshest daylight what night and the past have left.

Turning into C-5, I wonder what’s left
Of childhood’s dream, the curves reckoning
The distance from the beginning of highways
To the home I’ve made, to what I claim is right.
I must have gone farther and farther away in my passing,
In the constant coming and going where I am caught.

In my job of days, the web in which I am caught,
I spin the flimsy filaments of dreaming I have left.
Gathering the trophies of distance in my passing,
Every stone and leaf begins the ceaseless reckoning.
The highway opens before my eyes: to my right,
Clouds over tenements, in their daily wearing away,

To my left, Makati’s jagged sprouting, away
From the rubbish and dust of Bicutan, itself caught
In its own mesh of smog. Beyond Antipolo, that bright
Gleam of sky above the hills, is it what’s left
Of the sea of Legazpi in my mind? Is it reckoning
The growing mindlessness of my passing?

It is all right, the morning settles what’s left
Of the dream. There, caught in the noon’s reckoning,
It beckons: You’re never far away even in your passing.

April 22, 2002