nameabledays Archive One

As promised, and in response to all who wander along the paths of memory, asking about the old country, and perhaps forgetting that memory its own country...

I use here an alternate take of a scene I’ve used in a previous post (February 2007). It is the man-made lagoon tucked in at the groves of the Ninoy Aquino Wildlife Park left of Quezon Avenue towards UP. The other streets bordering the Park are North Avenue, the Elliptical Road to the northeast and Agham Road to the south—arguably the coolest place in Quezon City or the whole metropolis. Man-made because the tranquil lake came about mainly as a hole in the ground, left after a huge deposit of adobe was extracted for use in the construction of the nearby Philippine Science High School (from where Agham Road takes its name). I spend quiet time there, contemplating the lagoon on smoking breaks from a communication consultancy work with the Protected Areas & Wildlife Bureau of the Environment Department, whose offices are located around the lagoon. Wander on…


Bamboo Lake at the Wildlife Park, Quezon City


CONVERSATION

We go places but we never leave.
Who minds our journeys?
Who remembers we ever left?
In our absence are places ever less?
What do our words mean
When everything has been said?

We collect words like pebbles
In our pockets. We take them out,
One by one, show them off, compare,
Confer them import. We marvel
Or mock their accumulated weight.
Or lightness. Or their growing paltriness.

Choosing among them the more viable,
Between thumb and forefinger,
The more smooth, we skip them across
The pool that has formed before
Our speech. They bounce once, twice,
And then sink. Or just sink.

Always they send tongues of water
In our ears, from the edges of recall,
Or sleep. Reverberations of sense.
Tail ends of old arguments. Always
We are deft, or deaf, as we measure
Meaning by the length of our silences.

And yet we have no trophies
But words for the distances we have
Gathered. So what do our words mean?
Who understands the rustling
Of the leaves? What was it you said?
We go places but we never leave.


December 28, 1989
(from Poems en Route, UST Publishing House, 1998)