nameabledays Archive One

The previous namesake of this blog, my third book of poetry, is finally out from the University of the Philippines Press. The feeling is the most unnameable moment of these my nameable days. Or only because I don’t want to name it—I do not want to be sad because I cannot do anything about it, it is there. I do not want to be angry because anger is useless. I do not want to pass blame because it is even more useless. A book is a gift not only because it somehow completes the circle of our efforts—from almost nothing to drafts to revisions to design to the printed page—but also because it is the product of the efforts of a lot more people other than the author. There is the designer of the cover or the whole book, who could be one or two persons, then there is the publisher and the printing press. Okay, I’ll name the feeling: it is called disappointment.



For me, a book should be judged by its cover. The cover should manifest what is inside. If the outside is so-so, blah, then perhaps the inside might also be…blah. I’m disappointed because no matter the care that we took, the book designer, friend Donato (Donat) Alvarez, and I, the cover still came out as it is, not how we intended it to be. So it looks, not blah, but as if we didn’t know any better. Donat is one of the best designers around (aside from being a poet himself). He knows color, and color printing. The cover designer, Ed Cabagnot, prepared the cover, after I saw a painting by the late Santi Bose, which I had to trace back to its owner, now friend at Banggaan e-group, another artist, Glenn Bautista. Ed Cabagnot, who designed a retrospective book on Santi, had the digital file of the painting, and I turned over to him the task of doing some modifications on the painting (its digital file) by making it fit the shape of the cover, which he did by duplicating some of its parts without of course altering the painting itself. The repeated elements in fact added more mystery to the unique product of the imagination of Santi. It looked good. Donat, as overall designer of the book, took over most of the technical part, apart from conceptualizing the overall look—making sure the colors were up to specs and standards, armed with Pantone color swatches, etc. Still... Here are the book covers, as designed, and as printed. Sorry.

“Maganda naman ang laman,”poet Joey Baquiran said. The contents are quite good. Sure, I know that, too (sotto voce). “Pangit pa rin ang cover,” Donat & I tell each other—the cover is still ugly (referring to the color printing)—handing down the verdict to ourselves. There are other defects, miscues, mishaps, in the book (perhaps more than those in my two previous ones). But I am complaining only to myself.

So. To take a bow to Joey Baquiran’s kind words, here are two previously unpublished poems from the book, and the third, one of my oldest, apart from the others featured previously in this blog. ’Nuff said.

Snake Island

(from a Palawan cycle)

At last we caught a photographer’s sunset.
(Or even a watercolorist’s:
The world was turning mauve,
The mountains into moss.
Gold and crimson burned their crests,
Edged the smudged swell of the clouds’
Underbellies that threatened to burst,
The sun spilt its orange river
On the turbid sea…) What more
Could anyone ask for? Except
That we needed ‘local faces’ to put
On the foreground, or some landmark to fix
The locale, perhaps define the moment,
Avoid the tired prettiness of a postcard…
We walked further into the tail of the island
(Where the brush thickened
And someone asked if the island
Was actually named after its native fauna)
And nature smiled at us:
Rising in the tangle of mangrove,
Among crag and ledge and the usual debris,
The ramshackle silhouette of a lean-to:
Remnants of someone’s vacation house,
Work of the last typhoon that visited the island
(Just once or twice in the last twenty years,
We’ve been told), now repossessed
By a family of, for want of a better word,
Marooned gypsies. We caught them
In their chores at day’s end, the males—
Perhaps father and a couple of uncles—
Starting their round of gin, the females,
Half-smiling, half-wary, paused from their
Kitchen duties at a make-do stove
Of three stones, and a fire stoked
By coconut stalk, bamboo and driftwood, and
Closest to us, astride their hobby horse
Of weathered rock and limb of uprooted tree,
The children, girl and boy of six or eight,
Their eyes drawing us to depths
Both familiar and strange, as we’ve often seen
In the faces of war or hunger, expectancy or fear.
Our shutters snapped, our lenses fed and hissed.
Quickly we fished bills from our wallets,
Handed them to the women and muttered
Our thanks before we scampered
To our boat as the skies opened and the light faded.

July 24, 2002

Mostly in Monsoon Weather (2)

Mostly in monsoon weather,
In the grey hour, in the humid hour,
When the sky glints
Like tarnished silver,
When not a leaf quivers;
From the shadow,
From the brooding window,
The vanished faces beckon,
The vanished voices whisper,
Come hither, and remember…

Mostly in monsoon weather,
From the dimming dooryard
The young boy enters,
Takes a seat among the clutter,
Among books, abandoned letters,
And finds the unfamiliar
Are now the things that matter,
As the vanished faces look over,
As the vanished voices mutter,
We are here, remember?

Mostly in monsoon weather:
The rain arrives like the sigh
Of a thousand sulking afternoons,
In swirling puddles welling
Through the leaning picket fence,
Scattering the dried tambis leaves
Grandmother has gathered to burn.
And the vanished faces beckon,
And the vanished voices whisper,
Come hither, and remember.

May 6, 2004

Old Houses

Old houses remain long after they crumble,
Long after they’re demolished
By the various claims of property that often
Dispute and defeat the claims of memory.

In the mind they are young (as it is said
All stay that way after death): So perhaps
The wood of old houses never rot,
Roofs never leak and hinges never creak

In some celestial real estate—where the yard,
Slightly overgrown in the early dry season,
But newly groomed by Grandmother’s
Midrib broom, breathes a sigh of relief after a rain;

Where scents of camia and sampaguita mingle,
And the gravid jackfruit cracks and sheds
The talisman pearl of its redolence
That invades the quivering nostrils of noon.

Thus perhaps are instances of effulgence revealed
To little boys (their chin on the window sill)
As they watch the rain catch in the hair of green
Worms and moss glisten on tambis limbs.

Theses ghosts of brightness I carry around
Crossing pavements of cracked asphalt, or glimpse
Where the smog darkens and men race for a prized
Bit of permanence in a harried, shifting world.

(rev. May 6, 2002)



PHOTO: Sunset on another island by Lito Gallardo