This is for everyone -

Poem For People That Are Understandably Too Busy To Read Poetry
Stephen Dunn

Relax. This won’t last long.
Or if it does, or if the lines
make you sleepy or bored,
give in to sleep, turn on
the T.V., deal the cards.
This poem is built to withstand
such things. Its feelings
cannot be hurt. They exist
somewhere in the poet,
and I am far away.
Pick it up anytime. Start it
in the middle if you wish.
It is as approachable as melodrama,
and can offer you violence
if it is violence you like. Look,
there’s a man on a sidewalk;
the way his leg is quivering
he’ll never be the same again.
This is your poem
and I know you’re busy at the office
or the kids are into your last nerve.
Maybe it’s sex you’ve always wanted.
Well, they lie together
like the party’s unbuttoned coats,
slumped on the bed
waiting for drunken arms to move them.
I don’t think you want me to go on;
everyone has his expectations, but this
is a poem for the entire family.
Right now, Budweiser
is dripping from a waterfall,
deodorants are hissing into armpits
of people you resemble,
and the two lovers are dressing now,
saying farewell.
I don’t know what music this poem
can come up with, but clearly
it’s needed. For it’s apparent
they will never see each other again
and we need music for this
because there was never music when he or she
left you standing on the corner.
You see, I want this poem to be nicer
than life. I want you to look at it
when anxiety zigzags your stomach
and the last tranquilizer is gone
and you need someone to tell you
I’ll be here when you want me
like the sound inside a shell.
The poem is saying that to you now.
But don’t give anything for this poem.
It doesn’t expect much. It will never say more
than listening can explain.
Just keep it in your attache case
or in your house. And if you’re not asleep
by now, or bored beyond sense,
the poem wants you to laugh. Laugh at
yourself, laugh at this poem, at all poetry.
Come on:

Good. Now here’s what poetry can do.

Imagine yourself a caterpillar.
There’s an awful shrug and, suddenly,
you’re beautiful for as long as you live.

“A heart is to be spent.”

And because I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Sixty
Stephen Dunn

Because in my family the heart goes first
and hardly anybody makes it out of his fifties,
I think I’ll stay up late with a few bandits
of my choice and resist good advice.
I’ll invent a secret scroll lost by Egyptians
and reveal its contents: the directions
to your house, recipes for forgiveness.
History says that my ventricles are stone alleys,
my heart itself a city with a terrorist
holed up in the mayor’s office.
I’m in the mood to punctuate
only with that maker of promises, the colon:
next, next, next, it says, God bless it.
As Garcia Lorca may have written: some people
forget to live as if a great arsenic lobster
could fall on their heads at any moment.
My sixtieth birthday is tomorrow.
Come, play poker with me,
I want to be taken to the cleaners.
I’ve had it with all stingy-hearted sons of bitches.
A heart is to be spent. As for me, I’ll share
my mulcher with anyone who needs to mulch.
It’s time to give up search for the invisible.
On the best of days there’s little more
than the faintest intimations. The millenium,
my dear, is sure to disappoint us.
I think I’ll keep on describing things
to ensure that they really happened.

Jungle

When I wrote about my graduation ceremonies last March, I said that it was both awkward and perfect. My heels have already killed me even before the march has started. We all just died of the heat. I took my Alumni oath barefoot, and teared up a little, in spite of myself, when it was all over. I was sad because I wanted some people to be there, I was happy because it’s over, for fuck’s sake, oh, four years.

There were gimmicks up the stage and it was amusing to watch the deans struggle to keep their cool: those who curtsied, those who raised their fists in the air, those who wore lipstick but were undoubtedly not women, those who proudly declared six years of studying, those who made the Star Trek hand signal thing, those who went down the center stage instead of exiting to the left. The valedictorian speech bored the hell out of me, I still wished it was someone different. The inspirational speaker bored the hell out of everyone. Conan O’Brien, still has the best commencement speech in the world. To boot, my grandparents were in the john when I went up the stage, my father slept through the first part of the ceremony, and the car overheated after graduation. But: I sang the school song with all my heart, surprisingly. I hugged my friends tight because it was important to share the moment. That waiter, Marcus, at CPK was the best waiter one could have. My favorite mentor called to say congratulations, even though I couldn’t hear her voice.

The last four years flashed before me as I stood there with my fake diploma, how I changed and not changed, how the world still waited outside: I am still fat, I am still in love with Frank Sinatra, I am still stupid enough to miss someone I shouldn’t, I still count steps and windows, I still tack pins on the world map hanging on the back of my bedroom door. And yet: I haven’t smoked in two weeks, I no longer have a dog, I kind of listen to rock music once in a while, and I can finally win in a game of Hearts. Such accomplishments, really, deserve a few beer bottles.

But oh, but oh, what of the world outside. What of falling in line to do grown-up things? What of wanting to be yourself, but losing your choices? What then, what then. These thoughts course through my mind as we drive home, the lights passing over my face. Whenever a new world opens itself up to me, always, always I don’t know whether I should just let go, or fall back.

So finally, to end this sap, a poem:

Tiger Face
Stephen Dunn

Because you can be what you’re not
for only so long,
one day the tiger cub raised by goats

wandered to the lake and saw himself.
It was astounding
to have a face like that, cat-handsome,

hornless, and we can imagine he stared
a long time, then sipped
and pivoted, bemused yet burdened now

with choice. The mother goat had nursed him.
The others had tolerated
his silly quickness and claws.

And because once you know who you are
you need not rush,
and good parents are a blessing

whoever they are, he went back to them,
rubbing up against
their bony shins, keeping his secret to himself.

but after a while the tiger who’d found
his true face
felt the disturbing hungers, those desires

to get low in the reeds, swish his tail
charge.
Because he was a cat he disappeared

without goodbyes, his goat-parents relieved
such a thing was gone.
And we can imagine how, alone and beyond

choice, he wholly became who he was—
that zebra or gazelle
stirring the great blood rush and odd calm

as he discovered, while moving, what needed
to be done.

Wednesday’s Child

While I never blamed my parents for putting me in such a position between the firstborn of the family (who acts like the youngest now) and my two youngest sisters, I do feel the brunt of it sometimes. Growing up I just taught myself not to care. I do find this the saddest thing, though, something which is a bit true (at least, for this family):

“They tend to have fewer pictures in the family photo album alone, compared to firstborns.”
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birth_order#Middleborn

But because I’ve learned to live with it, and because I’ve long ago told myself that I cannot absolutely afford to get upset about things like this, I pull this poem out, like I’ve done a lot of times, and sit still, and keep quiet, and be okay:

A Sad Child
Margaret Atwood

You’re sad because you’re sad.
It’s psychic. It’s the age. It’s chemical.
Go see a shrink or take a pill,
or hug your sadness like an eyeless doll
you need to sleep.

Well, all children are sad
but some get over it.
Count your blessings. Better than that,
buy a hat. Buy a coat or pet.
Take up dancing to forget.

Forget what?
Your sadness, your shadow,
whatever it was that was done to you
the day of the lawn party
when you came inside flushed with the sun,
your mouth sulky with sugar,
in your new dress with the ribbon
and the ice-cream smear,
and said to yourself in the bathroom,
I am not the favourite child.

My darling, when it comes
right down to it
and the light fails and the fog rolls in
and you’re trapped in your overturned body
under a blanket or burning car,

and the red flame is seeping out of you
and igniting the tarmac beside your head
or else the floor, or else the pillow,
none of us is;
or else we all are.

Postcards

There are people to send out postcards to. I keep forgetting.

Postcard from Kashmir
Agha Shahid Ali

Kashmir shrinks into my mailbox,
my home a neat four by six inches.

I always loved neatness. Now I hold
the half-inch Himalayas in my hand.

This is home. And this the closest
I’ll ever be to home. When I return,
the colors won’t be so brilliant,
the Jhelum’s waters so clean,
so ultramarine. My love
so overexposed.

And my memory will be a little
out of focus, it in
a giant negative, black
and white, still undeveloped.

I miss the days when people still write to one another.

Lasts

Everybody is talking about their lasts, as we spend the final days in the university this week. The last Monday, last Tuesday – that we’ll ever spend.

Today: the ‘last’ Wednesday, and I’m sitting in front of my computer, surrounded by books I’ve yet to read, listening to some ominous music: With or Without You by Cellar 55. For lack of trying to be sentimental, I didn’t go to school. Instead I woke up late, hunted for leftovers in the fridge, tried to quell my desire to smoke.

There is a heavy rock lodged somewhere in my heart, but it’s not because of how things are ending. I feel that the past few days everything is beginning. I feel strangely light, like I’m at the edge of the cliff, about to jump off. Yet I also feel like I’m sinking, deep. Again I contradict myself. I walk in circles in my four-cornered room.

Or: I am standing with my eyes closed feeling my way around me. My fingers touch doors that have yet to be opened, and I could feel imminence vibrating from the other side. What is there?

It’s all I’m feeling now, this strangely fine, a bit bewildered dwelling. I’ve ceased to be curious as to what would happen tomorrow, I only know that things will happen, and that is that. Oh, the possibilities. Is this what Fr. Roche might have meant when he said, “Our finite conditioned human situatedness is the condition of possibility for our freedom”? Ah, but what of Theology. I didn’t even liked the subject.

Now: I marvel at how my playlist has been attuned to my emotions. Awhile ago, Frank Sinatra’s wobbling into I Could Have Danced All Night, and now, Gershwin’s Our Love is Here to Stay. Here: this is for myself. The time to finally settle is coming, and I walk around my room, listen to Charles Trenet sing La Mer, and wait.

As for those who have developed a love affair with books, with libraries, or with strangers, quite a wicked habit for me, most of the time:

Marginalia
Billy Collins

Sometimes the notes are ferocious,
skirmishes against the author
raging along the borders of every page
in tiny black script.
If I could just get my hands on you,
Kierkegaard, or Conor Cruise O’Brien,
they seem to say,
I would bolt the door and beat some logic into your head.

Other comments are more offhand, dismissive -
“Nonsense.” “Please!” “HA!!” -
that kind of thing.
I remember once looking up from my reading,
my thumb as a bookmark,
trying to imagine what the person must look like
why wrote “Don’t be a ninny”
alongside a paragraph in The Life of Emily Dickinson.

Students are more modest
needing to leave only their splayed footprints
along the shore of the page.
One scrawls “Metaphor” next to a stanza of Eliot’s.
Another notes the presence of “Irony”
fifty times outside the paragraphs of A Modest Proposal.

Or they are fans who cheer from the empty bleachers,
Hands cupped around their mouths.
“Absolutely,” they shout
to Duns Scotus and James Baldwin.
“Yes.” “Bull’s-eye.” “My man!”
Check marks, asterisks, and exclamation points
rain down along the sidelines.

And if you have managed to graduate from college
without ever having written “Man vs. Nature”
in a margin, perhaps now
is the time to take one step forward.

We have all seized the white perimeter as our own
and reached for a pen if only to show
we did not just laze in an armchair turning pages;
we pressed a thought into the wayside,
planted an impression along the verge.

Even Irish monks in their cold scriptoria
jotted along the borders of the Gospels
brief asides about the pains of copying,
a bird signing near their window,
or the sunlight that illuminated their page-
anonymous men catching a ride into the future
on a vessel more lasting than themselves.

And you have not read Joshua Reynolds,
they say, until you have read him
enwreathed with Blake’s furious scribbling.

Yet the one I think of most often,
the one that dangles from me like a locket,
was written in the copy of Catcher in the Rye
I borrowed from the local library
one slow, hot summer.
I was just beginning high school then,
reading books on a davenport in my parents’ living room,
and I cannot tell you
how vastly my loneliness was deepened,
how poignant and amplified the world before me seemed,
when I found on one page

A few greasy looking smears
and next to them, written in soft pencil-
by a beautiful girl, I could tell,
whom I would never meet-
“Pardon the egg salad stains, but I’m in love.”

I couldn’t help but think that the rest of my life are scribbled somewhere by people I don’t know, in margins of books I’ve yet to open, in places that I’ve yet to go to. Lisa Ono shoots to Begin the Beguine, and I open and close my closet, lift and drop my pillows on the bed, looking for my heart.

Overture

Because a friend has mentioned Atwood and Horowitz, I bring out the beer stashed under my bed in case of emergencies. And this moment seems to be pressing, somewhere, something is breaking, inside my body. I put on George Bruch: Violin Concerto No.1 in G Minor, and then, this.

There is time to smoke, in a while. For now, a poem:

I Was Reading a Scientific Article
Margaret Atwood

They have photographed the brain
and here is the picture, it is full of
branches as I always suspected,

each time you arrive the electricity
of seeing you is a huge
tree lumbering through my skull, the roots waving.

It is an earth, its fibres wrap
things buried, your forgotten words
are graved in my head, an intricate

red blue and pink prehensile chemistry
veined like a leaf
network, or is it a seascape
with corals and shining tentacles.

I touch you, I am created in you
somewhere as a complex
filament of light

You rest on me and my shoulder holds

your heavy unbelievable
skull, crowded with radiant
suns, a new planet, the people
submerged in you, a lost civilization
I can never excavate:

my hands trace the contours of a total
universe, its different
colors, flowers, its undiscovered
animals, violent or serene

its other air
its claws

its paradise rivers

***

In my Market Research class, we were tasked to conduct personal interviews all over Manila about the latest ad campaign for Coke. A lot of them don’t remember anything now. A lot of them don’t even drink it now.

The tea phenomenon is invading the metro. They say, We have to keep the body clean. Detoxify. Keep healthy. Here: it is a temple, where your blood runs like a peaceful river. Like Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata on a sad night with no rain. This is how quiet the body can be.

I just took my can of beer and emptied it onto the bathroom sink. I put some water to boil, brought out a packet of dried leaves, smelling jasmine, the only thing I’ll find around this house now. I’ve read somewhere that Longjing is a famous Chinese tea. It stands for Dragon Well. Yun Wu is for Cloud and Mist. Chun Mee means precious eyebrows.

It’s a known fact that drinking tea can be good for the body, especially the heart.

***

Chopin pitter-patters with Nocturne. I tiptoed around the kitchen trying not to make any noise. Everyone else is asleep; there’s no one to stay up for, no one to think about at this time.

His birthday in two days.

***

Teacup in hand, I return to my room to find Bach’s Air playing. Ah, but what else can I do but sit in the corner of my room, by the floor. Then, Franz Schubert casually slips into Unfinished Symphony No. 8. I now feel archaic. Time-worn. Passé. I think I sleep somewhere between forgotten and vanished.

If you want me I’ll be at the bar

It’s almost February, and moments like these are ones that I’d like to forget. Oh, February. Stop. It’s been more than a year. I’d like to think that this is just because I haven’t slept right in the past three days, and thesis is running me to the ground, and I haven’t smoked since I watched Perfume at Em’s house, and I had my heart broken a little after watching that, and I had my thesis groupmates over for the first time in my house (which was more than unsettling), and I’m listening to Joni Mitchell, making me write loopy run-on sentences like these.

It also doesn’t help that I cry for no reason at all in the past few days, and I can’t even explain to myself why this is happening. Is it because of how petty I feel worrying about my future? But I love this fact, this nearing towards the end. I am grateful, most of all, that there is an end.

Anyhow, it’s all the same now: I wake up, and then the next thing I know, I’m back in my room, climbing into bed, falling asleep. And then I wake up.

***

It’s almost the last leg of my thesis. The financial plan’s been done, and I’m crossing my fingers that we won’t get too fucked with this one. So far the past five passes have been great. I’ve never worked this hard in my entire college life, and I’m stupid if I let this business idea go once we all graduate.

These past few days I was thinking that it wasn’t too bad, this, studying a course I never wanted in the first place, but learned to like a little, in the end. I marveled at the resiliency I had, no matter how little, how I managed to crawl through the four years studying about things that I’d rather trade for something else, how I managed to find other ways to keep on doing what I really loved, and defying forces, even if it hurts so bad sometimes.

Maybe it’s how things are meant to be. Maybe things had to happen this way. I’m beginning to believe that now.

***

I realized that I love to look at people reading. My younger sister used to do that, sit in front of me while I’m reading some book. She’d get close to my face, sit very still, and I wouldn’t notice. Sometimes I’d read for hours, and she’d be there. When I happen to look up accidentally, I’d lurch back in surprise. I asked her why she does this, and she says she likes to look at my eyes move from side to side. She says sometimes my eyes would move very slowly, and then very fast, and sometimes I blink too much, and then sometimes I don’t blink at all. This fascinates her to no end.

I guess I caught the habit. When I’m at cafes, or odd restaurants, bookstores, trains – I noticed that I can’t help but look. It’s not only the eyes that I notice, but their expressions while they read. They’re so naked, their faces.

***

My friends slept over at my house to slave away for our thesis last weekend. I enjoyed their stay. It’s been awhile since I last had someone in my room, try four years ago, there, an abandoned friendship. The day after that was the beginning of the end, the cliche. I’ll tell you all about it over coffee, it’s not that painful now, today.

After all it’s different than the last time, and I’m happy for that. It’s been awhile since I’ve willingly let people in my personal space. And it was a big step for me. Four years of having this room all to myself was quite long. And that was important. And after this weekend I still had my friends. I’ve never been more apprehensive to go to school than today, I was afraid it would be like the last time, and how I couldn’t handle that.

But I’m still on my feet. No nightmare whatsoever that has happened. Except for missing the deadline. Trivial. I still have trust issues, I still can’t tell everything to everyone, still can’t give more of myself to friends who’ve welcomed me to their lives, but I’m getting there. Getting there. It’s just hard, you know. Still there are people in my life now, who wait, who never ask questions, and I’m thankful.

***

I can’t believe I’m looking for a job. And my life, swept around somewhere, in the corner of my room, maybe hanging like my bra on the bedpost, maybe in the bottom of my waste basket, maybe tucked between Roubaud and the Travel Guide to Switzerland. And there is a poem somewhere that I can’t write:

When the Heart Flies from Its Place
Eric Gamalinda

The names are the first to go,
then the dates of births and deaths.
It’s as if everything moves on another,
esoteric level, here among the gravestones
where the elements collude so we don’t realize
how we succumb to forgetting. The milkweed unfolds
its damascened leaves and monarch caterpillars
devour them scrupulously, and out of this simple act
something marvelous is already happening,
the promise of a massive and silent migration.
Order is natural progression: a century from now
the sugar maples planted by the pioneers
will still be growing, too ancient to remember
everyone who’s seen them here. This once
was a church, where now two benches meet
in mute conviviality, and this a pound for stray sheep;
one village will be mowed over by another,
one more road will cut through the forest here.
A tractor roars to say the conquest is complete:
we tame the land until it accepts
our habits, our fear of need. When I hear these sounds,
says Stansik, age five, my heart flies from its place.
Just eight months in the country, he is learning
the landscape of language where there is no
fixed geography, and everything
still evokes another memory: cowdung is
smell of village, a pond is primal, rippling
with translucent newts. The stones
say little of these former lives, just that
they once were valiantly loved;
you can almost hear them calling the roll:
Thompson, Merritt, Thayer, each a perfect
solitude, a stilled comet. Stansik again:
Why are there no blacks in Massachusetts?
And: You are not black but gray. Pretty soon he’ll forget
his Russian, the language he is slowly
inventing, the man from whom his mother
had to run away. I wonder if he will remember
this summer, and how the heart feels
when it flies for no reason other than
—what was it? I didn’t know, I had never learned
the word for it, and to this day I walk
the unspeakable territories.

I think I need more Brubeck now, and less of Nina Simone.
My heart’s too full.

Bless you, 2006.

Took this from here, because this is exactly what I want to talk about:

Things I learned this year
That the world is both good and bad to me. The funny thing is, and the thing that I’m most thankful for, despite the circumstances, is that the world gives me the good and bad at the right time. I never thought about it before, and I just realized it this year: whenever something good happens to me, swak na swak lang sa panahon. And whenever something bad happens, I was in the right state of mind and environment that I was able to pull through it. Another thing: the world is also small. It can become small even for just two people.

People I met this year
Definitely people I’ve met through work and through the workshop! Also I am glad to be able to meet up with old friends finally, after a few years of not seeing each other. And spending more time with new friends this year, that is, is still something I want to do again and again.

Things I don’t want to take with me to 2007
my cowardice at letting go of things I should’ve
my weak body (I want a stronger, healthier one, of course)
my sense of awkwardness

Things I want to hold close as I pass into 2007
poetry, mine and others’
people I love and have come to love

Things I’m looking forward to in 2007
opportunities, lots and lots of them
chances, lots and lots of them
grace, lots and lots of them

Things that were life-changing in 2006
the final break-up
the national writers workshop
friends
and doing stuff that I tasked myself to do

Things I hope to accomplish by the end of 2007
keep in touch with people who are important to me
read lots and lots of books
write poetry (and some fiction)
learn how to drive
and many more

2003 was for balance.
2004 was for choices
2005 was for the self.

And this year is for being here, and being found.
Salamat, 2006. You’ve been good to me. You’ve also taken a lot, but you’ve been good. Maraming, maraming salamat.

I Come Home Wanting To Touch Everyone
Stephen Dunn

The dogs greet me, I descend
into their world of fur and tongues
and then my wife and I embrace
as if we’d just closed the door
in a motel, our two girls slip in
between us and we’re all saying
each other’s names and the dogs
Buster and Sundown are on their hind legs,
people-style, seeking more love.
I’ve come home wanting to touch
everyone, everything; usually I turn
the key and they’re all lost
in food or homework, even the dogs
are preoccupied with themselves,
I desire only to ease
back in, the mail, a drink,
but tonight the body-hungers have sent out
their long-range signals
or love itself has risen
from its squalor of neglect.
Everytime the kids turn their backs
I touch my wife’s breasts
and when she checks the dinner
the unfriendly cat on the dishwasher
wants to rub heads, starts to speak
with his little motor and violin–
everything, everyone is intelligible
in the language of touch,
and we sit down to dinner inarticulate
as blood, all difficulties postponed
because the weather is so good.

Para sa mundong umiinog.
Manigong bagong taon sa lahat.

I can’t shake you off, no matter how hard I try

Listening to Nina Simone. Smoking and reading this poem.

I Never Want To Go When It’s Time
Kate Light

I never want to go when it’s time
to go; I want to hang back, to read
a book, or make another line rhyme.
I always think that what I really need
is there in the place that I am leaving,
not waiting in the new place I ached
to go to. I go, but with a kind of grieving,
saying, Why’d I ever wish to shake
things up, when things were really fine?
To be with him I always had to yank
my roots, I always had to pull my bones
by heartstrings, to tear my spine
from land to land; sometimes I walked a plank
to reach that world, and breathe, and write these poems.