EDGAR ESLIT Website
An “E” novation
Prof. Anthony L. Tan
Anthony Tan is a professor of English at MSU-Iligan Institute of Technology, Iligan City, Philippines. Was appointed Chairman in the English Department. Winner of the Don Carlos Palanca Memorial award for Literature and the Homelife Magazine Poetry awards. His published books include Poems for Muddas (Anvil Publications, Manila, 1996) 5 Stories and 5 Essays.
To A Tree Near A Boulevard
Greener of foliage, darker of bark,
Wider the spread of branches,
You were a struggling sapling
When I first sought refuge under your shade.
You've weathered tropical depressions
And the scuddling rains of thunderstorms.
Battered by winds and seasonal typhoons,
You have not cracked like the sea-wall.
Other trees, not you, in secluded forests
Have fallen amidst the whirr of chainsaws.
The only signs of outrage are the ex votos
Carved heart-shaped round your gnarled bole.
No longer needing your shade for my head,
Though my sore heart needs shelter from life-storms,
I have come with one foolish wish: Perchance,
Through sudden shower of pink-white blossoms
You would deign whisper to me
The mysteries of your charmed life.
A Cyrenaic's Twilight
A quarter of the sky is tangerine,
Darkening toward vermillion near the rim.
The birds have flown to roost
On the summit of the star-apple tree.
The mother cow is mooing to her calf,
Lost somewhere in the next pasture.
The crickets announce the end of day,
And incessantly the frogs agree.
The angelus bells have long been silent.
Mid-sky the half-moon is hazy in the solstice.
Darkness comes early when the sun is farthest.
But no, don't turn on the lights yet.
Look, the belated birds are still in the air.
Let the firmament finish its last lights.
Don't hasten the twilight to end the day.
A Cyrenaic's Aubade
Mauve is the sky before the sun rises
From the nether part of the hemisphere.
Heiratic quietness reigns over the earth
Before birds descend in twittering drove.
Who sees the stars fade into yesterday?
Imperially yellow the street lamps burn.
The houses sleep, tenant-less at this hours,
(The hour the Tent-maker himself would rise.)
What you feel, behold and dream becomes yours:
Grass under bare feet, wind on naked skin.
Let through the iron gate the mountain breeze,
Let it make soothing music with the chimes.
Greet the relentless dawn the way birds do:
With zestful wings and unpremeditated song.
* * *
Moon Over Muddas
Yellow splendor over Pandami Isla
Large disc of gold on the dark, blue channel,
You watch, a solitary, lidless eye.
Radiance of heaven, goddess of our nights,
Light of benighted sailors, dream-tired hearts,
You watch, a solitary, lidless eye.
Jewel of the firmament, diamond of god,
Fire of our dreams, fire of our desire,
You watch, a solitary, lidless eye.
Two shadows on a shadowy vinta
Cross the channel, sea of forgetting,
You watch, a solitary, lidless eye.
A solitary, lidless eye, you watch
As the drama of their passions unfolds
On the dark water of their desiring.
* * *
Letter to Ling
...and my evening is all
That the lamplight encircles.
All the places and the future,
Those flaming ramparts
We thought lay beyond the horizon,
We have left them
Where we used to talk,
In the dilapidated school
House on the dream-sanctified beach,
When we were small.
My will is not the earth's magnetic core:
It cannot keep things
Where I want them to be.
My world has suffered an implosion,
But unlike a blackhole,
It does not attract
What I desire.
I'm writing to you to tell you
How like my falling hair
Things are falling away from me.
Indeed, like a tired planet,
I have lost my gravity.
And as I whirl daily in space,
Like one marrooned,
Things are flying away from me.
I have been flying, too,
Flying towards you,
But it only gives me this vertigo.
Tonight, across the light-years of your absence,
The silence in this room is made palpable
By the rasping of amorous lizards on the wall
* * *
The Sparrows Come Free
The future was already in the past.
The leaves were there in the seeds –
Brittle brown, black serration,
Wrinkled, desiccated,
Waiting for the clemencies of time,
And green thumbs, weather, earth, water.
In the mind’s eye were visions of things,
The possibilities of lushness,
Of tangerine ripeness and yellow pungency,
The anticipation of the sigh of summer
Among the wayward branches,
Of leaves snuggling in pouring rain,
The nocturne of frogs rising from the ponds.
When you dug a hole in the ground
To bury the unpromising saplings,
When in the months that followed
You uprooted the irrelevant weeds,
Prayed for rain and sunlight to some god
Of dubious munificence,
Was it ever on the periphery of the heart’s dream
That some years into your middle age
The seeds would have such a crown of abundance
For the birds to have made their airy sanctuary?
Now the garden is ablaze with their raucous summons.
And sometimes interfused with their ceaseless aubade,
As the saffron dawn recedes relentlessly
Toward common brightness,
The blue echoes of a god-like voice:
The sparrows come free,
Come free,
Come free.
* * *
Crossing the River
Came upon a river shrouded in mist.
Too early for bird call, or wing beat,
Too early even for wind.
A giant conch shell on a beaded string
Hung on the branch of a leafless tree.
It belonged to the boatman of the river.
With little energy I blew it long and thin,
Remembering what I had been taught,
Cupping it between my delicate hands.
On the edge of that feeble call
An apparition darkened the thick mist.
Slowly the bow emerged in the hush of dawn.
Beckoned me to his boat. Didn’t tell him
Where to and he didn’t ask, as if
My destination were already foreknown.
He didn’t paddle. He hesitated.
He waited as if he had forgotten something.
Looked me straight in the eye.
When I didn’t respond immediately,
He opened one bony hand,
The white palm trembling with greed.
The other hand gripped the head of a long pole.
Then I remembered what I had been taught:
I dropped a silver coin into his open palm.
He gripped it, dropped it into a bulging purse
That was tightly sewn to his leather belt.
The drop of silver on silver
Was the only sound in the soundless mist.
Only then did a fugitive grin light up his face.
Only then did he strike
The murky water with the pole.
There was no one to say goodbye to.
No friends. No kinsmen. No lovers.
The gurgle in the wake took the place of words.
The boat moved toward the other bank, where
He had unloaded his boat of so many strangers.
* * *
A Cyrenaic on Bantayan Island, Cebu
Over the isle’s supernal darkness,
Vast stretches of galactic dusts.
The stars, like holes of a cosmic sieve,
Brighten and multiply as the night deepens,
Each emanation a dent on the face of time.
We won’t be frightened by their silence, Pascal.
We’ll drop our careworn spirits on Cassiopeia’s
Chair, and load our sorrows on the wagon
And drive it beyond the points of
Let the archer shoot into the void
Of another galaxy, drawing his arrows
From a quiver of earthly woes.
The wish we must make, when the meteors
Shoot down like celestial fireworks,
Is lightness of being: to be borne
Evermore on the wave of laughter,
On the spindrift of intimacy.
Not steadfast as stars that were compasses
To bygone sailors, the ground of existence
Is as the sands on this beach of Santa Fe.
* * *
The Dying Swans of Muddas
At Death's bidding music rises
From the soul to the parched throat
And now to the beak of lamentation.
The wild thick rushes cleave in the wind,
Cleave in the silver track of her passage
As she makes the final survey of the pond:
Rocks, springs, rivulets, the clear streams
Of home, secluded for ages from defile.
She swims to the edge of the playground,
She listens to the gambol of the cygnets
And sees the play of sunlight and water
As they paddle back and forth in silver down.
She swims back to the rushes, for the song
Is fast breaking from her breast.
They must not hear her sing,
Not on a morning like this, not on any day.
She hopes for no wind to carry the song
Beyond the wall of tall grasses,
Or else for a mighty gale to broadcast
Into the earless firmament
The song that Death bids her sing.
* * *
A Cynic's New Millennium, 1999
During a lull between typhoon rains
Nine white-breasted birds sat on a wire
Under the canopy of low, gray clouds.
On sodden ground the trees and shrubs
Wore the vestigial gloom of late December.
I thought of Hardy and his frail, gaunt thrush
And wished the birds would repeat to me
The thrush’s song of hope, celestial solace
They would deign to pour on world-weary souls.
I waited for their song. None of them sang,
Engrossed they were with primping their feathers.
If nine presaged good luck, thought I,
It would be a prosperous year, or decade.
“Happy New Year!” I hailed them cheerily.
Six scampered away, startled, as I was myself,
By the zing and suddenness of my salutation.
Three tarried behind and looked around,
Twitched their tails in unison,
Dropped something white and watery
On my bare head and whisked into the dark.
* * *
Lady's Touch
Prof. Christine Godinez-Ortega
(POSTED WITH PERMISSION FROM THE AUTHOR)
Christine Godinez-Ortega is a poet, author, educator, journalist and chairman of the English Department, College of Arts and Social Sciences, MSU-IIT, Iligan City. She is the director of the Iligan National Writers Workshop. She lives in
Elegy For a Tortoise
In Siquijor, I watched
Some old men hunt
The tortoise—
His crawl of half-a-century
Poised upon that moment,
Yellow folds on brown.
I saw the face
The beak that bore
The creases of the good years.
And when the oldest man
Raised his remaining strength,
The head of the tortoise rolled,
It rolled and stopped and watched.
The old men broke the shell
The bolo pierced the lungs,
Severed the heart, perhaps.
Before I closed my eyes
I raised the tortoise and his tear
To straighten the curls
In my looking glass.
***
Heirloom
I thought the world ended
when I lost my bracelet of rubies
and a hundred and one diamonds,
each cut no bigger than eyelets
the rainbow curve brighter than its gold band-
intertwined snakes, surgeon's trademark,
Marcury's, too, around my arm.
Snakes' ruby eyes and flawless diamonds
flash fiery colors never fighting back.
Ruby eyes light up my dark nights, clear stones
balm for my chafed lips on long, hot days.
At night, I'd caress the white stones on gold
that came in a velvet box
with love and kisses from my grandmother
when I was seven.
Now that the bracelet's gone, my bare arm
wants to believe its diamond eyelets
are crying to surface from the
crevices in my old dresser, snakes'
cold stare ordering me to stop thrashing.
Tomorrow, the bracelet of the sky
will cut through my bedroom window,
more golden, bluer
and more green.
Golden Tara: Butuan's Figurine
The Golden Tara surfaced after a storm
but we've lost it like we had the Balanggiga Bell.
lighted up another type of storm in Butuan.
Manobo brushed off clay and nature's call
for Diwata told Man to claw and dip into
that carpet of mud, the throbbing star
by Wawa's roiling waters rushing
with the mighty
Historians fussed at golden deity's name,
Manobo's rough hands took salt and rolled bills
from cold, brown hands until the glit'ring icon
rested on pale, eager palms for free.
Butuan's kinship to the Srivijayans is assured,
dark balanghais still buried in the clay
and antiques safe in rich homes have pushed
historians to twaddle and twirl the globe
probing Magellan's landing in Masao.
Today, the Haves gloat in
far from this museum, the Have-Nots
spend their time polishing shadow plasters
of Paris dipped in paint.
Soul food