First night: steamed crab with garlic powder; fried kapong fish; big bottle of Singha at the seafood restaurant across the street in Pratunam Market.

Second day: loti (roti?) — spun sugar, like cotton candy, but crunchy, wrapped in a thin pandan-flavored flour pancake.

Second day: smoked catfish, minced and refried, with fish sauce, mint, peanuts and onions at a floating restaurant in Ayutthaya.

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Happy and Clarissa, grinning from ear to ear at the communion. Christ The King Church, filled to the brim with white flowers. “Ngayon at Kailanman.” Dad’s standup act: “Basta huwag kang sasabunatan.” “Get out your handkerchiefs.” The two easy chairs during the banquet pictorial. The bride doing tequila shots. The groom doing vodka doubles. 50 Cent’s “In da Club.” A maya bird looking for a red rose.

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You’re going to see the blog layout look all compressed within the next few days, as I won’t be posting for a little while — Madeline and I are taking off for a much-needed vacation from our vacation =), and leaving the little tyke with her grandparents. They say if we’re going to spend all that time worrying about our daughter then we might as well stay at home — but we’re worried anyway, because it’s going to be the longest she’s been away from us. Not even overnight.

Pictures from Happy’s wedding will be online — more about that later — and so will pictures from the vacation.

Bangkok and Siem Reap, here we come!

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Back when I was in sixth grade at the North Davis Elementary School in Davis, California — my folks were on sabbatical — I wrote a poem called “Life.” There was little about the poem — I should really say “poem” — that I remember, except for the ponderous ending (“Life is like / a long trip.”) and one sentence (“The river was / a ribbon of moon.”). Hey, it was sixth grade.

Then I didn’t think about poetry again for another 22 years or so, except for a detour through Eliot and Cummings in high school. But in the past few months I started plunging into it again, and the immersion has been life-changing, like learning a new language.

Then I started actually making them up just about a couple of weeks ago (see my “Hey, I Got Published!” post from a week back) — specifically, in Eileen Tabios‘s hay(na)ku form.

Indeed, I still have a couple about Madeline here, which I’m suddenly emboldened to post:

Your
eyes Your
lips and Your

Purple
kissed bruise
on: right knee.

And I’ve been thinking as well of organizing those dream couplets into some sort of series, like:

A tangle of horseflies.
The inadequacy of grass.

Peripheries of mollusk.
Inflection of sea.

Sheaves of punches.
The grammar of bees.

Then the best kick in the pants, as it were, was the following message from Eileen the other day:

Congrats to the winners:

Top Three Chosen By Judge Barbara Jane Reyes:

Tom Beckett
Jon Pineda
Dennis Somera

Other masterful hay(na)ku poets reveal themselves to be Stephen Kirbach, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Luis Cabalquinto, Kenneth Tanemura, Terri Leigh Relf, Kasey Mohammad, Benito “Sunny” Vergara, Bill Freind, Shirlie Mae Mamaril, Clayton Couch, Michael Snider, Michael Helsem and Rosanne Virata.

Please check the June 20, 2003 post at http://winepoetics.blogspot.com/ for more details.

Thanks to all participants; your words are a blessing,
Eileen

And in the company of real poets too!

All in all, I think, a nice beginning to things.

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1. Izzy isn’t sleeping very well. The last three nights she’s been waking up around 9:30, wanting to be held, yelling for her mommy. The moment we try to put her in our bed – which never works anyway – she starts squirming and playing with the pillows and kicking us. This continues until around midnight when we finally leave her in her crib and she’s too exhausted to cry out. All this clinginess is not a good sign, especially since Madeline and I are leaving her with her lolo and lola (we’re going to Bangkok and Siem Reap next week).

2. Tension is mounting as Happy’s wedding day draws near. My mother and I have fallen into our old “conversational” rut, mumbling sarcastic comments under our breath. Peck, counterpeck.

3. Last night Clarissa’s parents threw a party for us and what seemed like a zillion other friends and relatives. We picked up Tawee and Kalaya (Happy’s sponsors, flying in from Bangkok) from the airport, then headed over to Megamall to buy Tawee a barong (and got caught in the rain), then over to Clarissa’s. Great food — the chef, waiters, and bartenders were apparently pirated from some other restaurant and paid under the table. Saw some old acquaintances (bridesmaids of Clarissa), relatives and so on; the entourage also had a big briefing session, with lots of jargon I simply wasn’t familiar with (cord? arras? Was I supposed to have the ring on me, or grab it from the ringbearer?).

4. The flowers are going way over budget. My dad blames my brother, my brother blames the florist and my dad. The white roses (and glass vases) on each table — all 28 of them — are quite beautiful though. (The cost of the flowers alone — $1500 — is for me, in the US, pretty darn steep, and unimaginable in the Philippines.)

5. I’m angry when I brush my teeth. The bristles are worn down almost to the roots before I throw the toothbrush away. Sometimes I’ve even snapped the brush in the act of brushing, stabbing the roof of my mouth with the splintered plastic stub.

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