Eileen Tabios has a post on one of my favorite poets, Eric Gamalinda, and she's reprinted a fantastic poem of his, "Melting City."
I can still remember the very first time I saw his name in print, when he won a short story prize in Asiaweek sometime in the mid-'80s or so. My mom was quite excited, because Gamalinda was a neighbor of hers -- they lived on the same block of the same street (Instruccion) in Sampaloc, Manila, where my mom grew up. (She was much older, and remembered him as a little boy.) Since then I've followed his career fairly closely -- I think I even clipped his music reviews from the Manila Times (or was it the Daily Globe?) -- and when I finally met him in NY in 2000 (I'll namedrop here and say that I had dinner with him and Luigi Francia one time), I was somewhat tongue-tied in front of the two. (I don't know -- there's something about poets that renders the fanboy in me all speechless.)
I'm finishing up writing acknowledgments and whatnot for my dissertation, and if there was something I could use as an epigraph, it would be something by Gamalinda. The last stanza of his poem "Enough" -- found in his excellent collection Zero Gravity (Alice James Books) -- I've always found sharp and wounding:
Someday I will send everyone a card
with nothing in it, only
the calligraphy
of a river, and in the back
with invisible ink I will say:
Forgive my happiness,
I have betrayed you all.