Make
a face.
Make a fist.

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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.

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Got some more debt elimination spam today — this time not just with random words, but actual sentences clearly designed to foil anti-spam software. (It looks like the spam program automatically generates sentences based on a template: a phrase here, a preposition there.) The following two paragraphs were tacked to the bottom of the ad:

Now and then, near test honor upon compendium over. Furthermore, from condemnate, and of playoff fall in love with related to. I from squalid toward, or behind assimilate around. Any sky can of, but it takes a real chevron to nearest henry over. Most people believe that related to learn a lesson from heater, but they need to remember how refract. Go near gets drunk, and about we’ll starts spiderwort about lost glory; however, beyond give lectures on morality to from.

Now and then, of operate a small fruit stand with treachery around. When around uproot returns home, inside sweeps the floor. Together living with is careen.

The prepositions keep tripping me up, because they’re clearly randomly strewn about. But otherwise there are some great sentences and phrases here that one could use for later — “operate a small fruit stand with treachery around,” “starts spiderwort about lost glory” — and that last sentence, rhythmically a kind of summation: “Together living with is careen.”

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The wheel of responsibility lies caked on birds’ wings. Eyes open to a flutter, the image passes in silence. We are too tired to think. Hands are washed daily. An opacity in the current, a tremor in the stream, and the world rests on shimmer.

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Expedited delivery:
The tap on the window
Memos for your consideration
Sharpened pencils in a row

It’s standard operating procedure:
The detritus of clips
Spinning in my chair
The clash of deodorant
Rising above the tide

Consider it done:
I hear motorcycles in the woods somewhere.
The muted gentle buzzsaw
The sapper and tick of horses
Wind and river and jangle of quarters
Soil and dapple and rubber stamp

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