VICENTE met his wife at the Silliman University Creative Writing Workshop of 1997. She was a poetry writing fellow. But, now, reader, we confess we don't have much leeway to talk about her identity and are even now already hastened by our conscience to -- without much ado -- lead you forthwith to the few poems from her folder. A folder it was the contents of which Vicente had -- cross his heart? -- the permission to distribute through this page. Liar? Let it be, Reader, but Vicente would have to require you to read the copyright clause at the bottom of this page. That, at least, we owe Ate Cecile.
a note to a suicide
washed by the memory
of rain
in the private/public
space
of your chosen tomb,
your bottled misery
no longer -- oh christie -- bears
the color of your pain.
was it haste or intent
that you consigned crypt
to a pavement, waylaid
by dust and general passing?
do you not on this dying
claim
your pain for mine,
from mine, in mine,
but what clarity is there
in the transparence of glass
fragile or brittle?
and for what cause, christie --
you must have, falling, known
(they said they heard you scream) --
but for the most, solely, breaking
infinity in a thousand
broken pieces, shards
of untombed fall
not even a lifetime
can retrieve . . .
only hear
keen in the dead of night
the shattering of glass
slipping off my hands
toward some tearing silence,
apart into many floor pieces
i cannot trembling
gather strength to mend
one night
for unknowing mornings.
no hush where my hands
cannot reach, christie,
the farthest corner
of your death
to finally bury your deed.
your scream i only deem
as i walk, fictive, barefoot;
not really knowing
between my fall
and your shatter
if it was you
or me
that screamed.
-- 20 September/89
sans*
the muffled din in the cloister
drags a dredge into the depths
of thought, a Titanic sunken
in remote oblivion where memories
become flaccid in submergence
(a nondescript, hastily drawn analogy
when imagination fails to augment
reality's blatant gaps). what a miserable
crap, a caper it must have been,
frolic about random words and
hush the agitation by pretense;
a poem written in an attempt
to define logic sans reason.
*first appeared in Caracoa Poetry Journal, August 1986
-- page in progress --
Copyright (c) 1999, 2001 Cecilia Roxas-de Veyra. All rights reserved. Readers are welcome to view, save, file and print out single copies of this webpage for their personal use. No reproduction, display, performance, multiple copy, transmission, or distribution of the work herein, or any excerpt, adaptation, abridgment or translation of same, may be made without written permission from the author. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this work will be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
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