Gabriela Silang, image by Irene Koronas
Gabriela Sings Fado Into the 21st
Century
—for Gabriela Silang
I yearned for amnesia—Desiring amnesia from seeing
dragonflies
off-kilter, shoving through air like husbands
with
bruised eyes—Black dimes interrupted the sun’s glare,
an
experience familiar to travelers visiting “Namibia in
search of
pure light”—Uncertainty defined by farewells’
thermodynamics,
exhaustion yielding the scent of armpits
until
sight clung to a riding crop, suddenly admired for
its stiff
leather spine—Centuries of woodcarvers immortal
-izing
stigmata on the limbs of virgins and saints, eyes wide
and white
in exaltation—Sometimes, days of unremitting
brightness
from ignoring all ancestors to stare directly at
the sun,
only to discover myself clasped by the cool dimness
of a
cathedral where hands penetrated marble bowls for
holy water
whose oily musk lingered on my filigreed fingers
as if to
sheathe my flesh—Confusion over Love’s relevance—
Mornings
broken by waking at quantum velocity—Where
bones
erupted mountains in Guatemala and Peru—Perseve
-rance
defined as green stalks holding up ylang-ylang
orchids—
how their
thin limbs refused to break from the weight of lush
petals and
overly-fertile stamen! Mountains of bones shared
the pallor
of thick, white candles burning in helplessly tin
candelabras—No
metaphors exist for genocide—Should
one
italicize the word God? Sudden
longings for rose petals
yawning
like little girls, like the daughters I never bore—
Possessing
money for perfect hems consoles like martyrdom—
A
scientist-poet cautioned against “enhancing music” as more
would trip
“the fragile balance between sterility and sensuality”—
Diving so
deeply to become salt witnessing coral form sky
-scrapers
upside down as they narrowed towards the molten
center of
earth—Schools of fish dispersing to reveal
the
undulating sea floor as “suddenly flesh, suddenly scarred,
suddenly
aglow”—“Geisha” defined as lipstick from nights
jousting
at the West End Bar (New York City) when jazz still
rained and
reigned—Heartbeats succumbing to radiance after
curiosity
moved me to bait handcuffs and whips—Radiance
penetrating
to complete its caress bearing a price that will never
reach
blasphemy—Commitment costs—Today I hide from
what I
once bartered willingly bartered for
Lucidity—
**
“Civilized
satiation”—Fabrics fraying but still mustering to
cover the
shoulders of non-retired warriors—The chandelier
with 500
light bulbs branding immortal air—Together, we formed
tuning
forks longing for emphatic hits—That video I created with
lies: its
choreography of phantoms rated “X” by bureaucrats
expert
only in a “failure to articulate”—Empathy defined through
a bent
spine craving an ellipsis whose bulge implied arrival, not
departure
or division—The salty pleasure of sisters elongating
pink necks
to snag spotlights beamed from men experienced
in the
utter aliveness of dying—Painting a floor red with my hair,
backing
myself into a corner: when you grasped
my throat,
your
greedy footprints completed my painting—Whispering,
“Step
heavy. No such thing as a sonafabitch in
turning art into
flesh”—Press
me against a steel door radiated by generous
halogen—Hunger
defined as losing battle with courtesy—she
was not a
petite doll urging sirloin on others while she settled
for sauce
on rice—Longing for an intermission. But love is also
a source
of difficulty—Pyres of ashes rise with a verve matching
Babel’s
ambition—Sag, therefore, into night as if night is a lover—
The
teacher likened the moon to an arsehole—A lake capitulated
to ripples
from a stone’s impassive penetration—Can art fulminate
within
gold Baroque frames? Smothering inch-high candles floating
with
decontextualized petals in crystal water bowls—Inherited
pages
crumbling between black leather, the font embossed
in
tattered gold as “Holy Bible”—Melancholy rice fields a rippling
mirror of
a sunset inside you—Generous beds of unpicked mint:
radically
fragrant but untapped potential—Coins tossed at brass
fountains
wish for the opposite of diminution—Craving kindness—
Photographs
overcome by sepia, certainty demolished by screams—
Demeter’s
statue languishing over water where orange manna set
goldfish
ablaze. I had no excuse, not even History—Compromise
defined as
writing typhoid fever instead of ecstasy—Inhale the biting
scent of
tar—Chanting calculations of false theorems, weeping
as if
there are gods to court—Soldiers whispered by a paltry stream,
their eyes
locked on the slimness of my ankles revealed through
ripped
cotton—I owned a widowhood to avenge—All men were my
sons. I
could not afford any man reminding me pearls never yellow
when worn
against flushed skin—Hollow cheeks on mothers
cradling
dead warriors—Charisma defined as letters forming words
like myrrh, honey, balsam, pepper wormwood—flavors
used
by Romans
in Beaucaire to camouflage fermenting raisins spoiled
in
amphoras now lining the Mediterranean with thousands and
thousands
of shards—To savor my childhood house where
grandmother
gave births with abundant abandon, where generations
died more
radiant than a sun’s implosion—Seashells sleeping
on
windowsills—Clouds of cushions recycling chicken feathers
softened
every inch of narra furniture;
stitched lace and sequin
tempted
viewers to believe angels never fell and a harpsichord
can last
for eternity—Foregoed milk for tapey
rice wine as I pre-
ferred my
tongue sodden—I forgot meticulousness in preserving
memory as
proof that someone will always remember you and
me—Nights lactating morphine, roses rebelling
against the after
-math of blooming, and vampires
about to sin—Marble
floors
with
cobalt veins chilling the barefooted sleepwalker—Diego
lifting
eyelashes to reveal soot—The Ilokano sea witnessing
eighty
virgin men dangling from trees to protect me—Memorizing
combined
scents of tobacco and milk—Suturing words by setting
calloused
fingers free to roam across a piano’s ebony keys—
Marisa
peeling the skin from a blue-boned fish, Shakira rustling
up an old
clothesline for tying hands together after mosquitos bit,
Doris
tuning ears to lullabyes emanating from the wings of fire-
flies,
Luisa squatting besides betel-chewing crones with crooked
front
teeth, Marjorie swallowing the scarless sky over Siquijor….
We played
in a Kingdom waiting to happen, where palaces
contained
empty thrones, where no one would have challenged
had we sat
on rubicund damask cushions—Instructions ending
with the
order: Do not cry—Envy for scout bees
charged with
discovering
new food supplies—how I coveted their eyes like
a series
of mirrors able to split light: “the
trigonometrical bee will
always / be able to trace the route
from flower // to hive by taking
a reading from the sun”—Begging the 21st century
reader: Will
you breathe life
into me by believing?
—Eileen R.
Tabios
