UNIVERSITY OF SANTO TOMAS COLLEGE OF EDUCATION

LITERATURE 102A PROJECT PAPER FOR PRELIMS

Ophelia Alcantara-Dimalanta Poems to be Read for the Preliminary Project

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From Lady Polyester 1. Love in a Contemporary Key go indepth zero in with soul in chuck having to up on time beware these subliminal kinks and lows no laws see no hands game is played by ear each ones way the final insinuation is exploded in and it is consummated amen dammen as he now drops off his side purring and dreaming of women with warmer thighs and fresher insights while the other one quite righteously drops off a wifely load feeling horribly exploited and turned on more by thoughts of things less mundane and just as binding as this one social hang-up love? tell it to the bedpost brother sadly wives would rather now order than disorder beds and bungle biorhythms could even be motherly and solicitous yes over them soft old pooped less cocksure and superior all arrogance ejected and one loves to do them do them to death thus damned done in and spent

2. To Lady Polyester

Dimalanta, Ophelia A. (1993). Lady Polyester : poems, past and present. Manila : Santo Tomas University Press [PL5539.D21 .D591L 1993 ]

It is not poetry that kills one but life --Berryman True, I am, as against your Charge, pure silk, silken And crumbly-soft. I need polyester for strength, But only the right percentage To insure against shrinkage. And this one whirl of silk Is febrile, tenuous and remote, Tearing badly at the slightest Brush with sun and wind and rain, Curl, fray at the edges Under finger pressure. And I of course, need polyester Strength for the right bounce, The proper blend and weave, Sun-spun, a healthy brune Against this rose-ash dying. To spread out, centripetal Opening, purely strong, strengthened by your nudging Private polyester polyestrous Blood, and wakened, thus Shaken from this twilight silken woon.

3. Children and Lovers children have a special knack for making you feel odd and nude suddenly even with that vaguest piece of smile you ready somewhere to cover a scorching shame when they wickedly nave and sporting barge in without ceremony and when you finally

shut that errant door on them again to try resuming love you terminate it both ways instead it seems the look of bewilderment and hurt they leave behind you cannot annul henceforth an alienating chill scudding across your upright headboard flipped into stiffened sheets and consciences weighty amd brittle with adult experiences and reconsidered passions confounding even the best intentions but even more final than all finalities fumbled for is the cool crisp later your wall them away with somewhere again love waiting suffers a little falling away you end up wishing lovers are more like gaming children and children less like gnarled impatient lovers. 4. A Kind of Burning it is perhaps because one way or the other we keep this distance closeness will tug us apart in many directions in absolute din how we love the same trivial pursuits and insignificant gewgaws spoken or inert claw at the same straws pore over the same jigsaws trying to make heads or tails you take the edges i take the center keeping fancy guard loving beyond what is there you sling at stars i bedeck the weeds straining in song or profanities towards some fabled meeting apart from what dreams read

and suns dismantle we have been all the hapless lovers in this wayward world in almost all kinds of ways except we never really meet but for this kind of burning. 5. An Unobstructed View (for edna m.) My storehouse having been burned down, Nothing obstructs the view Of the brightest moon. -- Masahide yes, i see it all now; the sky is all there, no trees shotting up, no strictures looming to restrain its flow. i have it all to myself, like it has all of me, clear-eyed and undisturbed. it is as if I were seeing the world beautifully void, with new eyes, new soul. all the clutter and din and stringencies of past lifetimes wiped out sheet-clean. nothing is there. i am myself tabula rasa looking up unhampered at one unreflecting sky, the moon stolid, total, unfringed, with no strings attachedonly to itself, and myself with no life before; and after remains to be reworded in a re-birthing. there is no telltale traces of past me looking up into one freely flowing sky

and one singular unfrilled moon, now I begin to re-establish links, re-touch, re-focus, as I pen the text of new days to come tonight, here from one unobstructed view.

From Love Woman 1. Love, Lie Still What the body wants is the fecundity of forests and not the forgetfulness of sedatives, the hinterlands brief spreading, fluffs of clouds alighting noiselessly upon the shanks of space, skies shaped upon awnings of night, bland breasts inevitably resting upon mindless hands just there serenely dreaming. so naturally together. this unthinking laying of flesh upon flesh is honest speech caught still in the middle of a liethis is the beginning of the truest voyage to the other secret zones, access into the most intimate places. let us lie no more, glaze, pad up, camouflage in various subterfuges the color of pour helplessness. let us be sane before we even start to dissemble pickup from the erstwhile void as if we never minded. let this wilderness in us not ever begin to seek a clearing, knowing the impossibility

Dimalanta, Ophelia A.(1998). Love woman : poems. Manila : University of Santo Tomas Press [PL5539.D21 .D591w 1998]

of discerning the line between the lie of silences and the truth of utterance, the lie of naked complicity and the declarations of sheathed faiths. let us lie still, as time, conspirator, stands by as still, looking smugly shrewdly the other way. let us not ever speak again of the fictions and collusions of true love so-called; our instincts have been punished enough; let us now get on with our lives and ever so quietly naturally move into each other, and into heart of need. 2. Josephine Bracken All of Gold (Jose Rizal and Josephine Bracken were married with Fr. Victor Balaguer, S. J. as officiating priest at 5:30 am 1896, two hours before he was shot at Bagumbayan, now Rizal Park.) More than marriage, this is manifest text of loves bewildering ambivalences. How so closely love is married to death, and gentleness with rage, and dreams sudden dip into the maws of morning is still wedlock to the previous nights grim stalking. Losing you now, how steadfastly I cling, hurting so, and dying, you live in me, and promised in you in this rite of death is execution of a living faith sworn by. And bound to you, I am forthrightly flung into my greatest freedom.

Love indeed and death. And how cleverly at time we magic it away by having one identify the other and oh, how binding this liberating joy, brought about by these intimate almost-dyings in your so alive and violent reaffirmings and protestations, the stasis and the smoulderings that go beyond passions ever fitful burnings. Why is it when one chooses love one chooses death as well, a vow and a vain surrendering, a sigh and a reprisalyour countenance flashing and royal, solar and godly, grim and death-darkened, source of my own days most infrequent brightenings. But golden, it is quite false my love, gold easily falling into lead, its origin, but back to sun gold, my Sun, all of gold, your passion all of this fire, these earth-rendering luminosities, and Oh, my love, my loves darkest blight. And here touching, we are affixed in space, indelible signatures in a vow forged in another world, kinder and wiser. And in this instance we are unbelievably one. I swear I dont know where I end and where you begin, so holding,

so separate, so strange and spectral this rite under the imprisoning light of this crying fulsome dark!