Blessings from Don Luis

Luis Cabalquinto launched his fourth poetry book, Bridgeable Shores: Selected Poems (1969-2001) – published by Galatea Speaks, an imprint of Muae Publishing/Kaya Press – at Manila Garden resto in Manhattan last month. It was a star-studded affair, as they say – the stars being among the leading lights in the Fil-Am lit firmament.

In attendance were Alberto Florentino, Luis Francia, Eric Gamalinda, Nick Carbo, Gina Apostol, Lara Stapleton, Bino Realuyo and Paolo Javier, all of whom are distinguished writers based in New York.

Eileen Tabios, who helped edit the book and provided the inspired Introduction, flew in from San Francisco. Merlinda Bobis, who teaches at Wollongong University in Australia but was then engaged in a promotional book tour in the U.S., also graced the occasion.

Much to Don Luis’ delight. A photo he sent shows his lovely editor in what may be called a lap dance, the poet-author’s lap being the recipient of, or receptacle for, the ritual/sensual offering. Another rite of passage involved Merlinda, who was meeting the celebrant for the first time. Ever gallant and graciously acquiescing to post-modern demands that pass themselves off as e-mail messages (or is that the other way around?), Don Luis complied with our request to plant a hearty buss on his new acquaintance.

"This is for someone in Manila," he might have said. And the performance poet and fictionist Merlinda Bobis, flush from her success as an American-published author, would not have known the difference between a proxy or a stolen, self-gratifying kiss.

The celebrant’s daughter Sofiya Cabalquinto, herself fast turning into an accomplished poet, arranged for a Pinoy band to up the ante at the literary gathering. We failed to receive a detailed report, however, as to whether the music incited a further orgy of lap dancing. Perhaps the documentarist Bert Florentino still has to digest the affair before he includes it in his continuing list of Philippine-literature highlights.

Now, we’ve been great good friends with Don Luis, who often takes the trouble of airmailing us clippings from the New York Times Book Review and other publications, whenever he deems these invaluable for trans-Pacific sharing. He does it with books, too.

Now and then he deigns to visit us Third-Worlders. I still recall a night over a decade ago when Cesar Ruiz Aquino, who’s usually lost-and-found in Dumaguete, and I spent hours discussing poetry with Luis at his suite in a five-star hotel in Malate. Of course the whisky bottle he had picked up at a duty-free shop enhanced and extended our appreciation of the subject, so that we almost had breakfast on the Don’s account.

Several other times has Luis Cabalquinto breezed through Manila on his way to his hometown of Magarao in Albay. There he’s had a shrine to the Virgin Mary, and I believe a chapel, built on the farmland he always says he’ll retire to once his stake in the Viagra pills offered by Pfizer, where he worked for years, gets a proper accounting.

And so we have a soft spot for Don Luis. Admittedly, this may color our reckoning of his life work of poetry. We cannot be objective. But we can say without flinching subjectively that it has been a five-star produce indeed. And it has nothing to do with taking blue pills.

Cabalquinto can mesmerize with authority, his maturity of voice the supreme manifestation of an obviously earned quality of experience in a lifetime of poetry. Manly and macho for the most part, Cabalquinto also turns delicate in his most sensuously attended verse.

Listen: "Some night when you’re out there in an open field,/ looking intently at the black velvet sky thickly/beaded with stars, you might also feel what I’ve felt// on such a night. You might feel the heavy weight/ of your thoughts drop and vanish into the grass/ and all that really mattered would be the full volume// of your body displacing the same volume of air;/ then taking some of it back into an open mouth/ with each long slow intake, holding breath a minute// then letting go, sensing the flushing power of the act./ A cleanliness of being would pulse out into the universe./ Unseen, someone would be singing from afar –// a young woman’s voice, riding thin and fragile/ on the southeast gust that would brush your ear like fur;// and some deep part of you would be yearning for her// to come and share this pain, the stinging ache of your joy." ("Some Nights")

Confident of his status and stature as a lyric observer who eschews the poseur act, Cabalquinto can then indulge in playful reverie. "The fall of skirts –/ revelation –/ bestows hair, pores,/ the pale secret skin/ to the eyes; the/ hills and gulleys exposing/ geography:/ the promise of much/ country." ("Poem Composed One Morning While Passing Women Disrobing by the River")

Galatea Speaks editor Tabios offers an entirely lucid Intro: "The heart of Luis Cabalquinto’s first American poetry collection, Bridgeable Shores, may be viewed in its beginning sections, the first part ‘Morningland’ being poems inspired by the Philippines and the second ‘Sun on Ice’ by New York. By choosing this structure of two separate but ‘bridgeable’ shores, Luis logically embodies the expatriate Filipino as poet.

"...In his search, all the more evocative by providing the metaphor for the diasporic Filipino, Luis Cabalquinto achieves poetic grace through compassion, another hallmark of the great poet.

"...And because his poetry is his life, the manly Luis cares about making love and sex – the theme of his book’s third section ‘Break Into Blossom.’

"...In his poetic approach to sex, Luis sometimes displays that – to me – very Filipino combination of prurience and prudishness as a result of religious upbringings. For Luis, this can result in a certain obliqueness, as in his poem ‘The Night Bobby De Niro Went Down on His Knees and Blew Air into My Belly-button.’ With his special brand of glee, Luis charms with his approach to sex – also evident in poems such as ‘Quality Shopper’ and ‘Seafood.’"

We agree that Cabalquinto’s wonderful items of erotica are by turns subtle and graphic, cute but composed. Here are the brief poems cited by Tabios above.

"Quality Shopper": "Thoughtfully, she/ Pressed her/ Manicured index/ Finger on/ His nipples, / Belly button, Balls, penis –// Dainty shopper/ Checking a/ Display of/ Tropical fruits/ For quality."

"Seafood": "Hooking open/ His CK-briefs’/ Waist band,/ She casts/ An eye/ In there/ as if/ Checking a/ Kingfish’s gills/ For freshness."

Another example of his range of cheeky weaponry is evident in the concrete, laconic linearity of "Love Poem With Almost No Adjective": "ill/ for/ your/ riches/ i/ lie/ in/ bed/ eating/ a/ wall."

We’ve been privy to more recent erotic poems that are not in this collection, and they too buttress the kinky Don’s rightful claim to being among the finest of our love-and-lust poets. Such that in Anvil’s recently released coffee-table anthology, the remarkably elegant Eros Pinoy: An Anthology of Contemporary Erotica in Philippine Art and Poetry, Cabalquinto is represented by the most number of poems. These include what to our mind – and loins – may already be a classic, "The Pornographer Labors On His Lead." We’ve dealt with this poem in a previous column, extolling the device used by the poet to achieve a distancing from the persona, which in turn separates the poem from outright porn.

Perhaps in furtherance of the incestuous notion of a literary ménage à trois, we will also have to agree with the following observation from Tabios:

"...Luis doesn’t simply make connections. He also aims for balance, for alignment, between the forces, which can be the same ingredients for creating chaos – the turmoil that would cause mortals to behave despicably so that a gentle man like Luis is compelled to write poems like ‘Bosnia’; ‘Edge of the Woods,’ which depicts a brutal murder; and ‘Island Reports,’ which briefly but powerfully touches on various types of losses, from the prostitution of a child to the rape of a woman to the torture of a poet. He writes about these low moments for Luis is a poet who does not use words to separate himself from his environment."

Indeed. And how numerous the poems – of variant concerns and suitably differing styles – to savor in this collection.

We cite one more, "Eating Lechon with My Brothers & Sisters," of a longish nine stanzas, where Cabalquinto concludes, with the gentlest of proprietary summations, what he has started with the quietest of premises: "What fullness in the life is this which possesses/ An October night in the patio of my mother’s house,/ Eating lechon with my brothers & sisters/ At a reunion –//"

That is the first stanza. And here he ends with the last three: "They are here, they listen. We all listen late/ into the night in the light of a full moon over/ Magarao. We dream our dreams again, brothers/ & sisters, nephews & nieces, mother & siblings:// Together. Later, as I rest alone in my room,/ hearing my nieces sing of love & the adolescent/ In the dulcet tone of my childhood dialect,/ I also hear a silence beyond their young voices,// Undisturbed but for the distant bark of a dog./ I listen & take all in with a new understanding,/ When sleep comes slowly, gently – I feel at peace:/ Tonight, at least, snug in childlike content."

Eileen may have the last word: "Alignment. Unity. Such are appropriate for Luis Cabalquinto’s poems are ultimately about joy – that life is a blessing. (This is a recognition more rare than it should be among poets.) Without finding balance within the upheavals that also comprise life, Luis would not be able to live a harmonious life and write poems depicting harmony. To read such poems as ‘Eating Lechon with My Brothers & Sisters’ and ‘Sunday with the Smiths’ is to feel goodwill, to know that goodwill is more than possibility..."

Bridgeable Shores: Selected Poems (1969-2001) may soon become available in local bookstores. But for those who may want to acquire copies sooner, you may write the publisher at PO Box 7492, New York, NY 10116, USA, or gain e-mail access through www.kaya.com.