IMAGO by Joseph O. Legaspi
Cavankerry Press 2007
Reprinted with permission of CavanKerry Press.

Two Elegies
by Joseph O. Legaspi

I.
Death took root at the moment of birth.
~ Yukio Mishima

1.
I was far too young to know
him, the one contained in the box
layered with soft, white fabric, as if
the man was bathing, or drowning in milk.
The funeral wreaths on easels looked like artificial sunflowers.
I do not remember him being buried
although my mother said I was there,
that tropical winter of the archipelago
when she cradled me as the earth, like the ocean, swallowed
her father, submerging him to his last baptism.

2.
As sharp as the knife was, it still crackled
the brittle shell of the century egg
when I sliced it, shell-shards all over.

Two halves: the swirling reddish yolk reminded me
of my grandfather, like an embryo, dead
in the middle.  The black crystallized jelly
formed the earth where he lays buried.

3.
The barrio men tied the goat to a wooden fence,
a spotted, bleating kid with stumps for horns.
We split sapling acacia branches to feed it,
the animal chewing sideways like an old man.

The men returned and a fire was blazing nearby.
They forced a bottle of vinegar into the goat's mouth,
the beast suckling, swallowing gurgles of venom,
then another, until it was drunk, maniacal, limp.

Then the bolo knife plunged smoothly, penetrating
the fur, caressing the skin and throat into blood letting.
The men hauled the dead mass over the flames,
doused it into the boiling water, lifted it, its hair
molting prematurely, as if the beast confused its seasons.

4.
I traveled here among the acacia trees to mourn the deaths:
the pigeon swallowed by a snake, the withered sunflower,
the burnt forest, the murdered goat,
the stray dog which choked on a bone,
the swan that lost its feathers,
the pearl necklace, the ivory pendant,
all the white horses,
the drowned child crossing this rapid river,
the disbeliever who slept under a mango tree, the death tree,
the disappearance of the moon, the sinking of the sun,
the hushed deaths of my misbegotten grandfathers,
and with them, charred pieces of my mother, dead,
petrified pieces of the deaths of my father, adrift.

 

II.
Death was a silence that gave back no answer.
~ Marjorie Kinan Rawlings

When I was twelve, my father's father died
of a heart attack, a quiet passing,
he slipped away in his sleep, disturbing no one.

His funeral was a lush, three-day affair.
The open casket, in the ylang-ylang scented room,
seemed to create the orbits we voyaged.

Despite the merriment outside, the men drinking,
playing mahjongg, the women in black laughing,
the children running along dragging a chicken by its tail,
and me, my mouth stained red sucking on salted plums,

I was drawn to the wooden coffin and my grandfather
in it, a dried seed.  I rustled into the room and saw
my father before the dead.  Standing by his side,
I looked up to his eyes, like two full moons.

From the poetry collection “Imago” by Joseph O. Legaspi (CavanKerry, 2007).

© Joseph O. Legaspi

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