2008 WINNER OF MERITAGE PRESS ANNUAL HOLIDAY FILIPINO POETRY CONTEST CONTEST

Letras y Figuras
By Rodrigo V. Dela Peña Jr.


Their names are a kind of narrative

though imagined, the way history
                                    unfolds

                        before the page.
Before the canvas the letters
                                    shape the scenes—

                                    fin de siècle
settings and measured gesturings.

            *

                                    JOSE FERCED
Y TEMPRADO, BALVINO MAURICIO…
                        Who is to say

                                    the dead
tell no stories? In the afterlife

                                                they long to be
and be remembered.

Who can tell if the dead make

            up lies?

                    *

                                    T is a man
with a sugarcane upon his shoulders,

C a languid mother
                                    carrying a baby.

                        To be burdened
by one thing

            or another, a lifetime's

                                    occupation—
the loop of P a weathered face, wrinkled
                        as dry earth.

                    *

Out of this silence:

                                    cockcrow,
gossipy chatter, gossamer music
                        stirring the air.

If you listen closely, you will hear
                        
secret

                                    conversations.

                    *

                                    Letter
                        by ornate letter,

the wor(l)d is represented.

                    *

                        How to describe without
description, how to paint a portrait

                                    without
the subject's image. There is

something to be gleaned from this: the real
                                    resists

                        to be
                                    represented.

                    *

                                    Interspersed
between figures, between letters

                        are vines and shrubs,
                                    sprawling

tropical flora. And in all
                        this labored realism,

                        the obsessive attention
                                    to detail,
the letters themselves

            appear almost incidental.

                    *

Almost. Their names are still out-
                                    lined,

                        epitaphs
                                    of the upper class:

WILLIAM P. PIERCE, FRANCISCO
                        GARCIA ORTIZ.

                        They know how
the equatorial heat and monsoon rains
                                    afflict us with

                        amnesia.

                    *

And now this fate more than

                        a century hence:
                                    to be housed

in a museum or private
                                    collection;

                                    to be recognized
extant, time's only surviving
                        form. Let this

                        fiction of a past
                                    be memory.


+++++++++
(Note: "Letras y Figuras," which literally means letters and figures, was a popular art form in the Philippines from the late 19th to the early 20th centuries. Rendered using watercolor on brown paper, it depicts tableaus of ordinary Filipino scenes, with letters of the patron's name cleverly formed to mimic human figures engaged in various activities.)