Carlos A. Angeles

Selected Poems

All the time I was talking as if you were listening

to hear these words spoken in a coil of tongues:
these words that spool off from eddies of fluxing
winds, the cruxes of water in air involute.

In minor hands these words construct assemblage
from inferior earth amphoras to hold in water
sprung from a weight of hidden springs

II.

All day burning letters of exquisite speeches.

Oratorios in a chaos of tongues lift from the fire
of their being, like the resolute anguish
of lost souls in the purging cells in hereafter.

And cellos and bassoons in discordance repeat
words that I speak, their dark syllables repeating
a spoilage of echoes in the void. Muted. Unheard.

--Carlos A. Angeles

Light Invested

The dark which canopies the dawning skies
To be ripped in a flood of morning light.

This brittle startle which seals and reaps the eyes'
Slept wonders. Core of the sky's most intense.

This sun that bowers pure beneficence
Whose living heat pours out in silence stark

As in the scattered morning flight of larks
Who shadow silence in their skyward thrust:

As in the the silent scrawls of light abrupt
That stricken thunders in the dark of night.

--Carlos A. Angeles

My grandson, Jet, who is all of five,
comes home to unload the weight of lessons
learned from his kindergarten class,
the way he unloads the colors in his crayon box
down splat onto the writing table
where he can not wait
to draw a tree. He starts
to gather the colors in disarray
and compose a winter tree
whose curlicues of leaves
curve up like winged pagoda eaves
on which he mounts the patience of
a slew of hand-shaped tinted globes
in variegated hues
of yellow, orange, silver, red and blue,
strung up like lanterns lighting up the tree
and glittering down around
the pyramiding greenery.

On top of the tree he tacks on a star
to burn a beacon homing for the Holy Night.

Bottom of the page he roots his tree
and scrawls a stubby hand
to validate the masterpiece.

He hopefully scans around
beyond the room's disorder
but discovers no space that can hold his art.

Whether he ponders this
perplexed or unpleased
he pauses but a moment;
then nudges a secret smile to show
that now he knows that he can do.

He moves out of the light to where I sit
bearing an instant gift.

"This is your tree," he says.
"I hung stuff on it."

....the yellow of amarillo yellow bells
and the scarlet of bougainvillea;
the blue ocean riding to its tidal froth
and the orange daybreak in the sundered skies;
the silver of the moon in its fullest bloom
and the shining Star of our dual ancestry....

....hang and glow on this precious tree.

And I rise to generosity lifting in his hands.

--Carlos A. Angeles

copyright 1994 by Author

MOURN

I read he Primer with impeccable preciseness
of how the finicky little Red Hen found rice
but found no help she needed to plant her grains--
not from the cat, the goose, the pig. "Not I,"
they said and walked away. At age seven
and in school for the first grade,
I wore a mameluko outfit every day,
a drip, my friend Augusto Reyes said I was,
reminding me half a century later
that nevertheless
I was the first and only one in class who read.
Was I?

But I remember our teacher Miss Pamintuan
who dressed in irreproachable white
the whole year through
one extraordinary day in October
clothed herself in mourning black,
but wore her sackcloth
like a coffin sheath of dead air
that shielded her from ominous movements
beyond the classroom,
the while we sang to the upbeat of our
learning song:

"Guavas are ripe, guavas are ripe
the mayas cried one day..."

but then, just around the bend
where the town hall and churchyard meet
a brass band in all sonorousness
marched to a fleet of mourners down the street.

It was her mother's hearse
pushing on its way to burial at the edge of town--
but it detoured
and entered our collective consciousness
because Miss Pamintuan
opened the classroom's galvanized iron door
to hide inside a triangle of darkness there
herself and her stifled weeping
which surged into one loud mourning howl
then stopped up--
returning us to a prior moment
far from dark funerals and strains sepulchral
dying down the distance to the edge of town

I remember that, after a while,
Miss Pamintuan led us back
and restored the chorus of guavas
ripe for the maya birds.

--Carlos A. Angeles

*mameluko--child's dress with upper and pants parts connected

copyright 1994 by Author

for Kerima

A pocket of space
this barren air
of sunlessness
with his soul
leaning on my heart...

I did not see him die
I only felt
and smelled beginning earth

Imagine spore
the essence of it
down drifting in the darkling night.

--Carlos A. Angeles

copyright by Author

A Burial