by Ramil Digal Gulle
Somewhere up a mountain, inside a cheap hotel,
the breath of pine that was green when invisible candy puffs
in each young writer's earlobe-cool Baguio cool-was ignored.
When each poem lay there, legs spread-pinned arms, perverse
cruciform X. Everyone had glass-shard, scalpel, post-mortem
lower lip quiver of craftsmanship's class. Voodoo dissection inter-
stitial orbit of learning's erotic machete curve. Beauty. That's
what they're being taught to accomplish. Truth-telling. Somewhere
they brought out the objective-correlative, eventually. It looked like
an old, foot-long rubber sausage. Young writers all around squeezed,
rubbed and stroked it. One of the old writers took it by one end,
made a grand gesture of a job blowing it, twisted it into a
pretzel of air and let it float, bounce about the workshop hall.
That was the day's form and content. The next day's assignment?
Catch a metaphor, alive if possible.
Not easy because the slippery
things kept changing shape, from cobra to tin can to toothy vagina.
For the first time, I wasn't listening. I wasn't
teaching. I didn't care about craft anymore.
I was thinking of the Baguio woodcarver, sitting on a wicker chair,
who stomped his foot, sending a cloud of red earth flying
about us. He told me: I was a guitarmaker in Cebu. I once made
a special guitar with strings made from my wife's hair. Hair I collected
the seven years we were married, collected because I loved her.
Then I hated my wife, and I made the guitar. He brought the guitar
out and played it for me. The fog was creeping towards our feet, its
whiteness broken by long streaks of red earth, threads of bloody spittle.
And I heard a young woman's voice singing:
Ask him what happened. Ask. Ask him what happened to me.
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