After the Rain 3: Poems from the Paintings of Lina Llaguno Ciani

Six Fifty-Nine PM, oil on canvas, 100x60cm

Tree Tanaga #3

Grace visits us like moths and leaves,
The rain drumming on roof and eaves.
Always, God has something up His sleeve:
Mists and colors after nature grieves.

We come to one of the last of a series on that rare (for me and any other poet, I suppose) occasion when one is asked to write poems on somebody’s paintings and read the same during the art show opening itself. One is honored by the request from an artist who is—apologies for bringing this up—my senior in the craft, as well as in artistic experience. Indulge me some more, although a promise is a promise.

It has been an experience, as has been obvious the way I’ve narrated it in the last postings, the reading and writing. I was facing “real,” “live” and contemporary paintings by a living artist (different from our ekphrastic exercises on, say Luna, Hidalgo, Delacroix, or even the late lamented Santi Bose), as exciting, indeed, as when I first encountered Alfredo “Ding” Roces’ paintings on his blog and furiously tapping away at the keyboard, or when I saw Delotavo's huge canvas of the Filipino diaspora at a group exhibit. I was discovering a new territory, a “scaffolding,” as they say now, with which to build new poems, and a slightly different poetic. Ekphrasis, of course, had been invented or defined, by the Greeks, but doing it in our own contemporary time on the works of living artists, is another thing. Thanks and thanks again to Lina LLaguno Ciani and to Galleria Duemila and its owner Silvana Diaz, for welcoming me and my poetry into a live gallery (quite different from a color plate in an art book).

Why all this fuss about art and painting? (Of course we're always "fussing" about art, and if they’re like Ciani’s art, all the more.) Painting and poetry have always been called the sister arts in classicism. Horace said “ut pictura poesis,” as is painting so is poetry (which I’ve made into a motto of my other blog and ezine, poets’picturebook), and closer to home: I’ve always thought I’d be a painter when I was this big, before poetry seized me, and when I was gawking at my (late) eldest brother doing his boards of frames and talk balloons for the komiks (he was a paid dibuhista for some time). I drew and wrote my own comic books. I went from Superman and Batman and the Justice League to Sci-Fi and Heavy Metal and, well, I somehow gave up comic books for books, pictures for words, along the way, though not completely. It never stopped. I still stop at the new, pricey, and cultic comic book shops (or illustrated novels, as they call them now), I still gawk at art exhibits.

So, here they are. This may be the penultimate post of series, as I might have to reserve a long poem for a separate post (it needs some some work since there are lot of indentions among the the verse lines.) To remind readers, the first post on Ciani’s art was my own review of the show, the second a society page of sorts (beautiful people coming to the show and, in the process, listening to my poetry), and now, for my blog readers, esp. Bikolanos (because this is about us): with their respective paintings, the poems.








Eastern Wind,oil on canvas, 70x100cm

Blue

Across the grass nothing is blue,
Nothing and the feel of nothing,
The nothing we are brothers to,
That will slay us in our sleeping.

Cirilo F. Bautista

Desiring
God is transparent blue—the color

Which makes our souls visible.


Marjorie Evasco


Is this the river or the ocean?
Where is the garden?

Whose blue is this?
Not the fisherman’s blue
Where he casts his net
To haul in his blessings.

What blue is this?
Not the kingfisher’s blue
Whose wing is made of sky,
Not the soul’s blue
That makes him visible,
If God were looking.

Whose whites are these?
Where is the altar
That shall receive these
Votive stems, these
Unsullied petals?

There is only the blue
Of wind and dark water
Rising:

The ocean is a river,
There is no garden.

Tree#1, oil on canvas, 90x100cm

Tree Tanaga #1

In purple air everything swirls,
Life hangs or clings like eggs or pearls;
What wing or claw can brave the storm,
Man curls under roots: piteous worm.

After November,oil on canvas, 70x95cm

Apáy Leaf

There is a pool below
The leaf left by either flood

Or tears. Even in mud
It catches the limpid droplet

Become a gem as it slid
Down the leaf’s velvet skin.

Taste lingers: Noons of
Rice and coconut milk,

Tang of dried fish stirred
Into the thick stew of leaves,

And the sudden epiphany
Of spice on the tongue…

Beauty,
Bruised and smudged, still
Resides in the blood-caked

Sod mixed with sand
Left by the river choked

With boulders spilling down
The Volcano’s slope.

Life,
Shedding a pellucid tear,
Sprouts like a hear-shaped

Leaf.

Tree#2, oil on canvas, 90x100cm

Tree Tanagà #2

Stripped of bark, the old life lingers,
Its branches a-flutter with green.
The new one sleeps in its chamber,
And soon will wake to tangerine.

NOTES
Apáy. Taro, gabi, Colocasia esculenta
Tanagà. A traditional Tagalog verse form of four rhymed lines of seven or eight syllables each.