Poets Simeon Jr. and wife Milagros Dumdum at Oakridge Pavilion, Cebu
PORTABLE MAGIC
‘Book Haul’ by Cecil Robin Singalaoa, watercolor on cotton rag paper, 2020, 4×6 inches
The poetry collections Dog Songs by Mary Oliver and Moving with Moonrise, Haibuns by Ma. Milagros T. Dumdum came to me as gifts over the long holidays—from the Christmas season to Valentine’s. They’ve rested on my bedside table ever since. My evening ritual has become to read a poem to close my day, alternating between Mary, the lover of mutts in particular and nature in general, and Milagros or Gingging, the celebrator of the quotidian.
Forgive me if I sound as though as I were that familiar with the two poets who I am proceeding to refer to by their first names. But such is Mary’s companionship that through her selected poems, compiled in Devotions (Penguin Press, 2017), I am daily refreshed in my view of the world—from paying attention to bird song to humorously considering my bloated body.
In I Worried, she opens the stanza: “I worried a lot. Will the garden grow, will the rivers / flow in the right direction, will the earth turn / as it was taught, and if not, how shall / I correct it?”
If you’re an incorrigible worrier like I am, Mary’s lines strike a chord. She goes on: “Is my eyesight fading or am I just imagining it, / am I going to get rheumatism, / lockjaw, dementia? / Finally I saw that worrying had come to nothing. / And gave it up. And took my old body / and went out into the morning / and sang.” There is that prose-like opening, then she concludes with a one-two punch of poetic truth.
If you are, like me, a reader also of Indices of Titles, of First and Last Lines, the exercise feels like stumbling upon found poems in themselves. Such is my regard for this Pulitzer Prize winner that I am reduced to oooh’s and ahhh’s over an opening line like “If there is a life after the earth-life, will you come with me?,” and I have this sudden thought, “I wish I had written that!”
It’s a thought that recurs with Dog Songs and Gingging’s latest collection following Falling on Quiet Water, The Feel of Light Rain and The Sigh of a Hundred Leaves, a collaboration with poet husband Simeon Jr.
Would that the time my husband and I spend with our retriever Satchi yields a bucket of words like Mary poured on her Percy, so named after the Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. She takes turns narrating from the dog’s viewpoint or from her own. She talks about how the dog once ate her copy of the Bhagavad Gita, a fortunate happenstance because many copies of it are still available.
Because it was that, of all books, that Percy ate, the poet and her human companion tap “his wild, curly head and say, / ‘Oh, wisest of little dogs.’”
The book is interspersed with some black and white illustrations of Mary’s pets by John Burgoyne. It is also unusually laid out in such a way that the pictures fall on the left side, wherever they’re available, and the text on the right page. So sometimes there are blank pages on the left. Does one scribble one’s passing thoughts on those blanks?
Anyone who has or had a dog (or other familiar) in one’s life should get a copy of Dog Songs—for the simplicity of the words, for the comfort they bring, especially if one is grieving for a lost or dead dog, for the answers to Mary’s questions: “What would the world be like without music or rivers or the green and tender grass? What would this world be like without dogs?”
Published by Ateneo de Manila University Press, Gingging’s 56 haibuns combine prose and haiku. As her fellow poet and University of the Philippines Tacloban Prof. Merlie Alunan explains in The Alchemy of Moonrise, the haibun “may be a prose description of a specific experience. It may tell a story or describe a place.” What follows this prose section is a haiku or 17-syllable poem.
The retired Dumdum couple of Cebu is said to spend their afternoons in a café with tall glass windows and from there they watch the ships in the port city pass by. They sometimes or maybe often do their writing there and then.
Gingging’s Haibun No. 8 is quoted in full:
Of an afternoon by the sea in Cebu, when the remaining daylight still offers ample time for a pizza dip, a strawberry smoothie, and some conversation, writing becomes irresistible, especially when nothing blocks the view through the glass wall, allowing one a delightful perspective of the outside.
Seen from a building—
The ship appears, disappears
Column to column
And what can be more every day than the sight of early-morning cyclists and joggers? In Haibun No. 9, the poet writes:
We are at our favorite dessert café beside the Mactan Channel. Cyclists and joggers at the coastal road take their breakfast here, something we haven’t tried, as we are not exactly early risers however inviting the sea breeze might be. But I can imagine the saltiness of it all.
Cyclists and joggers—
at a seaside restaurant,
sweating, sipping tea
The books are available through empirebookstore.org, Amazon.com, the Ateneo University Press Bookshop in Bellarmine Hall and the press’ official Lazada and Shopee stores.
