In his prize-winning poetry collection Reliquaria, R. A. Villanueva embraces liminal, in-between spaces in considering an ever-evolving Filipino American identity. Languages and cultures collide; mythologies and faiths echo and resound. Part haunting, part prayer, part prophecy, these poems resonate with the voices of the dead and those who remember them. In this remarkable book, we enter the vessel of memory, the vessel of the body. The dead act as witness, the living as chimera, and we learn that whatever the state of the body, this much rings true: every ode is an elegy; each elegy is always an ode.
In his prize-winning poetry collection Reliquaria, R. A. Villanueva embraces liminal, in-between spaces in considering an ever-evolving Filipino American identity. Languages and cultures collide; mythologies and faiths echo and resound. Part haunting, part prayer, part prophecy, these poems resonate with the voices of the dead and those who remember them. In this remarkable book, we enter the vessel of memory, the vessel of the body. The dead act as witness, the living as chimera, and we learn that whatever the state of the body, this much rings true: every ode is an elegy; each elegy is always an ode.
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Overview
In his prize-winning poetry collection Reliquaria, R. A. Villanueva embraces liminal, in-between spaces in considering an ever-evolving Filipino American identity. Languages and cultures collide; mythologies and faiths echo and resound. Part haunting, part prayer, part prophecy, these poems resonate with the voices of the dead and those who remember them. In this remarkable book, we enter the vessel of memory, the vessel of the body. The dead act as witness, the living as chimera, and we learn that whatever the state of the body, this much rings true: every ode is an elegy; each elegy is always an ode.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780803276505 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Nebraska |
| Publication date: | 09/01/2014 |
| Series: | The Raz/Shumaker Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 80 |
| File size: | 379 KB |
About the Author
R. A. Villanueva was born in New Jersey and lives in Brooklyn. His honors include the 2013 Ninth Letter Literary Award for poetry and fellowships from Kundiman and the Asian American Literary Review. His writing has appeared in Virginia Quarterly Review, AGNI, Bellevue Literary Review, and elsewhere. A founding editor of Tongue: A Journal of Writing & Art, he teaches at New York University.
Read an Excerpt
Reliquaria
By R. A. Villanueva
UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA PRESS
Copyright © 2014 Board of Regents of the University of NebraskaAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8032-7650-5
CHAPTER 1
From the beginning it has been end-conjuring. José García Villa, Doveglion
Swarm
We were well down the ventral axis
when Father Luke noticed. Our cuts
steady through the skin, our scalpels
already through the thin give
of the sternum. With each bullfrog
pinned to its block and double-
pithed by nail, he had by then
talked us clean through the lungs,
past a three-chambered heart couched
in tissue and vascular dye. We must
have been deeper among the viscera
when he heard us laughing,
not at the swarm of black eggs
spilling from the oviducts to
slime the cuffs of our blazers,
but at a phallus, jury-rigged from
foil and rubber bands hanging off the crucifix,
hovering above a chart of light-
independent reactions. This was nothing
like the boys lowing through recitation
their antiphon for the layman whose wife
we heard was trampled by livestock
over trimester break. Nothing at all
like Sister Mary being made to face
the bathhouse scene from Spartacus in slow-
motion or her freshmen rewinding again
and again stock films of chariot drivers pitched
from their mounts, dragged
to their ends only to float backwards,
hands bound up once more
in the reins. The Dean of Men confessed
he knew of no prayer or demerit
that could redeem such disgrace,
could conceive of no greater sin
against the Corpus. Transgressors, all of you,
he said and closed the door behind him,
refusing to look at us or the thing
that seemed to shimmer and twitch
with each frog's reflex kick against our forceps.
He held us there far beyond
the last bell, waiting for just one among us
to want forgiveness or for a single boy
to take back this mockery of the body
our Lord had made.
Life Drawing
How she is quiet before his robe falls
each week to his ankles. This man who sits, nude
for my wife, whom she draws with Conté sticks
and pastel pencils. Each page in her notebook
is a parade of his torsos, galley proofs
of breastbones and chests. She explains
because these lines are my favorite
and shows me, traces with her knuckle tip
chin to sternum, jaw to shoulder, clavicle to cusp
of the arm. How in three passes
an artist makes a place for a head
to rest. Later, in blue and orange
pigments mixed at the edge of a knife, thinned
with linseed oil and mineral spirits,
my wife will paint him on a canvas
primed black. Again his body will end
just above the pelvis, will fade
into a fog of armrest or shadow, cushion
or hip as if rendered in some fugitive dye.
Because he is only the second man I have seen naked,
in person. His, just the third I have seen in my life.
When I tell my wife I want to write about her
naked, sketch her back's faint taper
as a class might to check perspective, describe
the moles I notice on the underside of a breast
as we make love, she says I can. And, in return,
she will paint the whole of me, bare
from the neck down as I pose
in our living room. No one will even know
this is you. The light will blank out your face.
These Bodies Lacking Parts
With raw sienna crushed by fist
in mortar, umber ground
to tender shadow to flesh,
Michelangelo binds a body,
mid-thrash, to the plaster,
its death flex throwing a heel
into the sheets, a bare arm
up at the drapery tempered
with cochineal red. In this Sistine
pendentive, Judith and her hand-
maid carry the artist's head away
on a dish, buckle at the knee
as if unable to bear fully the weight
of a skull hewn from the whole
of a man. On the mural opposite,
Michelangelo offers his skin
to the Last Judgment, hangs his face
elastic, lacking eyes or mass,
upon a martyr's fingertips. All
around the Redeemer, bodies vault
toward the clamor of heaven, plead
with their thresh and flail to render
themselves apart from the damned,
rowed toward a waiting maw.
* * *
These are the men Vesalius halves
and digs into: criminals fresh
from the Paduan gallows, gifts
of the executioner's axe. Unfolding
the heads of petty thieves, he laces
what nerves and veins he finds
within their sutures into a crown
shooting skyward. He figures
a new man from their bared
tributaries, writes of arteries
as latticework. When the anatomist
poses for his portrait, he instructs
apprentices to draw him directly
from nature, beside a body opened
at the wrist, his fingers gracing
the exposed vessels of the lower arm.
Telemachy
1.
Patron of the head
freed from the neck,
the new year's feasts
and burials,
martyr of good arms
casting their stones,
benefactor of scattered wheals
like lagoons along the thigh,
Saint Telemachus
bleed for us
into the arena floor,
its crushed sand, its lions halved.
2.
After first Communion I pose
by the sacristy, beneath a crucifix
of unfinished pine. I am wearing
a suit that rips at the armpits.
My father parts my hair to the left,
combs through with pomade,
presses down with his palms.
3.
My father never heard
of the Kill Sparrow War
in his province—
Peking boys each morning
called to the nest-trees
with trumpets, their slingshots
aimed at the flocks,
red banners tied
to pots and spits. Knuckle-
bones into eggs, ladles
against prayer bells
and the birds
with nowhere to alight,
all falling from the sky
with little sound,
their hearts damp
fireworks going off
in their chests.
4.
Thoughtful-Telémakhos
knew nothing of scars
or the ramping boar, its tusk
caught in his father's leg,
above the knee just missing
the bone.
What he knows
are tremors.
His father's arms
pressed into his
before the Test.
His father's voice
a black ship
sealed with pitch.
5.
My father and his classmates
liked the air raid drills best
and would cheer the sirens
while they marched single-file
beneath the schoolhouse
posts. He imagined pilots
passing over the Philippine Sea,
scanning the open fields
for resistance, checking masks
for leaks, unable to read him
there in the dirt, flicking
anthills with his fingers,
pulling up grass by its roots.
Like when passing graveyards
We made sure to drive the length of the landfill with the windows shut
and the air circulation off. And each night we passed by these heaps
on the side of the highway afraid of breathing in. Off the muck
there was air Dad promised was safe. There were cattails thick like fingers
from the marsh grass, gulls in riot above the headshunts and exchange tracks.
At first sight of the Meadowlands, we sucked in through our mouths
and pinned our nostrils up with our wrists as long as our lungs could hold,
as though ghosts could seep through the soil, through coffins
and funeral dressings up and free of the sediment into the open sky.
Almost home, my brother told us about the Cemetery of the Holy Sepulchre
cut in half by the Parkway, about the bus driver who paid toll with gaskets
and reminded him to look out both sides, so he knew when it was over.
Fish Heads
Yanked free at the gills from cartilage and spine,
these fish heads my mother cleans, whose bodies she scales, throws
all into salt water and crushed tamarind. At dinner she alone
will spoon out their eyes with her fingers,
suck down each pair as we watch. See, this is why the three of you
could never hide anything from me—as though these organs
brought her sight to be soaked through the tongue.
When I tell her that I have tried to make this stew from memory,
she warns, Don't waste what should be eaten. Reminds me
of every delicate gift we have thrown away: tilapia stomach
best soured with vinegar, milkfish liver to melt
against the dome of the mouth. That after church,
a bucket of chicken soon became a blessing of wing gristle
and skin, dark meat no one else wanted to save. We refused
to taste her gizzards and hearts fried in fat, mocked
the smell of pig blood curdled on the stove, wished gone
her tripe steamed with beef bouillon and onion broth.
After my brother and sister push aside bowls of baby squid
in garlic ink, gag at my mention of ducks in their shells, boiled
alive in brine, my mother believes I was the only one to share
in such things. Which maybe means, she says, in some former life
you and I were seabirds or vampires or wolves.
In Memory of Xiong Huang
who disappeared from Shanghai and whose body,
his brother believes, is now on display in New York City
in an exhibition of plastinated cadavers
In some province a hemisphere from here
you tapped at your grandmother's kneecap, her elbow
crooked in bags of bok choy, bamboo shoots,
and rapeseed oils. You shouldered her skins
of bean curd all the way back to market,
offered coins from your pocket up
toward a farmhand she paltered for bargains.
Of you and that day, your brother remembers
this most: how your diaphragm shook as if sorry
for the quick of her tongue. How each capillary
and joint grieved the reach of her teeth. And he swears
he sees your red wince in the subway ads,
this bus stop poster where you have become a mannequin
of tendons, a mock Thinker pumped with tinctures
and phosphorescent balms, cured,
desiccated in silicon gas. Your flayed fist
against a mandible, your brother lays hands
on your knuckles. He traces aloud
the syllables of your given name. Imagines
the sound of a boy's now ossified heart.
Aftermaths
What the rains bring are trains, shorted, held fast
to bridges between stops, boots, fireworks
called off again. They say the city—mist-
figured, flood-drummed—has wanted this for weeks
and point to maps, cold sweeps, shifting pressure
along the Arthur Kill up and out to
the Sound. But Friday was free of thunder,
wind, downed lines. You smoked on the front stoop
and she walked her dog and I felt a sting
at my shin from the salt and sweat in my
stitches. We talked too long about small things—
prom nights, driftwood, punch lines to jokes poorly
translated—and had to remind ourselves
why we were here. That sky. Your son. Those grins.
* * *
We are here because of that sky, those grins
and grudges our sons will inherit if
not for us. Beneath Chambers the walls
are made with eyes, cracked tesserae of
sight lines dusted gray. Above, my wife walks
to work past picket-men, Gadsden flags, boys
arm in arm, posing beside full-color mock-
ups of Memorial Voids and storey
15 cradled by fog. Everyone stares
at everything else. It is what we know
now, how we tell each other we survive
upright in an America we own.
But suppose I'm given no piece of your
"we," you say—suppose your "home" smacks of war.
* * *
You say: There was no time when home and war
could be kept apart or held untroubled.
Take how each drive out in the Pinelands would
feel like crossing the Mason-Dixon or
how the white kids massed in pickups with their
empties and ropes, barreled into town dead-
set on catching her with him, hand-in-hand.
Now when I think about it, my mother
is who I see. She spent her nights brushing
my hair, tracing my eyes. In the mirror,
she pointed, I named: "black," "almond." Mom made
sure to add "blessed," "lucky," and I believed
her then. I've learned my son is still too young to wonder where we're from or what we are.
* * *
And before you ask: I've learned what we are
is unwanted, marked by sighs and curses
like some new kind of rot. Each summer since
and every floodlit, bone-shaded Never
Forget has arrived dressed with teeth, flags, their
sight of me that night below Myrtle, fists-
in-pockets, unsure of where to run. Boys
that drunk mean what they promise and could care
less about the color of your passport
or where you call home. Fuck remembering
their way. If we let them, soon all we'll have
left are anthems, this looping montage of
eagles and bugles and smoke. Remembering—
I need you to know—takes names, faces ghosts.
* * *
I need you to know I've tried. To name ghosts,
to face them, dark as they are, slurred in with
the city's glossed clots and fresh buttresses,
that earthworks' trill we've let pass for rebirth—
it's to ask mercy from all that survives
us. And, yes, it's how we'll skin their myths, right
those mouths rhyming "bruise" with "brick," "break" with "leave."
Last night, stalled near Rector, I thought about
the sound of particulate matter and
burnt bone upon glass, about my brother
who refuses to shake it off. My hands
fell, emptied. I thought to knuckles, sutures,
"Go Home" cut into cheeks, how—weighted by
their marrow—flightless birds want the sky.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Reliquaria by R. A. Villanueva. Copyright © 2014 Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
Acknowledgments,Sacrum,
Part 1,
Swarm,
Life Drawing,
These Bodies Lacking Parts,
Telemachy,
Like when passing graveyards,
Fish Heads,
In Memory of Xiong Huang,
Aftermaths,
God Particles,
Part 2,
All Souls' Day,
Despedida,
Sacramental,
Socorro,
Blessing the Animals,
Confluences,
Traps,
On Transfiguration,
Divination,
Part 3,
Antipodal,
In the dead of winter we,
Ballast,
As the river crests, mud-rich with forgotten things,
Drifting toward the bottom, Jacques Piccard recalls the sky,
Corpus,
Vanitas,
What the bones tell us,
Iconoclasts,
Invocation,
After this, Loving Kindness and Asanga flew,
Mine will be a beautiful service,
Notes,
About R. A. Villanueva,