The summer of invisibly yours
There are any number of quotes or excerpts of verses that can be lifted from Cesar Ruiz Aquino’s definitive collection of poetry, Shadow of the Wind (Pawn Press, Cebu 2025), 121 poems handpicked by the Dumaguete-based recluse in the span of roughly seven decades in the business of writing, which includes wrestling with the muses and other assorted demons of his subconscious.
In Ruiz Aquino’s almost occult approach to the craft, poetry comes across as some form of cabala, to be read with utmost care to get the full benefits, in the process reveal aspects not only of the poet but of the reader herself, and it is not to be taken lightly that they are at times one and the same.
Shadow of the Wind was launched quietly earlier in the year at an even quieter bookshop in the city of gentle people, since designated city of literature by the UNESCO, but maybe we are getting ahead of the story because the author himself was a no-show, a prisoner of love and other shadows in his place in Taclobo going into the interior, searching perhaps for a good enough view of Cuernos de Negros.
Many’s a time he may have been forsaken as that Paul Simon song goes, which could explain his moniker Sawi, then again there are many recognizable personalities, a few likely tipsy with bahalina, stepping out of his fiction or vice-versa, archetypes suddenly finding themselves in the midst of plot, conflict, setting in a narrative that has no beginning, middle, or end.
Which is just as well, as there are scarcely random quotes to be found in this random review, if review it can be called, written at break of day after intermittent bouts of insomnia, sleepwalking, semiconscious snoring during halftime of a Champions League game over cable TV.
Maybe what we can do is tap from the bulbiferous blurbs on the back cover written mostly by his cohorts in the generation of beat, James Dean, not necessarily lost.
“Cesar Ruiz Aquino is a unique poet, and his respect for the craft is incalculable,” writes Wilfredo Pascua Sanchez from Chicago, don’t know whether sox or cubs. “It is your gift, Seraph, to love purely without object, without subject, without fear, without end,” says Erwin Castillo, whose novel The Firewalker has an afterword by Ruiz Aquino in one of its reprints.
You can turn to any page in Shadow of the Wind and be enamored of found verse, indeed a poetic crashing by design, like an abat playing a transistor radio on the second floor very near a chico tree, or how the omnipresent boulevard gives birth to other boulevards and piers in the city of pedicabs and the smell of lomboy cigarettes, aka tinigol.
“In some imagined place you stand/Where the street goes blind/Dressed in red in the early moon/At five in the afternoon” (verse 1 from “Pilgrim Fruit”)
In December we visited him before his birthday, before Christmas, brought him some fruitcake from Mary Grace and a T-shirt bought at a Muslim stall along Boni Avenue, which read Penguin, surely pirated but this did not make him less a Penguin author.
“…hadn’t ‘moon above’ become ‘moon/below?’ as I wrote elsewhere, ‘On the moon/there is no moon!’ No imagination/can fathom the fact, we are phantoms, son.” (Last lines, “To Juan at the Full Moon”)
His daughter Michelle was supervising the building of an annex behind the main house in Taclobo, a few paces away from the chico tree under which a nipa shed shadowed a chessboard, presently without pieces except for a cat named Strider gamboling about.
“The stars fell, the sea traveled. A spider/wove patterns to a somnambular/insomniac’s steps as he dreamed.” (from “Jerahmeel”)
I remember first reading that poem as a story that appeared in Expressweek magazine eons ago, the genres blurred in a crossover dribble— nothing new with the author, might say it comes with the territory, like a fool playing hopscotch and wearing a dolt’s grin. Only the grin has lost its dentures.
“This much we know: there is life in the egg before/it is hatched. Before it is laid. Is there, as well/terror, horror perhaps, a silence at its core/that is not silence, as eggshell shatters eggshell?” (from “The Terrible Love of War”)
In the city of literature the literature festival was held in April, so hot and humid you could almost disappear, well and good, and not two months later the famed workshop, and an oldtimer once lamented that the workshop has been the main thing, not the writers who make the workshop, which is a pity. But here comes Strider.
“Me, I may never see Finland,/Iceland, Ireland, Greenland/let alone a world in a grain of sand/but to see a grain of sand in the world/…why that’s just as marvelous.” (from “River Islander”)
