"A POETICS OUT OF TIME, MARCH 2020," by Eileen R. Tabios

 To my sorrow, I’ve been writing poems
the entirety of my writing life
on the collapse of language--

I camouflage my subversions
under theories of poetics
responding to colonialism replacing

my mother tongue with English:
Thus, I fashionably cited surrealism,
abstraction, the collage of found texts…

to remain stubborn against
narrative for the anguish inflicted
by invaders, the latest being China

who literally exports truck loads
of earth from Philippine land
to create false islands for gambling

dens atop an oceanic territory
it stripped of fish and polluted
with exported waste (perhaps

in exchange for decades
of receiving shipping fleets
of the world’s garbage)--

Now, as the Corona virus spreads--
Corona offers $10 million to rename
                   it “Bud Light Virus”--

I grieve again over the poem’s power
to foretell, to gather what stains
the air until it alchemizes into the clarity

of blown-up, detailed scenes
gleaned through the polished lens
of a psychological microscope--

I fold into a fetal position against

my new mattress of toilet paper rolls
speechless like a baby who cannot
communicate except for the presence

or absence of tears. Photographs
reveal that the image of a dried tear
shows similar passages of erosion

as have etched earth for years. “Amazing
how the patterns of nature seem so
similar, regardless of scale,” notes

the photographer Rose-Lynn Fisher. Anguish
begets the same images of branched crystals
whether from dried tears that formed

in moments or from the consistent deterioration
of a terrain over prolonged passages of time
“as though each tear is a microcosm of

collective human experience, like one drop
of an ocean,” says Fisher. If a poet presents
Fisher’s observation to you, Reader, unmitigated

by “art,” is the poem more effective? Any
fetal position I undertake is metaphorical--
should I forego metaphor as if language suffices?

I still want to know
though now I know
I will never overcome


N.B.:
References to Rose-Lynn Fisher from “The Microscopic Structures of Dried Human Tears” by Joseph Stromberg, Smithsonian Magazine, Nov. 19, 2013
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Eileen R. Tabios has released about 60 collections of poetry, fiction, essays, and experimental biographies from publishers in ten countries and cyberspace. Most recently, she released a short story collection, PAGPAG: The Dictator’s Aftermath in the Diaspora and a poetry collection, The In(ter)vention of the Hay(na)ku: Selected Tercets 1996-2019. Her writing and editing works have received recognition through awards, grants and residencies. More information is available at http://eileenrtabios.com