Drivers at the Short-Time Motel

by Gloria, Eugene (Author)

• ISBN13: 9780140589252
• ISBN10: 0140589252
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2000-06-01
• Publisher: Penguin (Non-Classics)

Summary

Ephemeral lives, and souls lost in the tattered fabric of war, displacement, and ruined love find hope, redemption, and a common voice in Eugene Gloria's artful concoction of American and Filipino vernaculars. While some of these thirty poems deal with the landscape and folkways of contemporary Filipinos, others locate themselves on the streets and byways of present-day America. Like many poets of dual heritage, Gloria's work is concerned with self-definition, with the attempt to reconcile a feeling of exile and homelessness. Frequently taking the form of character studies and first-person narratives, Gloria's poems poignantly illuminate the common man's search for connection to the self and to the world. " Eugene Gloria's Drivers at the Short-Time Motel is propelled by an imagistic sincerity and paced lyricism. Each poem seems to embody the plain-spoken as well as the embellishments that we associate with classical and modern Asian poetry. Though many of the poems address the lingering hurt of cultural and economic imperialism, worlds coexist in the same skin through magical imagery. Gauged by a keen eye, history is scrutinized, but through a playful exactness. These wonderful poems are trustworthy." -- Yusef Komunyaaka

Author Biography

Eugene Gloria teaches at DePauw University in Greencastle, Indiana.

Table of Contents

I
In Language	3	(1)
Mauricio's Song	4	(2)
White Blouses	6	(1)
Winter Fires	7	(2)
Saint Joe	9	(2)
Subic Bay	11	(1)
Ruin	12	(2)
``Where the Feeble Senses Fail''	14	(2)
Song of the Pillar Woman	16	(3)
The Maid	19	(2)
The Driver Conrado's Penitent Life	21	(2)
Drivers at the Short-Time Motel	23	(2)
The House in San Miguel	25	(4)
II
For the Dead and What's Inside Us	29	(2)
On Mission Road	31	(2)
Iron Man	33	(2)
Milkfish	35	(1)
The Whisper	36	(3)
Nocturne: Two Versions	39	(3)
Sisters of the Poor Clares	42	(1)
Pan de Sal	43	(1)
Elegy for No One	44	(5)
III
Palawan	49	(2)
Rizal's Ghost	51	(2)
News of Pol Pot's Capture	53	(2)
Sweet Talk	55	(2)
Palm Sunday	57	(2)
Carlos Bulosan	59	(3)
White Flower	62	(3)
The Buick	65

Excerpts

Chapter One

    In Language

After we make love, I teach you

words I'm slowly forgetting,

names for hands, breast, hair, and river.

And in the telling, I find myself

astonished, recalling the music

in my grandmother's words

before she left this world--

words you don't forget, like a mandate

from heaven. She said, It's in the act

of cleansing that we kill the spirit--

ourselves; every culture's worst enemy

is its own people.

And so I teach you, to remind

myself what it means when I say,

hali ka rito , come here, tell me

the names for ocean, stars, river,

and sun--and you tell me

what you remember from the moments

in which the telling arose. You say

hair instead of river; you say breasts

instead of hands; you say

cock and cunt

instead of moon, sea, and stars.

    Mauricio's Song

From Mobil Gas he emerges

like a Mack truck from the desert horizon.

You might think of bluefin tunas

coursing the algid sea.

A man with a singular purpose

always walks with his best foot forward--

leans into dusk, moon heavy on his back.

Mauricio has punched out at the station.

If you happen to see him

you might remark on the butterflies--

the small cloud of yellow, speckled wings

fluttering like wayward kites around him.

You might even reconsider

your faith in miracles,

your capacity

to comprehend the mystery.

You could be going to the market

and have already made a list.

You could be as still as a tinsel tree

illuminated by a spinning color wheel

in a room of immobile silhouettes.

You could have your face

pressed against the windowpane--

your chest, a bodiless blouse

and puffy as our Winter faces.

You could be standing in a living room

full of boxes with your fears in tight little bundles.

You could be Mauricio Babilonia

on his way to a rendezvous, his hands

cracked and stained with axle grease,

black as the night gathering at his feet.

And butterflies, impossible and constant,

brushing against his cheeks

like a hundred kisses, the papery wings

of golden monarchs calligraphed

with untranslatable sonnets for one Mauricio Babilonia

on his way to meet his love behind a wall

he will climb, but not fast enough

for the bullet that would seek out his heart.

    White Blouses

When the soul selects her own society ,

she gathers herself like mist

from the rain-drenched earth.

She goes to Texas, orders a steak

with eggs and coffee, drives

a turquoise Cadillac heading for the gulf.

The angels of morphia want to make a home

in the dark cave of the soul's mouth,

they want to crawl

inside a word, which looks more like a road

covered with snow.

Once the soul lay down

on the snow to sleep. She was naked,

weary of making.

Her mouth is pumice white--

not snow, not Hiroshima ash--

but white as a room hoarding all

the neighborhood light,

white as a line of limbless blouses

and bedsheets running through the bluffs

beneath a pale Nebraska sky

where a girl with scoliosis shakes--

working a Hula-Hoop,

like light dancing through a painted window.

    Winter Fires

Winter nights in our neighborhood

you can hear the fire engines' wail

clear through the rib cage of every cramped apartment

with at least one space heater set too high.

The village idiots have given up,

tucked in moist blankets.

They've bought this night on credit

beneath great archways of apathetic buildings

with names fat with purchase

like Pillsbury, Madison, and Sutro.

We are recovering from Consumer Credit Counseling.

Our overspent lives read like a broadsheet of debits.

We've been told our future lies in Default, Pennsylvania--

in some trailer park with barking dogs

and corpses of old Chevies.

Could be worse. We could be like our fathers.

Or our great-grandfathers the good children bailed out

time and again from debtors' prison.

The old in our building are prisoners of good manners.

Besides being foolish for not wanting to leave

when the firemen finally came.

They hemmed and hawed, fought with our super.

The weaker ones, those who could no longer fight,

wept beneath their doorways and soaked

their sticky carpets with crocodile tears

when our super ordered all of us

to abandon our homes.

That night the cold swept across our slippered feet,

the fire engines warm and still, their fat hoses

uncoiling from the giant metal spool

as my anthemless neighbors and I stood

clutching our secret possessions pressed

against our breasts as if we were all

pledging allegiance to some cruel god

who stole us away from happy sleep.

Saint Joe

   after James Wright

When the choppers churned and swayed

the swift brown current like a field of cogon grasses,

we dropped a rope below,

but the native girl, no older than my daughter,

was too weak to hold on, and let go.

We had to leave her to refuel, though we knew

what the river would do. When my duty was up,

I chose to come here, for humid sheets over bamboo beds,

for some honey in a slip--

a ninety-pound rice cooker named Ronda

and the soap dance she's known to do. But hardly for love,

as I wait with this man bent in my arms.

When the Coca-Cola truck hit this pedicab driver,

you could see his rubber slippers fly

all the way up to the second-floor window.

His body thrown five meters from his cab.

I imagine the Lord Jesus descending from his cross,

a good marine saving the dead in limbo.

But on this god-forgotten street a crowd gathers,

crows peck and gawk, and name me "Joe."

Their faces tell a separate story, each one

ending with the sweet by-and-by, like the girl

whose hands slipped at the end of my rope

dancing above the fury of a bloated river.

A man in a suit slouches off, whistles for a cab;

a flotilla of rubber slippers converges on a two-inch lake of rain.

A pair of white hands, mine, reach for his limp body.

And from the swollen streets, an ambulance calls,

draws closer, louder. And I hold on,

listen to children chant "Joe" in the rain.

    Subic Bay

At 12, Lita acts Imeldific .

She bats her eyelashes, waxes her lips,

and examines the arc of her mouth

when she says Oh .

Her black hair falls over one eye

as she dances on a platform

above a sailor from Norfolk, Virginia,

who will not recognize the hopscotch girl

at the elementary school by the PX.

These night streets are lit by fluorescent

fog lights from platinum jeeps within

a strip, which resembles the flash

of a pinball machine. Street vendors

clang their wares, jarheads in loud

short-sleeved shirts careen toward massage

parlors with two-way mirrors,

women in heavy makeup

wait in well-worn dresses.

In a nightclub, Lita worries

about tomorrow's lesson when

she must conjugate the verb

to be .

    Ruin

My beautiful, unlucky brother is a deadbeat,

a scofflaw, a veteran of foreign wars.

When the Vietcong god sent him back to us,

my mother prayed to the Virgin

in repentance for her threat to disown him

when he considered Canada instead of the draft.

In Khe Sanh my brother bivouacked through rice paddies,

though I picture him in rubber slippers

along rice terraces in the Ifugao,

in villages beneath a corrugated sky.

When darkness shut into the dark,

he spied the enemy through his nightscope,

marching like a trail of black ants,

loaded down with light

mortars, scant provisions, and their wounded.

After his tour,

I found a snapshot I wasn't supposed to see--

a captive boy, his ankles held up

by a smiling soldier while another is slicing off his balls.

When my brother had arrived at his manhood,

he called me. It was after the neighborhood boys

gathered before Goteng, a part-time

healer and collector of discarded glass.

Circumcised, my brother, slumped on his bed,

his cock wrapped in guava leaf, and bleeding.

In his hand was a gift, the blue marble,

the one he named the Conqueror .

Once there was a bridge

that sagged to the river and beckoned him

to drown with all his gear.

And all the women he had ever loved

would take up his bags and bless his failures,

unpack his last clean shirts--white

like his mestizo skin and delicate as his sisters'.

Beautiful, unlucky brother,

sleepwalking amid the ruins, I call

you back to your desires

along the rim of terraces, back

to the shallow water flourishing with young rice.

(Continues...)