TALES

OF THE
SPIDER
WOMAN
.

Woman of many words

She loved him with words, torrential.
She threw the words down from skyscrapers,
cathedral spires, belfries of country churches,
thatched eaves of peasant homes. The words
tumbled and clattered and zoomed and slithered
and flew over tin roofs, tops of trees, umbrellas,
they tickled the ears of children and dogs
and elephants in the zoo, and made them dance
and wriggle and prance, they rained down
on rivers and ponds and oceans, rode
on the backs of turtles and seals, and the whale
heard them and echoed them in arctic waters
cold and deep, and some words fell on the sand
for snails to nibble and crabs to drag to their lairs.

Her words would not stop coming, so now

his ears were full of them, clogging his nose,
cramming his pockets, his shirts ballooned
with them, they squished in his shoes, they littered
his bed, the carpet, the table where he worked,
every cup in his kitchen brimmed with them.
They fell from the trees when he took a walk,
every flower he passed called them out to him,
even the birds could not stop chattering
as they flew from earth to tree to earth again,
the red dragonflies spelled her words in the wind,
and the fireflies blinked them all night long.

Still her words came, an endless joyous rain,

he swam in its flood, he filled his mouth
with them, and still she loved him and loved him,
her words flooded his mind and stole his sleep.

July 19, 2008

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Tales of the Spiderwoman
 Tale of the
Spiderwoman
Pyres of leaves burn away summer.
Cicada shells pile under the marsh grass,
still memorial of seasons past.
I’ve no words for these—
lean boys and slender girls pass by my window
drinking the sun on their golden skin.
Apple-breasted women with melons in their bellies
snitch sprigs of basil from my herb pots,
and curious-eyed strangers scan the veiled glass
for glimpses of my blurred face, but hurry off
with any stranger’s indifference.

How endless the mazes I inhabit,

layer on layer of silence shield me.
Odd monsters breed here, I warrant.
I myself daily grow smaller and smaller until
almost invisible. Fuzz on my skin, my eyes
multiply a hundredfold in this darkness
and split the light in thousand prisms—
and now I can see what’s before and after.
I become light as air, my sweetness distils
to fatal potency. I practice a patience
vaster than ten worlds. I wait.

28
Merlie M. Alunan
 If, at last,
the merest rumor of your scent
warms the air drifting to my door,
I shall shake my thin thighs loose.
My hair will grow back in the usual places,
my eyes regain their focus, my ears
will hear words and speeches again.
Cicadas will chirr live under the marsh grass.
Perhaps it would be June,
the green returning to the trees.

When your shadow crosses my door,

please enter without fear.
But remember not to ask where I’d been
or what had fed me in this empty room
curtained with fine webs of silk.
Ignore the seethe of all my memories.
Come, take my hand.
I am human at your touch.

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Tales of the Spiderwoman
To teach a heart
For Felipe Lim, my accupuncturist

“Your heart,” he says, planting a needle

on a point between her brows,
“beats too fast. Too strong.
Works too hard.” More needles.
Side of her neck, her throat,
her shins, her feet, on her back.
Immobilized by the needles,
she wants to tell him

—This heart has always chosen

its own pace, won’t slow for anyone’s sake,
not even its own. Makes its own rules
as hearts have done these ages now,
maybe till all time. Quite beyond reason,
this heart listens to no one,
not even to me, deaf to everyone but itself—

but she says nothing, closes her eyes,

watching behind her lids violet suns
fold in, unfold, swirl, burst upon a world
known only to herself—caves of her fear,
ridges of her sorrow, thickets of rage
where sharp-clawed leopards prowl
in great hunger. Tissue and blood,
bone and flesh—fragile remnants
of her ebbing days—why her heart now
flails wild like fish caught in a drought,
thrashing in the mudflats of her memories.

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Tales of the Spiderwoman
 His fingers count landmarks
among her ribs, down her spine.
More needles. “For heart’s ease,”
he declares. Now she’s a secret
he reads too easily with his salient eyes.
She sighs. Bless the live air streaming
in rivers of her veins, bless trees,
the quarter moon, the purple suns
swirling in the dark behind her eyes.
Bless earth, bless wind and fire, bless rain.
Bless these thin needles in her throbbing pulses.

For when all’s said and done,

who can tame a heart
wild in its cage of mortality?
Still she lies, rehearsing faith
in his deft device.
Who can teach a heart
what the heart desires?

38
Merlie M. Alunan
 The neighbor’s geese
He keeps them fenced in, together with
the fattening pig, a few chickens
he’s raising for the pot, some lanka trees—
his flock of five white geese.
He’d kept a dog there once, a lonely
hungry brute, snarling and barking all day,
and an ewe which lambed in due time.
One cold wet night while he slept,
the dog broke its leash and killed the lamb.
Ewe and dog are gone now—to their fates,
I guess. But there are still the geese.

He keeps the geese, he says, to guard

his few trees, the pig, the chickens
scrabbling in the grass, the thumb-sized
patch of gravel he had claimed
under God’s heaven as his.
If geese had business of their own
other than this, he’d never think of asking.

72
Merlie M. Alunan
In his little gravel patch, the wind blows in
as anywhere else. Leaves, twigs fall as they would.
Prowler cats break in, stray dogs snaffle past,
rats, mice scuttle through, sometimes a toad
hops around toad fashion to his water trough.
The geese announce intrusion in raucous gabble
without any distinction. Or perhaps it’s just
goose talk, “Bad food here, mate,” and the rest
squawk back, “You bet, not enough here
to make crap!” Goose laughter, loud, loud.
If geese were like us, they’d be more polite.

What I always say is

keep only what comes to your door
freely and in peace. I’d say it to him,
but he’s too full of his own wisdom—
I doubt he’ll hear me out.
I’d tell him, keep only who would stay, willingly—
for as long as they need, a day or two maybe—
to breathe, rest, feed,
furred, feathered, or human,
bearing gifts or empty-handed.
Above all, keep only what you can love,
truly, abundantly, without regret,
and no holding back, although you know
they could pick you bone-clean before they leave,
shaking the dust from their feet
for you to sweep to the high wide sky.

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Tales of the Spiderwoman
 There go his geese again,
honking, screeching fit to bring down the rain.
They hold their beaks up,
craning their necks as they raise their urgent cry,
marching across the gravel patch
in peerless dignity, their heads held high.
Despite his fence, I’d grant,
these geese guard terrains grander
than this gravel patch—all we could see
with our mere human eyes.

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Merlie M. Alunan
 Dancer
This too familiar territory—
tight fit of skin over flesh,
the bones’ strict measure,
tendon and muscle harnessed
to lift, stretch, sway, bend
to a design—space, the finity
of her body, she makes
or unmakes with a gesture.

She flutters a hand and history

breathes—innocence returns,
sin ripens on the tree of knowledge,
death comes to be. She leaps,
the future gathers at the point
of her feet—memory resurrects
—wefts of our common hope.
Within the known ground
of her limbs flexing, shoulders
straining, breasts thrusting,
head upturned to the unseen stars,
the world in a second held captive
as water sleeps, tamed for the while,
in a vessel of fragile clay.

94
Merlie M. Alunan
Oceans may crash in her veins,
in her blood unseen rivers roar
in flood, but what she knows
within her flesh we cannot see:
wind lingering over valleys
of her need, her hair a thicket
of dreams to snag the moon
in its tangles, in her womb
a well full of shadows.
What eternity of sky yearns,
empty behind her far gaze?
Beneath the tempo of her gait
the hidden idioms of her flesh.
We sit and watch, testing
our truths, tasting our passions
in her grace. Her body stays,
weighted to its changeless fate.

March 30, 2009

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Tales of the Spiderwoman