Body Haul Sampler

UNIVERSITY OF SANTO TOMAS PUBLISHING HOUSE
Breaking the Structure, Handling the Body
Poetry is such a Kafka-esque, ever-morphing creature, always buzz-

ing around here and there under the canopy of its ever-fluctuating struc-
ture, some elusive thing refusing to be pinned down. In more ways than
one—and to reference a book by Jorie Graham—the unified field is and
will always be just a dream in poetry. I say this to start off the introduc-
tion to this book, Allan Pastrana’s first collection of poems, because Pas-
trana’s poetry reminds us of the innate wanderlust of the poetic form,
and startles as such.
These are not necessarily poems of access; the untrained reader may
find himself/herself wrestling with Pastrana’s diction, technical conceits
(enjambments, italics, indentions), and syntax: possible gridlocks that
would further delay the arrival at the poems’ intentions and insights. Yet
while these may be perceived as cruel negotiations on the part of the
reader, they are not intended to be deliberately punitive (difficult?) on
the writer’s. The problem only arises when the one holding this book
relishes in impatience, treating seeming violations in language as humps
blocking the path toward that thing called meaning.
Lest we forget, poetry is language—and may even be so vice versa,
if you bother to read on to the end of this intro. Gemino Abad once said
“the poem is wrought from it (language)”. Meaning is, at its best, relative.
Poets aspire in general for the human turn, that glimpse of some fleeting
truth. We do not write poetry to tell the truth, but to aspire for the pos-
sible. In a word, verisimilitude. I am not saying here that poems intend to
lie and to use language as its convenient alibi. Only that often our toler-
ance of language is blunted by our sharp need for the profound, our zeal
for quick epiphanies.
But I’m speaking too much about reader concerns. Language is of
constant primacy in poetry, of course. It is its vessel, its beginning place,
its womb. And it evolves, graduates from the commonplace, gushes forth
in ebbs and flows in its craving for naming.
xi
Body Haul is cradled by this schema. While there’s a seeming intel-
lectual and academic strain in the poems here that breaks away from ac-
cessibility, it is not the writer’s concern. Pastrana is not posing or postur-
ing in his experimentations, nor is he deliberately excluding. Instead he
indulges Crafting—the endless possibilities of the lyric, and the music it
emanates. The poems here are therefore not poems of performance, but
of the paradox of silence and sound on the page.
I had earlier stated that these poems startle, and this is mainly be-
cause of Pastrana’s mostly syncopated approach to diction and syntax. It
would be convenient, of course, to credit this to his background as a Mu-
sic major. But most of the poems here do mimic music—not song—and
delight in the lilts, crescendos, and diminuendos of the instrumental,
the voice-devoid. He finds sound most immediate, most tactile, and he
scrambles to have language capture this urgency.
Still, the seeming humps down this language road do disappear
and open up to familiar terrains and vistas when one really sits down
on the individual poems in Body Haul. This is because, while the poems
play around at will with the myriad languages of space and sound, the
poet considers this as required transactions that will pay off and unravel
(eventually, to the keen reader) very personal and quasi-confessional
concerns. It won’t be easy; these revelations are deftly camouflaged by
pervading syntactical breaks in cadence and syncopations. But the con-
cerns are surely discoverable, waiting for the willing to walk with the
poet down that road’s end.
Pastrana’s is, and ultimately, a collection rooted in the poet’s aspira-
tions to manage desire, to underplay directness. It just may be labeled
Language Poetry by some, but the poet himself does not believe in such
boxes. Instead he insists on the small melodies, the many mercies lan-
guage ultimately afford to the willing listener/reader. He does this con-
versely (non-traditionally?)— from the abstract to the physical. The
music first, before the song.
This, finally, is Body Haul’s body electric: to carry our mortality
(“our most frail gestures,” as e.e. cummings put it) by willingly surren-
dering and heaving it into this one box: this structure, this cage, this
Body—the poet and the language both wide-eyed and keen on their
glorious possibilities and given transience.
Joel M. Toledo
xii
Inner Life
Here you were born

and raised, and raised
well. Not beyond
their means. Not a war-torn

country either, here.
Dank perimeter that was
your weather, leitmotif.

Sure, you’d feel its cold
coming like a not-so-distant
future, the wind of it,

the deep drone of it.
The animal
that didn’t make it to the shed

was an incident.
Interruption.
But that was hardly

a puzzle: only a short
distance and you were out there, right
in the middle of things,

important, just being necessary
and all by yourself.
3
Few more days before rain.
The gloaming’s not-yet-green
would find a way to survive
the accidents. The leaves were dead

underfoot. Beneath, history was
throbbing, been breaking out
of, awhile. That backyard

had never been so beautiful.
Too much of an opening
in the wilderness but quite

a luck, and you knew it,
aerial wire to aerial wire.
Someone, from the farthest

end of the house, called
your name and you didn’t
answer. You were all of four.

These limits. Otherwise you were there
already, sudden and not moving away.
Nothing like this revenge.
4
Allegory of the Red Blossom
Let’s say a fishing village—a certain degree of

remoteness, the kind of place where stories that don’t match
any we heard of come from. And if it beats, the per-second
rootedness that quietly folds in between parts, we believe it
resists to be found. As when a stranger aboard a dinghy shows
on his open palm a red blossom, which is neither fire nor blood;
none of the color’s prime, merely its wakefulness. He carries it
a long way, then drops it, picks up. What the wind waits for is
the squint, that uncertainty—the roof that shelters the stare,
then gone. Un-grip and it’s beyond reach, bobbing up and down
the water. But he remembers the boat is the same offshore,
otherwise, that it is something he could readily make sense of.
And if he could afford a simile he’d choose ‘sail as throb’ and
nobody laughs—because the flower is nowhere in sight nor the
man, because this isn’t a tale about love.
22
Signs
Again, one of the usual stops we make.

This antique shop is a cold and dark
warehouse of the heart—reckonings, slow
like death. Notice that china’s edge,
chipped but true to its imperfections.
You say it has to be hand-painted and
I imagine the delicate strokes, blue
stirrings where an artisan’s steady hand
had mustered love, at once tender and muscular.
Always, we believe that a story has kept
each detailed treasure here, what is to be
repeatedly glazed over beneath the carbide
lamp, while that old phonograph plays Faust
like a bad translation of our years together.
So we keep on rummaging through piles and

heaps, among shelves. This is a panic of
memory, the wild arrest when desire
reads like a code: I want to acquire everything.
Study that wooden image, the one resembling
a caryatid, the bad carmine paint peeling off.
The quaint detail of its face reminds you
of someone you might have met anywhere.
Signs will fail us, the way anything here
resumes with little breath-space. This cold
heaven’s everything we would have wanted it
to be—fallible, random, alive.
35

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UNIVERSITY OF SANTO TOMAS PUBLISHING HOUSE

Breaking the Structure, Handling the Body

Poetry is such a Kafka-esque, ever-morphing creature, always buzz-

Here you were born

their means. Not a war-torn

your weather, leitmotif.

future, the wind of it,

that didn’t make it to the shed

But that was hardly

in the middle of things,

the accidents. The leaves were dead

of, awhile. That backyard

in the wilderness but quite

Someone, from the farthest

answer. You were all of four.

Nothing like this revenge.

Let’s say a fishing village—a certain degree of

Again, one of the usual stops we make.

So we keep on rummaging through piles and

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