HER QUIET REPRIMAND
“But what have I, but what have I, my friend,/ To
give you, what can you receive from me?/ Only the friendship and the sympathy/
Of one about to reach her journey’s end.”
---T. S. Eliot, “Portrait of a
Lady”
How often
does she get up nights
looking
for the leftover dried fish?
She wakes
up hungry these days,
roused by
carousing cats, mating
with
puling sounds she snickers
about
when her knees do not hurt.
Dawn
cracks by the time she rests
her face
on the laced tabled cloth
her ilustrado* family had given
her as a
wedding gift, embroidered
by her abuela: the way to a man’s
heart is through his stomach.
Or some
such bromide she must
have lived
by, however often she
promised
to leave the philanderer
on her
now cold bed till he freezes
over, but
he went on to die ahead
in a
seedy motel locked ardently
in the
armpit of a snoring querida.
With
grand aplomb, she buried him
decently,
and her neighbours said:
Like a lady, she stood by her man.
She wakes
up nights now looking
for a
misplaced cellphone, its use
scarcely
learned, no, not mastered,
but handy
anyway when she calls
her
next-of-kin across-god-knows
what-oceans asking for his where
abouts, ‘he is not
home yet’, and she
feels
like eating some hot dimsum
from that
dark Ka-Yang panciteria
where
families gather on Sundays.
---Albert
B. Casuga
*ilustrado
-- well-educated
