miyako73
04-25-2014, 11:59 AM
Please critique this short story before I submit it to this publication. Thank you.
A Portrait of the Poet as a Curious Child
“And it was at that age... Poetry arrived in search of me.”
— Pablo Neruda
"My tongue, my lips, the whole of my mouth did not say the very first syllables, the very first words, the very first lines of my poetry," said the poet.
In their childish eagerness to understand, kids around Pablito’s age, when he was as inquisitive as they were and his questioning as impertinent as theirs, would ask incessantly to know why birds could fly, and they would unleash a barrage of more silly questions after that. While in his taciturn isolation, the moment of a recluse he found tranquil and relaxing, Pablito, little Pablo to everyone, would seek to answer his own abstruse curiosity: why he did not have wings.
"They can fly... because of their memory of flight," his tipsy father told Pablito’s twin brothers who were a year older than him then and already in first grade, after he downed his third bottle of beer and opened up his fourth using his strong teeth yellow-tarred by years of smoking Marlboro reds.
Pablito’s father entertained simple, mundane questions and turned them into deep philosophical soliloquies only when he was drunk. They sounded like monologues of a lunatic who succumbed to his brilliance or brief lectures of a tired forgotten professor or spoken afterthoughts of a forgetful man with a busy mind.
He could have been a writer, perhaps a poet, but patience was not one of his virtues. Instant gratification, like drinking his favorite local brand, was more interesting to him. He would rather be in a drunken stupor than lose himself in a dizzying page of metaphors. Not a good way to enjoy boredom, writing, to him, was a tedious labor, and he thought of it as a punishment only a sadomasochist thinker would gladly welcome.
“Sadomasochist... because I’ll write to torture minds, and I’ll also write to torment mine,” Pablito’s father once said when his wife encouraged him to write some sonnets about wild forest mushrooms, his botanical hobby. He collected them for medicinal use, display, and consumption and grew the ones he sold to market vendors. He was known for his shiitake and plump portobello.
Pablito did not really wonder before why he had never gotten even a short letter from him. His father would much rather speak to him directly and tell him what he wanted to say without reservation, minimally almost like in the form of haiku. Oftentimes, seventeen syllables were too much. His stares and glances were inaudible monosyllabic words Pablito had known for years and decoded after several leather welts and buckle bruises. Pablito knew what to do with his shorts, when to kneel on mung beans, why he was yelled at, where he should hide, who to ask about something, and how to beg for an approval by looking into his father's eyes.
When Pablito’s father was away for a while or he was somewhere far from his family, a seasonal wonder to Pablito that he found out later to be backpacking his father needed to fight life’s sameness and existential ennui, he would use a phone for a brief talk or send a cryptic telegram he did not type. Even sending a Hallmark card with just a date above and his signature below was a wasteful effort and too much a bother. Pablito had learned early on not to expect something in the mail on his birthday or on a holiday.
"They can flap and flutter their wings because they can remember." His father tried to simplify what he previously said, thinking this time he would be clear and understood, but still it came out ambiguous and as confusing as before.
It was ironic to Pablito; his father believed in learned behavior, yet in front of his twin sons who were pretending that they were interested and listening, he was holding a bottle of alcohol frothing and fuming the bitter smell of hops and malts, while Pablito and his mother were preparing the meal, setting the table, and serving the cooked food. Almost a noon ritual, his father's drinking preluded their lunch. Beer was his liquid appetizer. He would only start eating after he had lined up at least half a dozen of capless brown bottles—emptied to the last drop—on the messy side of the table.
The long family dining table, an heirloom whose chips, cracks, scratches could be traced back to several generations before Pablito’s father's, complete with nostalgic anecdotes and stories that remained untold and unsaid, was made of solid black mahogany. It looked almost the same as the table in the dull silver-framed Last Supper stuck on the wall that separated the dirty kitchen from the eating area. Careless and scared, Pablito had always banged his head, bumped his elbows, slammed his knees on its sturdy legs, pointy corners, blady edges when he would quickly hide underneath terrified of his father's heavy footsteps shaking the stairs and the wooden floor and his roaring voice waking them all up every time he would come home from a night out puking-drunk.
Other children had secret gardens; Pablito had his own secret cave. Under the linen-covered table, he had felt safe and secure, saving himself again and again from his father's beat-up leather belt. Crawling on all fours in stealth, Pablito would probe the empty chair in front of him, his father's favorite seat; run his fingers on its smooth, dark cherry finish; feel the shiny, almost frictionless surface; fiddle its carved coils, curls, curlicues; study the varnished wood grains that looked like big eyes staring at him; and wonder if it, too, would become an heirloom someday and tell his story.
"The vastness of the sky is how endless their thoughts are," Pablito’s father said while looking outside through the window, checking the billowy midday clouds.
The twins looked at their father with blank stares, while Pablito did the same with delight. He was in awe; his father sounded like an expert exuding authority and confidence as if he really knew a lot about birds. To Pablito’s ears, it was about "ornithology", one of the words he learned from browsing the National Geographic magazines, but in his mind what his father said was poetry. He could tell his brothers were no longer interested, not even to just pretend.
Jung, the one who wanted to become an architect so he could build their parents a huge palace—very huge, he would confidently promise—could not understand their father's puzzling rhetoric, which he dismissed as another absurd babble only a drunk could utter and comprehend. He just scratched his head, a habit when he was confused and could not say anything, and banged the sides of his plate with his silver utensils for more rice. The beef tamarind stew was scrumptious and hot, and the onioned pork steak, charcoal-broiled, was slightly sweet and succulent.
Jong, the independent-minded between the two, who thought he was too young to decide what he wanted to be in the future—the time when he could freely think for himself, according to him—did not really care about what their father said that also sounded like psychology to him, but for birds. He just wanted to hurry up and finish his lunch, so he could feed his leftover leafy salad to the red-breasted finch he found almost dead on the ground not far from the bamboo grove. He had been nursing the bird back to its health in his bedroom. He put it inside the bamboo basket turned upside down under his bed. If uncovered and not hidden, it would force itself to fly with a weak pair of wings, he thought.
Across from his father's seat, Pablito could not force himself to lift his spoon under the mound of rice, nor could he free his fork piercing the slice of meat, trying to decipher what he thought was a beautiful riddle. His mind craved for an elaboration, another poetic line, but he was scared to ask his father. His father’s brow and cheeks were profusely sweating and turning rosy pink, a hint that he was getting there—in the torpor and lethargy of drunkenness.
Wanting to know more, he turned to his mother and asked why he could not fly. His mother, usually, would not respond to such idle talk especially on the dining table and while eating. Without wasting a dismissive sigh, she simply said, "Because you're not a bird."
Pablito was used to her matter-of-fact utterances and her almost bookish way of speaking. His mother was a strict teacher handling difficult but straightforward sciences—Chemistry and Physics. To Pablito, what she said was a nice answer, a brief and lucid one, but he found it hard to appreciate. It was not deep enough. It was not metaphorical. It was not poetic.
He already knew about flying angels being inspired creations of a fertile imagination, so he just shut up while trying to make sense of the winged birds like penguins that could not fly, understand the pain of the bird with wounded wings in his brother's makeshift cage, and think about the tragic melting and falling of Icarus' wings.
Such feeling of indifference was not new to Pablito. He just could not force himself to believe his mother's atoms and molecules. He also could neither see nor feel her big bang and black hole. With his father's nymphs and goddesses, mythology was real. Pablito used to think and convince himself that Dionysus, the God of wine and harvest and of ritual and ecstasy, was his father's deity.
Unsatisfied with his mother's quick remark, Pablito moved his gaze back to his father. He understood Pablito’s questioning eyes. He was good at poker. He could read his opponents’ minds and bluffing through their stares and glances and even their blinking.
After gulping some more beer, his last bottle, and taking his time to burp, Pablito’s father haltingly said as though he wanted his stops and pauses to be profound and poignant, "Because... because you don't need to explore the sky... for... for memories." He thought hard and long before the last phrase came out.
His father’s reasoning silenced Pablito. That afternoon, when he was six, his father made him understand the essence of being human. Pablito finally found the sense of living through his father's seemingly incoherent words. Although they were metaphors of an alcoholic father, the curious son clearly understood why he should go on alone and find life by himself. It was not the pain but the memory of being hurt that would give him vim and vigor to live and make him resolute and stubborn to survive. Pablito had become a poet that day.
A contented grin on Pablito’s face, he filled his bowl with soup and a chunk of beef marrow loosening from its bone. The soft rice was steaming hot, and it looked beautiful like a miniature white hill on his plate. The lightly burnt skin of pork was perfect. The vegetable salad topped with mango chutney tasted great. He had a wonderful meal. Even the glass of chilled water was delicious. Pablito was full.
He got up and excused himself from the table without waiting for his mother's milky dessert—iced tiny beans, grated coconut, and candied jackfruit. He went straight to his room, sat in front of his study table, and wrote down his father's words in his journal: "Birds soar in the sky for memories, and I live the moment for it." He did not know much about pronouns and antecedents then.
Pablito stayed in his room, silent and motionless, and his breathing was hushed, but his mind was restless and alive. Jung boasted about the perfect sphere he drew on their father's pad of yellow papers lying empty on the iron table in the living room. Outside by the Avocado tree, Jong played an earnest therapist, teaching the still weak bird how to fly again. Their mother stood quiet and worried in the kitchen, washing plates, glasses, forks, spoons, pots, pans one by one; maybe thinking about Neil, their eldest brother who ran away two days ago to explore the browning landscape of the countryside; and waiting for little Eddie, their youngest who already snored at four, to wake up for his late lunch.
On the patio, their father swayed himself in the hemp rope hammock, humming an old song about crying and promising not to cry again. The stodgy ambiance in the house perturbed Pablito like his recurring dream of déjà vu that almost seemed like a stubborn nightmare and that could not be exorcised with spitting and knocking on wood. It felt empty inside.
After belching the gassy feeling in his stomach that still had the tart, spicy taste of his favorite dip of soy sauce, white vinegar, and hot pepper, Pablito lay down in his bed, overwhelming his mind with the serene stillness of the slow moment. The cool breeze, occasionally, swooped and whistled through the half-opened window, moving to the west to follow the retreating sun and diffusing the distinct woodsy smell of a mushroom ready for pulling.
On the old pendulum clock, it was already two, Pablito’s hour for siesta, the time to dream of wings and flights he would later turn into lamenting words and bleeding images, the time also to sleep away the clingy warmth of the heavy brightness of that summer afternoon, when the struggle of the poet began.
A Portrait of the Poet as a Curious Child
“And it was at that age... Poetry arrived in search of me.”
— Pablo Neruda
"My tongue, my lips, the whole of my mouth did not say the very first syllables, the very first words, the very first lines of my poetry," said the poet.
In their childish eagerness to understand, kids around Pablito’s age, when he was as inquisitive as they were and his questioning as impertinent as theirs, would ask incessantly to know why birds could fly, and they would unleash a barrage of more silly questions after that. While in his taciturn isolation, the moment of a recluse he found tranquil and relaxing, Pablito, little Pablo to everyone, would seek to answer his own abstruse curiosity: why he did not have wings.
"They can fly... because of their memory of flight," his tipsy father told Pablito’s twin brothers who were a year older than him then and already in first grade, after he downed his third bottle of beer and opened up his fourth using his strong teeth yellow-tarred by years of smoking Marlboro reds.
Pablito’s father entertained simple, mundane questions and turned them into deep philosophical soliloquies only when he was drunk. They sounded like monologues of a lunatic who succumbed to his brilliance or brief lectures of a tired forgotten professor or spoken afterthoughts of a forgetful man with a busy mind.
He could have been a writer, perhaps a poet, but patience was not one of his virtues. Instant gratification, like drinking his favorite local brand, was more interesting to him. He would rather be in a drunken stupor than lose himself in a dizzying page of metaphors. Not a good way to enjoy boredom, writing, to him, was a tedious labor, and he thought of it as a punishment only a sadomasochist thinker would gladly welcome.
“Sadomasochist... because I’ll write to torture minds, and I’ll also write to torment mine,” Pablito’s father once said when his wife encouraged him to write some sonnets about wild forest mushrooms, his botanical hobby. He collected them for medicinal use, display, and consumption and grew the ones he sold to market vendors. He was known for his shiitake and plump portobello.
Pablito did not really wonder before why he had never gotten even a short letter from him. His father would much rather speak to him directly and tell him what he wanted to say without reservation, minimally almost like in the form of haiku. Oftentimes, seventeen syllables were too much. His stares and glances were inaudible monosyllabic words Pablito had known for years and decoded after several leather welts and buckle bruises. Pablito knew what to do with his shorts, when to kneel on mung beans, why he was yelled at, where he should hide, who to ask about something, and how to beg for an approval by looking into his father's eyes.
When Pablito’s father was away for a while or he was somewhere far from his family, a seasonal wonder to Pablito that he found out later to be backpacking his father needed to fight life’s sameness and existential ennui, he would use a phone for a brief talk or send a cryptic telegram he did not type. Even sending a Hallmark card with just a date above and his signature below was a wasteful effort and too much a bother. Pablito had learned early on not to expect something in the mail on his birthday or on a holiday.
"They can flap and flutter their wings because they can remember." His father tried to simplify what he previously said, thinking this time he would be clear and understood, but still it came out ambiguous and as confusing as before.
It was ironic to Pablito; his father believed in learned behavior, yet in front of his twin sons who were pretending that they were interested and listening, he was holding a bottle of alcohol frothing and fuming the bitter smell of hops and malts, while Pablito and his mother were preparing the meal, setting the table, and serving the cooked food. Almost a noon ritual, his father's drinking preluded their lunch. Beer was his liquid appetizer. He would only start eating after he had lined up at least half a dozen of capless brown bottles—emptied to the last drop—on the messy side of the table.
The long family dining table, an heirloom whose chips, cracks, scratches could be traced back to several generations before Pablito’s father's, complete with nostalgic anecdotes and stories that remained untold and unsaid, was made of solid black mahogany. It looked almost the same as the table in the dull silver-framed Last Supper stuck on the wall that separated the dirty kitchen from the eating area. Careless and scared, Pablito had always banged his head, bumped his elbows, slammed his knees on its sturdy legs, pointy corners, blady edges when he would quickly hide underneath terrified of his father's heavy footsteps shaking the stairs and the wooden floor and his roaring voice waking them all up every time he would come home from a night out puking-drunk.
Other children had secret gardens; Pablito had his own secret cave. Under the linen-covered table, he had felt safe and secure, saving himself again and again from his father's beat-up leather belt. Crawling on all fours in stealth, Pablito would probe the empty chair in front of him, his father's favorite seat; run his fingers on its smooth, dark cherry finish; feel the shiny, almost frictionless surface; fiddle its carved coils, curls, curlicues; study the varnished wood grains that looked like big eyes staring at him; and wonder if it, too, would become an heirloom someday and tell his story.
"The vastness of the sky is how endless their thoughts are," Pablito’s father said while looking outside through the window, checking the billowy midday clouds.
The twins looked at their father with blank stares, while Pablito did the same with delight. He was in awe; his father sounded like an expert exuding authority and confidence as if he really knew a lot about birds. To Pablito’s ears, it was about "ornithology", one of the words he learned from browsing the National Geographic magazines, but in his mind what his father said was poetry. He could tell his brothers were no longer interested, not even to just pretend.
Jung, the one who wanted to become an architect so he could build their parents a huge palace—very huge, he would confidently promise—could not understand their father's puzzling rhetoric, which he dismissed as another absurd babble only a drunk could utter and comprehend. He just scratched his head, a habit when he was confused and could not say anything, and banged the sides of his plate with his silver utensils for more rice. The beef tamarind stew was scrumptious and hot, and the onioned pork steak, charcoal-broiled, was slightly sweet and succulent.
Jong, the independent-minded between the two, who thought he was too young to decide what he wanted to be in the future—the time when he could freely think for himself, according to him—did not really care about what their father said that also sounded like psychology to him, but for birds. He just wanted to hurry up and finish his lunch, so he could feed his leftover leafy salad to the red-breasted finch he found almost dead on the ground not far from the bamboo grove. He had been nursing the bird back to its health in his bedroom. He put it inside the bamboo basket turned upside down under his bed. If uncovered and not hidden, it would force itself to fly with a weak pair of wings, he thought.
Across from his father's seat, Pablito could not force himself to lift his spoon under the mound of rice, nor could he free his fork piercing the slice of meat, trying to decipher what he thought was a beautiful riddle. His mind craved for an elaboration, another poetic line, but he was scared to ask his father. His father’s brow and cheeks were profusely sweating and turning rosy pink, a hint that he was getting there—in the torpor and lethargy of drunkenness.
Wanting to know more, he turned to his mother and asked why he could not fly. His mother, usually, would not respond to such idle talk especially on the dining table and while eating. Without wasting a dismissive sigh, she simply said, "Because you're not a bird."
Pablito was used to her matter-of-fact utterances and her almost bookish way of speaking. His mother was a strict teacher handling difficult but straightforward sciences—Chemistry and Physics. To Pablito, what she said was a nice answer, a brief and lucid one, but he found it hard to appreciate. It was not deep enough. It was not metaphorical. It was not poetic.
He already knew about flying angels being inspired creations of a fertile imagination, so he just shut up while trying to make sense of the winged birds like penguins that could not fly, understand the pain of the bird with wounded wings in his brother's makeshift cage, and think about the tragic melting and falling of Icarus' wings.
Such feeling of indifference was not new to Pablito. He just could not force himself to believe his mother's atoms and molecules. He also could neither see nor feel her big bang and black hole. With his father's nymphs and goddesses, mythology was real. Pablito used to think and convince himself that Dionysus, the God of wine and harvest and of ritual and ecstasy, was his father's deity.
Unsatisfied with his mother's quick remark, Pablito moved his gaze back to his father. He understood Pablito’s questioning eyes. He was good at poker. He could read his opponents’ minds and bluffing through their stares and glances and even their blinking.
After gulping some more beer, his last bottle, and taking his time to burp, Pablito’s father haltingly said as though he wanted his stops and pauses to be profound and poignant, "Because... because you don't need to explore the sky... for... for memories." He thought hard and long before the last phrase came out.
His father’s reasoning silenced Pablito. That afternoon, when he was six, his father made him understand the essence of being human. Pablito finally found the sense of living through his father's seemingly incoherent words. Although they were metaphors of an alcoholic father, the curious son clearly understood why he should go on alone and find life by himself. It was not the pain but the memory of being hurt that would give him vim and vigor to live and make him resolute and stubborn to survive. Pablito had become a poet that day.
A contented grin on Pablito’s face, he filled his bowl with soup and a chunk of beef marrow loosening from its bone. The soft rice was steaming hot, and it looked beautiful like a miniature white hill on his plate. The lightly burnt skin of pork was perfect. The vegetable salad topped with mango chutney tasted great. He had a wonderful meal. Even the glass of chilled water was delicious. Pablito was full.
He got up and excused himself from the table without waiting for his mother's milky dessert—iced tiny beans, grated coconut, and candied jackfruit. He went straight to his room, sat in front of his study table, and wrote down his father's words in his journal: "Birds soar in the sky for memories, and I live the moment for it." He did not know much about pronouns and antecedents then.
Pablito stayed in his room, silent and motionless, and his breathing was hushed, but his mind was restless and alive. Jung boasted about the perfect sphere he drew on their father's pad of yellow papers lying empty on the iron table in the living room. Outside by the Avocado tree, Jong played an earnest therapist, teaching the still weak bird how to fly again. Their mother stood quiet and worried in the kitchen, washing plates, glasses, forks, spoons, pots, pans one by one; maybe thinking about Neil, their eldest brother who ran away two days ago to explore the browning landscape of the countryside; and waiting for little Eddie, their youngest who already snored at four, to wake up for his late lunch.
On the patio, their father swayed himself in the hemp rope hammock, humming an old song about crying and promising not to cry again. The stodgy ambiance in the house perturbed Pablito like his recurring dream of déjà vu that almost seemed like a stubborn nightmare and that could not be exorcised with spitting and knocking on wood. It felt empty inside.
After belching the gassy feeling in his stomach that still had the tart, spicy taste of his favorite dip of soy sauce, white vinegar, and hot pepper, Pablito lay down in his bed, overwhelming his mind with the serene stillness of the slow moment. The cool breeze, occasionally, swooped and whistled through the half-opened window, moving to the west to follow the retreating sun and diffusing the distinct woodsy smell of a mushroom ready for pulling.
On the old pendulum clock, it was already two, Pablito’s hour for siesta, the time to dream of wings and flights he would later turn into lamenting words and bleeding images, the time also to sleep away the clingy warmth of the heavy brightness of that summer afternoon, when the struggle of the poet began.