Alunsina's Return (For Gilda A Tribute) by J Neil C Garcia

Back in 2014 I gave a lecture for the Likhaan: UP Institute of Creative Writing, titled “Myth and Writing.” It distilled my ideas on the role that mythological thinking plays in literary creativity, and I ended my lecture with a reading of a few of my poems—all mythopoetic retellings.

Gilda was already having difficulty walking then, but she attended my lecture. She even joined us for merienda right after, at the Likhaan’s office on the second floor of the old Faculty Center. This meant she had to navigate, using her walker, the steps of two full flights of stairs.

Of course, Gilda knew how important the topic of this talk was for me, and I suppose for her also, going by her lifelong interest in our country’s fascinating folklore and myths, a sumptuous sampling of which she had presented so beautifully in the books and plays she herself had written and/or produced and published. Two examples just now come to mind, The Soul Book and The Body Book. These wonderful Filipiniana titles have proved indispensable to my own poetic and critical work, and indeed they constitute luminous intertexts to a couple of my own books.

For our “Gildafest,” allow me to read my own retelling of the cosmogony or creation story of the Panay Bukidnon people, which I believe I also read at that lecture. It begins with an epigraph, a quote that I sourced from an earlier retelling, also by me.

The story of the ancient Panay-on deities Tungkung-Langit and Alunsina bids us to rethink what grief and loss can do. As this creation myth reminds us, and as this tribute itself performs, melancholy can be generative, for it is also the occasion for creation and creativity.
Alunsina’s return
She was not there.

— “Legend of the Seafoam”
In his version of their story,
she orphaned him
with her decision to disappear.
A child, he quickly trusted his hands,
and the wondrous things
they could accomplish:
sun, wind, rainbow,
the cool green fastness of earth,
and those rhythms
breathing in their vessels of clay
he set to stand,
to break upon it.
Of his handiwork,
she likes the ocean best:
a blue immensity
casting shadows over the gaze
that sinks, always seeking its bottom.
Tasting the salt,
and sifting the tide
with her dim fingers,
she understands
he caused the sea for her,
a pure and constant mirror of what,
to him, she must have been:
wave and shimmer,
ripple and swirl,
a sadness singing
the clearest legend of water.
But even here he was mistaken.
She was never as simple
as any shape
he could conjure:
staring at the sharp horizon
of his mind,
sometimes she wonders
if he ever knew her at all.
Even now, she feels he waits,
crouched before the farthest shore,
or perched upon the sunset’s
riot of oyster and blood,
for her return.
How strange, she ponders:
this god cannot see
beyond his own god-eyes.
The glimmering
of his suspicion
is true:
she will not come back,
she is cleft from him always.
But what he cannot imagine,
and what is truer,
is that she never really left.
Dark and without form,
she is his deep and wordless loss,
but not his loss alone.
Woven into life itself,
she is desire:
an emptiness, a sigh
that holds the world in place.

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