Friends & Effigies

Juaniyo Arcellana

The little I know of Marie Marjorie may be like that flashing light from a cellphone with message waiting to be read, or a lighthouse that guides ships in the dead of night, blinking along with the sound of the stern slicing through waves as if in reverse, trying to retrieve something from the past.

And somewhere someone must have written that the light peering through a crack in a closed door resembles an inserted letter, both assuming a slanted rectangular form.

That too could be her.

Like the house on San Jose extension in Dumaguete, in that maze of wood and iron sheets a stone’s throw from the street, smoke rising from the kitchen.

Or the house on Rovira Street in the selfsame city, gone with the scent of ylang-ylang outside the window of a second-floor room.

In separate summers no less.

Yet why do we mention these things?

In Manila there is a festschrift to be put together, and one maker of effigies gets up each morning to resume work on something he knows will only be set aflame, as if the work encompasses the meaning of all art.

The cycle of build and destroy, and when an artist is most like god.

In Mandaluyong City in Hagdang Bato there is a Japanese garden where there is no place for effigies, only for a stray stone named uyuqa, a chime that sings agtona, a chipped jar with the word besoso engraved underneath.

Nonsense coins in a word game in the age of slippers and piranhas, as alive as Jesus in our hearts.

But how sure is the reader that they make no sense, when there are poems waiting to be sung, and the cats come home to scratch on a giant carrot post?

The light waiting to be read, the message that is not there, the sound a ship makes upon leaving port and later, slicing through what can only be dark water.

The coven meant to be retrieved from the ashes like a covenant, or phoenix.

A woman smiles with a pinprick of leaves in her hair, in the year of the molave that was not like the molave, the gift of fruits, reconstructed effigies and reverse departures…