"It is the sea," says the poet, "pursues a habit of shores."
The words come to him on a bleak day at Gabu; in a
moment of chaos--the poem, the gift outright! As from a
cliff he watches the wild dogodog sea batter berserk the
wasteland round, he sees "the rock-stones part / And
drop into the elemental wound"; he feels on a sudden
"The waste of centuries grey and dead" where the sea's
"spilt salt... lies spread / Among the dark habiliments of
Time." And then, he discovers with a piercing sense of
irrecoverable loss: "The vital splendor misses...All things
forfeited are most loved and dear."

This poem called "Gabu," 1954, is Angeles's best known
and most anthologized. It is certainly among his finest
for its verbal force and imagery, but for me at least, the
poem's allure also lies in this: that it foretells--even
without the poet's consciousness at the time the poem was
given--what I might call his poetry's elan vital, its secret
burden and motif. Thus, when Angeles comes again to
poetry, after twenty years of silence, it is a coming back
to the heart's hidden places. "The Heart," as he wrote
in 1949,

Or, as he put it more directly in "Memory," 1991:

It is also significant that, after twenty years, the first poem
that Angeles should have written, "Manhattan Rain,"
1984, is, like most others in a stun of jewels (1963), what
he calls a "survival poem." There the poet muses, "how
can we survive the autumn pall?" and as, in a sudden
downpour, he and his wife runs for cover on a dead-end
street, he suddenly finds himself fleeing with her,"heavy
in the womb / with our firstborn-to-be," despairing for
escape from bombs falling on Baguio City during the last
year of the last War:

To survive: to live over any fate, to overcome all "pompous
logic." That may be one of imagination's deepest infinitives
by whose irremissive pressure Angeles's poetry becomes
of a piece, from "Asylum Piece,"1948, say, through all the
remarkable poems of the fifties in stun of jewels and then,
after a long silence, to memory's simple declarative
clearing in, say "Balance of Our Days," 1991.

We could fix on Angeles's imagery of trees to catch that
fierce throb of imagination's faith by which the poem is
seized from the toils of language. "The pertinence of
patience the trees bear," for example,

Who, with their metal branches, scour the air
for rumors of impending May...
.............................................
While roots probe deepest for a hoard of silt
And seepage--till, silver in the sky, the late
Rains pour at last, hard where the treetops tilt.

These lines come from"The Summer Trees," 1960; but an
earlier poem, "The Trees," 1949, also speak of how their
roots probe

For fossils of a kind their ancestry
Was native to, and yet, in constant watch,
Involve a secret never quite revealed.
And never, never do roots lightly touch

When, gripping terribly at the earth's core,
They touch some ancient hands for amulets:
Then fluid surfaceward flow forth before
The leaves give off, and fecund summer sets.

But what is that "secret never quite revealed," that
something beyond "Logic, to which the heart is uninitiate?"
In Asylum Piece, the young girl carrying "bullfrog and
legend" is saved from ambush by her "insect instinct";
the "Ants," 1949, raised their "antennae of faith... Before
disasters of a stupid malice" ; in "Badoc," 1953, the poet
sees "A Pattern for survival" in the torn belfry's moss--

Your Faith that orchards you among the ruins
Of time's corroding hands,
............................................
For if, Jose, green is the color of survival,
So are the locusts clothed like grass.

The secret is purely "the inward eye's concern," the eye
that is

...sprout in the mesa of the mind,
Must seek sactuary in the soul of sun.
......................................
The dazzling furnace of the sun's bright soul
Where tempered whole is kindness in the tray
Of fire, O, if it must survive at all,
Tendrils of faith be pushed against the day.

That faith of imagination is most dramatically exemplified
through the course of the poet's quest for home, of which
the sea's furious restlessness at Gabu is the image and
animus. In "Filipino," 1952, the poet appears lost and
derelict, merely native to any accident of shore:

A manner of walking called me suddenly home.

And there I was, crab on a beached pacific,
Sullen and cold, the starfish's guardian,
While sand blew in my tropic face all day.

And ocean waters shoreward strove to reach
And drown my shadow on claw-printed sands
And all that was the visible shell of me.

But that which is not visible is what endures. In
"Washington D.C.," 1959 (rev. 1989), the poet again
finds himself stranded upon alien ground and numbed by
a sense of desolation:"What was I to prove in this foreign
land" He imagines Hannibal, crossing the Alps and
vanquishing Europe's "Tottering empire"--but then,

Over the woken city a burst of sudden sky
Glistened at last on a cold Potomac. And I,

Tropic-born, a stranger on these dark shores, felt
The Alps in my hand crumble and melt.

In "Your Speech," 1949, "the native word" sounds on a
sudden "both lullaby and cry / To drown a futile and false identity" in the English text of the poet's self; and yet
that text, wrought from "the schoolboy's latin star," could
become "Symbol or comet upon bamboo and guitar." But
by the poem's Second Version in 1990, the possiblity is
denied: that "false identity" is "The drowned and bloated ego altered in the pool / Of English lexicography"; there is
neither symbol nor comet, only "bruising memories" and
"remembrances of idioms / Driftless in the turbulances
of the mind", the native speech, long buried and forsworn,
pours "like primeval rain"

Hushing the sleepless tide on this alien shore.
Hushing the wild cries drowning in the pool.

Only the vernacular, it would seem, reaches deep enough
into the self to seal its anquished cries and compose the
mind's native geography. Yet, finally, in the "Balance of
Our Days," the toils of language prove to be another
illusion. There in America, the poet's surrogate motherland,
as he listens to the life of all nature about, he knows
(he has always known) beyond any word's reach who
he is:

And home has beckoned, and I am no further away
Than ever.
..................................
I know whoever calls me home again
Will find me there.

And so, indeed, we find Angeles: by the inward eye, the
balance is just. We sense a great deja vu when, after
having read, "Balance of Our Days," we listen to the same
voice almost half a century before, in a poem called
"Statement Before Embarking," 1946:

When now you speak of these in vivid tone:
Peaks of th Sierras and California's trees,
Flow of the Wabash and spout of Yellowstone,
At home after the years that knew no peace

But then, knowing that, not all you may know
That is a spray of Pasig on your brow.

--Gemino H. Abad