Eugene Gloria

José Rizal Walks a Mile to “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida”

Listen, I say to him, Iron Butterfly’s
got nothing on Ginger Baker. And streets
like this one will be named after you.
Avenues and boulevards
wide as rivers where one can swim
for hours in traffic with buses
proud as frigates exhaling their black smoke.
In London and Paris, plaques
with your name will grace houses
where you stayed, and monuments
of you in parks from Madrid to Seattle. Yes,
even in Spain where celebrating dead
poets they executed is a thing.
Here you pause and shrug. History
is a fickle mother. In this purgatorial walk
you mourn your twenties. Seeing your face
in a mirror, though not exactly your face,
but the face of someone multiplying
like a mirror image of a mirror image.
What music did you listen to in your twenties?
Of course you bought records— 
often random 45s and LPs of artists you
were never passionate about.
You had too many hang-ups, too Catholic,
impatient, saddled with ephemeral contingencies.
In other words you were immature.
You listened to pop, but felt guilty about it.
And jazz? You didn’t know enough.
Having yet to discover Art Blakey
and Max Roach. And Ginger Baker
was only a name you attached to Blind Faith.
Not a man to be wary of
should you happen to catch him
walking your way along a dark street
that already bears your name.

---

Galileo

                                                                                   I.

Beyond the ship, which               is more sea, more water
He recites           the waves scroll like a sacrament in water

Homer who was vague               with color didn’t see the way
Yeats saw the sea        he gulped like a flagon of water

Their eyes, glittering ancient eyes      alit in lapis
he recites                      in his ministry of water

Beyond the sea which              is more sea than masts
Rizal accepts the wine-dark glass        murky as water
​
Galileo, drunk with the milk of heresy, imagines space
as the sea undulating with      narcotic waves            empty of water

He declares: there is no color             in night             no color in water
And the sea—call it blind or faith       is all mystery imbued with water

                                                                                   II.

Our interlocutor, George Costanza, recounts: “The sea was angry that day, my friends
– like an old man trying to send back soup in a deli.” /.../ In a smart and select pub in
Bloomsbury, Virginia Woolf sits the young José Rizal down with her milky glass of
Ouzo. Ready to school the young man in her boozy, but refined pronouncements.
“Take it from me, Squanto, we should all be writing novels devoted to influenza, and
yes, odes to typhoid and pneumonia! Why not lyrics to toothache?” Rizal nods ruefully,
nursing his one-beer blues.

---

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Eugene Gloria is the author of  four books of poems. His most recent collection, Sightseer in This Killing City is the recipient of the Indiana Authors Award in poetry. He is the John Rabb Emison Professor of Creative and Performing Arts and English Professor at DePauw University.