POETRY
Pantabangan Arkin Frany
The vessel slices across the surface, an expanding arrow ripple in its wake. Pushed by phantom forces of the dead motor, the propeller silent at dawn. In the middle of the false lake, the sagwan shoves the fisherfolk, their hunger stretching across the reservoir, shore to shore. The water dances in the early morning shimmer, suns on fish scales surge and catch a glimpse of sky, swelling after a few upstream rain showers. Like a sorcerer’s spell they cast the net and secure their catch of tilapia and carp, they must move fast, because later the alarms will blare and the turbines will awaken, the concrete monster will spill its secrets: once a nexus of rivers, this is where this town got its name: Pantabangan, in memory, a land of valleys, rivulets. They might never remember the time before the drowned, riveted façade, when people were driven out of these mountain vales and restraint was answered by the aim of guns. This is how they learned progress: in camouflage and boots flattening the mountainside. They might never remember, before the rivers were collected, before this town drowned with its name, before all of it was underwater, children let loose kites and played in the grass plains and farmers herded cattle in the verdant hills. There was a church with a tall spire piercing the sky, it survived immersed in this subaquatic cemetery, its skeleton still intact. On summers when the sky refuses to send rains, when the heat drags itself across bone, the lagoon recedes and shows its contents in the semi-translucent placid, look, the ghost town shows itself. The church spire punctures the surface as if to defy infinite depth, infinite erasure.
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