Speaking of __

Let us lower our voices, said the woman next to me at the bus station; but I know what you are speaking of. Hammock strings have a way of recoiling. Is that when we can no longer lie in it? Then we might go indoors to make the meal, call the children in, unfold the blankets against the night’s chill. Even so there will always be that one place you’ll want to keep setting at the table, the room that will become a shrine. You’ll never catalogue the growing things on that stretch of roadway, how many pieces of glass were rendered from the kuatro kantos bottle; what restraints might multiply in the hands of another. I am sorry too. Resemblance does not often matter. Money? Sex? It could have been a simple thing, the chrome of a radio dial sticking out of a jacket pocket. I listened this morning to stories of refugees trying to cross the Sahara; a woman’s sobs woke me from sleep. From over the ridge, a patrolman’s amplified voice, his words unintelligible. There are places in the world where a blue jay does his best impression of a red-tailed hawk, and then departs. Something like wings scissors in the sunlight. Oh my poor poor sweetheart, moans the woman in the desert, over and over again; I could not even bury him.

—Luisa A. Igloria
12.31.2010

In response to today’s Morning Porch entry.