If I were a brook I would unwind
like a spool in the sun, shake my green
maracas with sequined stones.
If I were a beet in the soil I’d pulse
like a heart, pull myself out
of my muddy shroud.
If I were a bowl of new
steamed rice I’d curl fringes of steam
and float a grateful face above it.
All over the newly bare field, melting
voices— whispering, murmuring, sighing
and gurgling a hundred ways at once.
—Luisa A. Igloria
02 18 2011
In response to today’s Morning Porch entry.
False Hellebore by Jennifer Schlick (click to see larger)
Veratrum viride
Bright green.
Tight green.
Clasping green.
Grasping green.
Armed green.
Charmed green.
Hairy green.
Scary green.
Ribbed green.
Nibbed green.
Panicle-green.
Planticle-green.
Patient green.
Abortifacient green.
Killing green.
Thrilling green.
Burning green.
Churning green.
Convulsive green.
Repulsive green.
Rain-calling green.
Down-falling green.
Green green.
Black.
*
Note: The Latin name means “true-black green.” The black roots were widely used by Native Americans for apotropaic magic and other ritual purposes. The entire plant is toxic.
Dear ruefulness, dear regret, I’ve rounded
the bend and here you are again in the clearing,
each tree planted like a taper in a circle
of melted ground. How deep are your roots,
really? The sky’s chipped at the rim like an old
piece of crockery— its white band milky,
its saucer mismatched. Where’s the calico
napkin appliqued with cats? I’ve forgotten
if I’ve set the table for dinner or for tea.
Perhaps it’s not too late to take a long
vacation by the sea. A fleet of sandpipers
and gulls holds the rocks at siege. The water
asks over and over, What is the heart?
You know it makes a sound louder
than any internal combustion engine.
Here I am waiting for the skin of leaves
to split open; waiting for lightning
to marble in the marrow.
—Luisa A. Igloria
02 17 2011
In response to today’s Morning Porch entry (and to another response-poem, by Dale Favier)
No snakes climb out of the pipes
or drop from the ceiling into our laps.
No blind men playing harmonica on the corner
break the crusts from their eyes and leap
with joy. No saint comes down the alleyway,
clad in camel-cloth and ashes, offering bread
smeared with honey and locusts. What hand
looms large, lettering this wilderness?
My prayers are stones and I’m so tired
I want to lay my head down by the water.
There’s a river of fire between the trees.
There’s the deep blue sky gashed
by a cursive of crows. And all I want
is for that heart caught in snow
and ice to flower, flower.
—Luisa A. Igloria
02 16 2011
In response to today’s Morning Porch entry.
Golden Ragwort by Jennifer Schlick (click to see larger)
Packera aurea (A.K.A. Senecio aureus)
Golden groundsel, butterweed,
life root, squaw weed,
uncum root, waw weed,
false valerian, cough weed,
female regulator, cocash weed,
staggerwort, ragweed:
many were the handles
for which you once were plucked,
used as a uterine tonic, an ingredient
in Lydia Pinkham’s famous compound
(mostly alcohol) for “hysteria,”
feeble appetite, irregular menses,
cramps & backaches, prescribed
even to men for breathing troubles,
swollen testicles or sore perineum—
until the discovery of alkaloids
that can damage the liver.
“Life root,” indeed!
Now you spread in peace again
through wet woods & meadows.
Your small suns open
only for the cinnabar moth,
who mines your heart-shaped leaves
with her terrible eggs.
“Now if it be true that the living come from the dead,
then our souls must exist in the other world, for if not,
how could they have been born again?”
—Socrates
Here’s sunrise, a stain on the western ridge:
errant strip of color someone has stirred,
some buried memory. In the distance,
a long whistle means a train is gliding
into the station, its zipper pulling away—
tracks from trees, trees from the oily
hemline of hills. Late stars flicker, pin
lights in a dim shop window. Just hours
ago, I wandered the aisles of an all-night
drugstore: in the toy section, old-fashioned
mason jars underneath whose lids thin wires
were bent and rigged to painted tin
butterflies. Pressed, the raised button
on the cover triggered convulsions along the line.
Sound of crinkled foil, sound of wings against
mesh screens. Even the soul could not live
in this simulacrum of air. All night I saw
blue and yellow outlines scissor through
the curtains. All night I tended the jangly pulse
at the base of my sleeping daughter’s throat.
—Luisa A. Igloria
02 15 2011
In response to today’s Morning Porch entry.
“…And everich of hem did his besy cure
Benygnely to chese or for to take,
By hir acord, his formel or his make.”
—Geoffrey Chaucer, “Parlement of Foules” (369-371)
In Cosmedin, Rome— in the Chiesa di Santa Maria,
a flower-wreathed skull sits preserved in a shrine
more ornate than any foil-covered box of candy—
that’s Saint Valentine himself, as the hand-lettered
strip of bandage across his brow proclaims.
“Protector of love,” martyr of Terni, he got
couples hitched at a time when (would you believe)
it was illegal to marry. The stories say he was “beaten
with clubs and stoned; and when that failed to kill him,
he was beheaded” outside the Porta del Popolo.
Poor Val, his aquiline nose may even have been broken.
But he seems to have kept most of his teeth, which rest
(some gaps between, though they say that can be sexy)
just inside the edge of the reliquary frame. His gold box
resembles a 1930′s RCA TV, or the consoles in the Dr. Who
episode where an alien disguised as a woman is trying
to take over the world. Even here, the theme is love
and monsters; or love and sex, lust, appetite, desire–
everything you want but can’t actually have, so naturally
you want it even more. On the eve of the festival
of Lupercalia, young Roman boys and girls wrote
their names on slips of paper and put them into jars;
then they held a grand old raffle to find out who
they’d walk hand in hand with the next day, share
a honeyed sweetmeat with, maybe spoon a little,
golden in the olive grove. Did the trees make noise
under the cloudless sky, touching in ways we
rarely do? Everyone loves a little sugar every
now and then; why not them too? Cushioned
in red and gold, the saint would understand
the meanings of excess: candygrams and chalky
conversation hearts (“Sweet Dreams”, “URDGR8ST”,
“Be Mine”, “Big Hugs”), little mounds of milk
chocolate goopy in their maraschino centers,
cardboard boxes lettered with their swirly
tic-tac-toe of X’s and O’s; lacy thong, slinky
sarong, velvet codpiece. Welt of pepper and spice,
ascetic stripe of sea-salt on the hungry tongue.
—Luisa A. Igloria
02 14 2011
In response to today’s Morning Porch entry.
A poetic celebration of non-romantic love and close friendship. Contributors include: Augustine, Brenda Clews, Jason Crane, Risa Denenberg, Ann Drysdale, Kate Fitzpatrick, Stephanie Goehring, Howie Good, Uma Gowrishankar, Joanne Hudson, Pat Jones, Sid Kemp, Maria Koliopoulou, W.F. Lantry, Ami Mattison, Carolee Sherwood, Paul Stevens, and Marly Youmans.
Podcast feed | Subscribe in iTunes
“The Starry Fool” by Marly Youmans originally appeared in Mezzo Cammin, “Epic” by Stephanie Goehring in 42opus, and “L’Hirondelle” by W.F. Lantry in Damazine. The music in “Veils to Clothe Venus” by Brenda Clews is by Buz Hendricks, used by permission. The podcast theme music is “Le grand sequoia,” by Innvivo (Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike licence).
The New York Times: “When Democracy Weakens”
Bob Herbert wishes Americans would take a cue from the Egyptians.
NPR: “An Immigrant’s Quest For Identity In The ‘Open City’”
I have been reading the glowing reviews for Teju Cole’s new novel with great pleasure, but it was especially fun to hear this interview come on the radio while I was kneading bread this morning. I was all like, “Hey, I know that guy! I’ve published his stuff at Via Negativa and qarrtsiluni!” So good to see a member of the old blog neighborhood make it big.
Grant Hackett: Monostich Poet blog
I don’t link Grant’s poems in the Smorgasblog because they’re too short to excerpt — a monostich is a one-line poem and he excels at them. I don’t know anyone who packs more mystery and suggestiveness into such a small space. He used to blog at Falling Off the Mountain, but took that site offline late last year. On the new site, he seems to post at the rate of about one or two poems a day.
Moving Poems forum: “What comes first, the video or the poem?”
Check out the variety of responses to my question from videopoets at all skill levels. I am going to have to remember to throw out questions to the community like this more often.
Voice Alpha: “To read or to recite? Dramatic versus Epic”
Dick Jones — poet, musician and retired drama teacher — wades into the debate about how best to present one’s poems to a crowd. Surprisingly, perhaps, given his background, he comes down rather decisively on the side of reading.
Call for Submissions: Festival of the Trees 57 with Rebecca in the Woods
Rebecca is one of the best young naturalist-bloggers out there, so we are very lucky to have her as host of the next Festival of the Trees.
Linebreak: “To Failure:” by Christopher Ankney
My first reading for Linebreak, a magazine I admire. Don’t know the poet from Adam, but I know the subject all too well! It was fun to learn the poem this way, over a series of half a dozen takes, even if I was a bit too tired to give it as good a reading as it deserves.
BBC Earth News: “Madagascar’s elusive shell-squatting spider filmed”
Speaking of failure, check out the first spider in this clip from the redoubtable David Attenborough & co. (a win for photography and evolution). Then there’s…
“Bizarre mammals filmed calling using their quills”
Tenrecs! Stridulating!
(Watch on YouTube)
In a rare trip off the mountain, a chance remark at the coffee shop led me to discover that I was surrounded by fellow kale afficionados, and one of them later sent me the link to this video. What used to be an obscure vegetable back when we started growing it in the garden in the early 70s has now apparently achieved cult status. Who’d have thunk it?
Dear arrhythmia, dear perennially
side-stepping, asynchronous and rapid
tachycardia, I’ve learned not so much
to fancy up my footwork than to fake
a passable improv: not even time
to do my nails, check my hair or lines
for an audition call— but here we are
again in the molasses of a telenovela,
gliding from moments of near hysteria
then shimmying to the Copacobana
as doors revolve like windmills
in the background… And it’s true, then,
what they say about you: how you break
knees, break hearts, and then ask
Will you dance? Sometimes I want to stop,
just be the wallflower, enjoy the view— be
the one the waiters come and tend to,
their silver trays bobbing with fancy,
pileated tufts of napkins. Oh but I’ve never
known the ease of a downier partner:
only you dealing and dealing it out;
sometimes, more than I can muster.
—Luisa A. Igloria
02 13 2011
In response to today’s Morning Porch entry.
