If the woodpeckers call
back and forth to each other at
the wood’s edge, why should rain
not come with the gecko’s call?
If the seeds of sorrow are sown
in the moment of joy, where are
the explosions of joy on the horizon,
from the multitude of sorrows sown?
—Luisa A. Igloria
12 15 2011
In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.
Low afternoon sunlight bathes the end of a log — a tree brought low by the ice storm of ’05 and cut to clear the trail. Walking with others, I have time only for one quick snap in passing. What attracts my eye? The red, the green, the pattern of white lichen. Later, looking at it on the screen, I realize that in its slow smolder of decay it has gathered all the colors of the Christmas season (though our only white so far has shrunk to a small patch of snow on the north side of the spruce grove). And looking at the lichen, I think: teeth. Big back molars, packed tight in an impossibly capacious jaw.
I have too much to chew on this month. Beyond a certain point, the chewed becomes the chewer, setting the gut to permanent churn. At the merest slight we light up like Christmas, but for the wrong reasons. Combustion comes in many forms, and some give off more heat than light. Starved of oxygen, for example, is possible to smolder in such a way that one turns almost entirely to charcoal — no ash for de-icing or the caustic lye, nothing but the fabled anti-gift, a stocking stuffer from Krampus.
Hardness is the earth’s own lament,
refusal its punishment. See
how the small birds tremble
in drab grey-white, how they call
in small pebbled relay among halberd-
leaved tear-thumb, asters bordering
the ditch like fringed husks of stars—
Who would not be moved by their darting
and pleading, their search for a soft
place to burrow among the stones.
In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.
I don’t look at my video stats very often, so I had no idea until tonight that the most-watched videopoem I’ve ever made is also my longest: “Fly Away Home,” for a poem I wrote called “Harlequin Ladybird,” has been played 915 times, despite being over five minutes long.
As I note on Vimeo, it’s as much a music video as it is a videopoem. I imagine the music (by Polish composer efiel on Jamendo) has a lot to do with its relative popularity. One thing I don’t mention in the notes is that I subsequently realized the last phrase of the poem — “small, bad heart” — was involuntarily plagiarized from Louise Glück. Which isn’t a big enough deal to make me want to take down the video altogether, but it will certainly keep me from ever adding it to a print collection.
In second place, with 648 plays, is the video I made with my translation of Lorca’s “Gacela of Unforeseen Love,” starring a housefly.
I chalk that up to the popularity of Lorca and searches for that poem by name. It also helps that both videos have been up for almost two years. In two more years, I imagine my videos for poems by Emily Dickinson, Pablo Neruda and Gabriela Mistral will lead the pack.
Just to keep this in perspective, my most popular video upload of any kind is “Argument with a Porcupine,” which has been viewed 129,806 times on YouTube.
And just to keep that in perspective, I call your attention to “Porcupine who thinks he is a puppy!“: 2,474,271 views. Which may not have anything to do with poetry, but warms my heart nonetheless. Hurrah for porcupines!
you’ve scraped me clean to the bottom
of the bowl, where the flint-
edge of spoon rasps against dented
metal, and lunar hollows give off
a cold and mineral light. From here,
the sky’s a bordered rim the eye
might skim, for the skin of passing clouds.
Now I’m anxious even for the sound of wind
or rain, the branches’ waking rattle,
downpour of warm remembered sun;
then by degrees the rising sap
like honey in the veins of trees.
In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.
One day when I was 14
I found a ground
beetle under my bed—
glossy black,
fast & furtive.
I grabbed a thick book
& beat it to death.
I liked beetles but
this one frightened me.
It belonged under rocks
in the forest, not two feet
below my pillow,
burrowing through the carpet
while I slept.
My voice was changing.
The beetle disposed of,
life went on as before
but in a lower key.
You’ve been here before, walked this path
under branches hung with brilliant rust
and yellow— all those moldering leaves
like torches lit for their glow, like lamps
whose wicks are dipped in tallow. For company,
only the nearby gurgle of a stream, the even
crunch of gravel. Solitude’s silver and blue
arrow streaks toward you, lodging like a piece
of ice under your skin. Fragments of salt
that lace the wind. Memory of others
come and gone, their spirits nudging you
toward wherever it is you need to be.
In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.
Are words more beautiful than things? In El
Greco’s painting of The Annunciation, the angel
in the gold-colored tunic is half-kneeling, half-
floating on a puff of cloud. The woman appears
to be in a scriptorium, though there is a marble
courtyard with a view of columns beyond, and a sky
chalked with white and blue. No oversized stars
reel yet in the dark, no hills ringed with the arms
of trees gilded with frost; no stumbling pilgrims
following the strange compulsion to search for
omens in the deepest part of the year. According to
tradition, he says to her: Be not afraid. Think about it:
how it is completely plausible she might have wanted
to bolt, run away to hide in the kitchen, in the fields
only stretching like eternity. But here is the moment,
clear and still: her hand pressed to her heart, thin
strip of crimson ribbon marking her place in the book.
In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.
I’m not sure why I did this. I don’t actually celebrate the winter solstice in any way; I just like having a tree up this time of year. And since my parents have decided to bail on Christmas, that meant I could raid their stash of ornaments and lights.
Continue reading
Let’s fold and crease the paper, once here and once over. Remember cutting half the outline of a paper doll then watching a chain of them shake loose in the air? Identical in bobbed hair and pleated skirts, hand in hand in hand, soon nubile-breasted. On the edge of the lake, a dark-haired woman walks barefoot, skimming stones and feeding bread to the swan draped around her shoulders. Winged silhouettes are always harder to do, so this time let’s try sheets of ice shaved into snowflakes. Cut out the shapes of prisms through which the light can fan, clear and cold, feathered lace against the skeletal branches. Hold them up against window glass: such flimsy tokens that we offer at the turnstile, as we pass.
—Luisa A. IgloriaIn response to an entry from the Morning Porch.
