Author: Luisa A. Igloria

Almost the longest night. 
Before real darkness arrives,
travelers set out.

*

Some leave, some arrive.
Flaggers waving lit-up wands
before the train station.

*

For a few moments,
the silhouettes of trees pressed
against the sky's burning throat.

*

Domestic vs. extravagant
space: a parade of placid geese
not yet leaning into the wind.

"Make no little plans."
         ~ attributed to Daniel H. Burnham


Like most everything else, it began
as a kind of dream. But grand, both

in scale and purpose. Each instance 
toward the manifestation of the dream 

became practice, a testing of principles 
first laid out on drafting paper, to bring
 
a sense of imperial order to the new colony 
in the East. Outward from the core of government

and the hub for commerce, a network of radiating
grids laid upon the wilderness. Here, the air

was bracing and fragranced with pine: a tonic
for those languishing in the provinces' 

tropical heat and malarial fevers. After 
the roads, a sanatorium was built on a hill: 

as charming as any in Simla or the Swiss alps, 
promising rest and recovery for the tubercular; 

fresh food and sunlight. A City Beautiful, 
whose monuments and buildings were scaffolds 

for ideals of civic and moral virtue— whose site,
cleansed of unsightly elements, would support survival,  

beckon trade, arrange functions for urban refinement and
aesthetics. An eye for immediate defense and a long future.  

flame-colored and obsidian spokes, trapped in marble orbs—

children flick these into a circle, serious but at play. 
 
to be ground-level, eye-level, and sense the tremble

of what you can't see beneath the only surface

you know: echos of passing traffic, daily clamor

from rushing to or from some important purpose.

describe this strange vessel which we inhabit,

our feet rushing to or from some important purpose.

you know the echoes of passing traffic, daily clamor

of what you can't even see beneath the only surface.

meet it ground-level, eye-level, sense the tremble

as childen flick globes into a circle, serious but at play.

flame-colored and obsidian spokes, trapped in marble orbs—

A high pile of pillows in bed, tufted 
mattresses, double-lined quilts. Side 

sleepers, face-down sleepers, flat-on-
the-back sleepers chasing the elusive

dream of sleep. But we lose count: sheep 
show no signs of quitting their high jump

marathons. The moon keeps training
its too bright spotlight through 

the window. Is it that we've grown  
too soft, too dependent on the idea 

of sinking as release? In one museum 
alcove, shelves of wooden and porcelain

takamakura, curved to cradle the neck and
head of the sleeper in such a way as to 

provide both a cooling effect and preserve
elaborate hairstyles. Perhaps they were on

to something, all those geishas and others
who lay on a mat and rested their heads

on these pillows, even while entertaining
the suitor that slid into the chamber at night,

having first slipped a poem of supplication
into the hands of a lady-in-waiting. Soft 

light from the moon filters through screens 
as though it did not have an iron core 

and a silicate mantle. When I purchase 
a sobakawa or pillow filled with buckwheat 

hulls, I'm thinking only of how tilting 
the chin upwards lifts the tongue away from 

the back of the throat, straightening the airway 
to better aid the flow of air into the lungs. 

Breathlessness can be involuntary; can 
also be the climax of heightened emotion.  

What you lose that someone else finds:
a note slipped into a fold in the cloth 
of time; another that slipped your mind.

Not the first time you feel as if blind,
flightless as a domesticated silk moth. 
But what you lose, someone else finds—

Luck had nothing to do with your state of mind.
Gravity pick machine, numbered balls in the broth 
of time. One after another they slip in your mind.

In thrift store bins, jumbles of left-behinds.
Atlases, maps; mismatched crystal, dish cloths.
What you lost that someone else finds

one bleak day, rummaging idly only to find
luck that flew out of your hands. It sprang forth 
out of time that for a moment slipped your mind.

One day, will you catch up to find
it accidentally broken, changed in worth?
What you lose that someone else finds
at another time slips into your mind.

Relief 
at finding a bathroom  
       
                    She says she feels
                 almost like a new person

If we are always tethered
to some idea or state

                          when are we most
                       ourselves

Pauses show
how silence is a palimpsest 

                   of meanings
                         The instability of

surfaces and intentions
At the end we are rendered into

              pulp and bone 
                   Only some things sift

completely into ash 
A practice in which the exterior
   
                                makes the interior
                             visible at last

Bodies of water with a menace of teeth
beneath the surface. 

Silvered arms of trees, unleafed, suggest 
a longing for taxonomy— 

How to remember origins, 
where we began. 

Trace them back to the root.

And farther back,
past the level of groundwater—

where there's less evaporation in deeper 
layers of soil. 

While we're asleep, our hearts 
send telegrams into the frozen skies.

The story is that an eagle mistook 
Aeschylus' bald head for a rock, 
and dropped a tortoise upon it. 
Did it shatter his skull or give
him a giant concussion? In any case,
he was supposed to have died instantly. 
Aeschylus, described as the father of 
tragedy, wrote: He who learns must suffer. 
And even in our sleep, pain that cannot 
forget falls drop by drop upon the heart. 
What of the tortoise— did it incur any 
injuries? In Maso Finiguerra's pen-and-
sepia-ink drawing of the scene, the idea 
of catastrophe makes a light impression. 
There's the writer, seated placidly by 
a stream, book on one knee, nodding off 
perhaps because of the leaves rustling in 
the grove. Strangely, the before and 
after of the turtle's fall is rendered 
in the drawing. One moment it hovers 
mid-air like a cartoon alien ship. 
In the next, it's landed smack 
on its back on the artist's head. 
The eagle itself wears an expression
of mild dismay, perhaps having just 
then realized it aimed at the wrong 
target. But such is the nature of tragedy— 
how the small, seemingly inconsequential 
thing leads to the undoing.

My student was talking about a film 
he described as terrible— about terrible 

human beings and how they did terrible things 
to each other, with no relief at the end. Not 

even a shot panning away from the broken window-
pane and into the shadowed hills, not even the noises 

animals make in the woods, magnified by the dark. Why 
even does it exist, he asked? why do people watch it? 

A movie can be like a poem, and a poem like a movie.
Nested images, personae, mood, some kind of setting. 

A poem can seem to have several movies nested inside 
it. But even the bleakest poem couldn't have complete

cynicism: otherwise, why was it turned into a poem?
Someone took all the koi out of the small pools

by the entrance to a battleship— nine guns, three
main gun turrets— now turned into a museum.  

We recall seeing the flash of orange and gold
scales as fish darted through moss-green water.

Chained by two anchors, the ship almost doesn't 
seem connected to something as terrible as war.

 
Behind the small folding bookshelf
in the guest room, I find three
canvasses. Each one bears traces 
of the start of a project— landscape, 
portrait, indeterminate still life; 
none of them complete beyond a first 
thin layer. I must have seen things 
then that beckoned as finished visions, 
but that now I must conjure if I want 
to complete them. Not to make 
a copy of the thing, but to manifest 
the heat that cut through the distance— 
wheel of yellow, bowl teeming with fruit; 
girl blowing a profusion of dandelion 
seeds into the wide open sky.