Author Archives: Luisa A. Igloria

Boatman who will take me
through the mist and rain, I have ready
a piece of bread, a little copper

coin for the meter
of your time, for passage through
those treacherous channels—

And I know today
could be the day, but my heart’s in shreds
from the brightness of yellow umbrellas

on the sidewalk, from Louie’s
Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off
brassy on the radio And oh! If we

ever part, Then that might break my heart!
And my heart’s a knob of sugared ginger
warm in my mouth, my heart’s

the room I’ve yet to dust, polish,
put in order, for all my loves who are coming
any minute now to while away the hours—

In response to Via Negativa: Feast.

the press of dark upon the eyelids—
and in the moment just after they open, the film
that shimmers, faint, around each thing.

In response to Via Negativa: Ad Man.

Rumors descend

That cloud
like dirty milk

or mist on glass

Under the stairs
fold in

Be still

The quiet
in our ears

grown much

too loud
Wasps & hornets

lie down

on the porch
Every tendril

quivering

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

This morning, rinsing a porcelain bowl before setting it
on the dishwasher rack along with others, I notice
the tiniest fracture— thin as a fingernail tip,

but how long before it widens, before a larger piece
shears off the surface, a plane like ice loosened
by gravity or the rinse cycle’s warmth?

In Fort Santiago, it’s said there is preserved
a part of the hero’s vertebra: chipped by one
bullet in the hail that guardia civil fired

from their rifles to end his life, just as he
twisted around to die facing his executioners.
The Roman poet Juvenal declared, Fortune can,

for her pleasure, fools advance, And toss them
on the wheels of Chance— Do you see here
how he refused? The voice of the revolution

gathers, grows louder than butterflies’ wingbeats.
Fissure, rent in the fabric, long ripple in the grass:
nothing too small to launch against history.

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

(Rosa canina assisiensis)

A jute robe is itchy. And so one day, the saint
feels the urge to abandon monastic life. If only
he were a tree, a strip of lettered wood nailed
to a crossroads sign; something else, anything
other than this silence among the doves, duties
beautifully illustrated by the missalette. If only
he were a sailor bound for a year’s ship journey
to the far ends of the earth, or even a scarecrow
flapping its tin-can arms in the middle of a field.
At the height of great feeling or pain, the body
has been known to forget itself. Do his eyes roll back
into his head, does he break into a sweat and twitch
like a lit swath of firecrackers? What are the cries
that escape his mouth? In the humid night, open
your windows after sex to find the air saturated
with the rumor of flowers: the ones with thorns
are said to have the sweetest scent. It’s not hard
to imagine what it’s like to be seized by fragrance,
to give oneself to the darkness; to leap
into the bramble bushes fully clothed.

In response to Via Negativa: In Partibus Infidelium.

Rumors abound as citizens wait for voting results. A metal box meant for a village in the north has found its way to a town in the south; none of these votes will be counted. The new king is naked and mad; or he has ADHD; or he is autistic. Or he is a former actor who cannot distinguish between reality and a B-movie script. The old king has been dead more than two decades; he lies in state, frozen in a crypt, pumped full of formaldehyde and surrounded by satin flowers. The ex-queen squints at him through the glass panels and plants a coral-lipsticked kiss closest to the side of his face. She returns to her walled-in estate and sighs, flexing her size 8 1/2 feet encased in Italian leather. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. Orchids sway in the breeze and the ocean blinks, brighter than cut sapphires. Maids bring her sparkling coconut water and ice. Someone turns on the plasma screen TV but her eyes are not what they used to be. Even in a country where she might run out of tears to cry for the very poor who are so very many, she believes there are still pockets of hope. Her son the senator has promised to join her for dinner. Her daughter the governor no longer hates her as she used to in her teens. See? she wants to say to the voices who come to taunt her in dreams. In the end, all will be well. The ones who have truly suffered will get their just rewards. Heaven after all is a dynasty where only the good can live forever.

In response to Via Negativa: Heaven.

“It’s harder to practice that tender emptiness of forbearance, that aches and yearns and still lets go, and that can recognize and hold the aching of others as well.” ~ seon joon

I think of their assorted quarrels through the years—
mother-sister-aunt-grandmother: the constant drama

of porcelain cracked and strewn on hardwood floor or
kitchen tile; names and insults hurled that sailed

through early mornings like jets of hot water
flung from coffee-pots and always found their mark;

bruise in the joint, their point of tension, their central
subject pain and desire. This grandmother lived with us

shortly after my father— her favorite and only son—
insisted he loved this farmer’s daughter enough

to marry her in church, before a throng of haughty relatives.
There are pictures, yes, of arras, veil, and cord.

And see in the background? The younger sister with the veil?
That is my mother too. We all kept house together, she

most of all, ladle constantly in hand; pot on the boil,
salt in the water. Then me in the oven for everyone

to fawn over and fondle, plot a future for. And this
grandmother is the same I tell those stories of,

that you still can hardly believe: how she slept
between the two of them that first night in their

marriage bed, how she parted the curtains of her room
to glare at mother’s lady friends when they might come

to call. God rest the souls of those who’ve gone ahead:
their hot angers finally assuaged, all their poor or lavish,

restless or unrequited loves absolved of any imperfection;
their cries and voices stilled in soft pillows of earth.

In response to thus: such tender emptiness.

These are the words used by a woman in my yoga class
to describe intensity of feeling: the kind that is
untempered and so always burns too much, too fast,
too hot; the kind that does not seem to understand

you can’t just drive a fist into the nearest wall,
scream I quit (or just scream and scream) in the middle
of a crowded restaurant as silverware and chairs
clatter to the floor, then run off sobbing into the darkness

without any sense of where to go— But it is important to know
that this same flaming heart is not exactly the opposite of balance,
or more precisely that balance is not indifference nor the negation
of any feeling at all. I think I know what she might be trying to say:

which is perhaps the recognition that rage and joy, despair
and soaring hope, are faces of the same goddess dancing
on a bed of burning coals, her naked feet not flinching,
her million golden arms circling and lifting, then lowering

and still. Everything in between, I don’t need to be told,
is suffering. And I think, didn’t I cut myself open in just
the same way when I was young, didn’t I find the world
unbearable, didn’t I want to run away or throw myself

on some pyre of oblivion for the sake of wearing
the reddest, most radiant welt on my sleeve— my anger,
my helplessness and pain, my tenderness and loneliness
for the world to acknowledge? One afternoon

in college, I remember telling my philosophy teacher
(whose mind I greatly admired) as he shared an umbrella
and we walked to class in a downpour how I couldn’t
stand people in general. I no longer know what prompted that,

but now I flush, realizing that he looked at me with genuine
kindness and not the pity or contempt I thought was surely
the only thing his open face could signify. Miserable
after class, I suffered in silence from that unguarded

disclosure and sat with others in the damp courtyard,
only half listening as my peers tossed back their Breck-
shampooed hair, volleyed phrases like dialectical
materialism in between puffs from clove cigarettes

then launched into their usual rants against society,
the sham government and its puppets, the whole petty-bourgeois-
bureaucratic-capitalist machinery. Who was it started poking
randomly at a wasp’s nest in the hedge, among the kalachuchi?

I wanted to walk away, wanted to yell at them to stop,
but also I wanted to watch for the inevitable— for the insects
stung to high aggression to emerge in a fist-shaped cloud:
wildly pulsing like a heart, unmistakeable in their raw anger.

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

bright and hot like molten silver, splashed citrus
on tiles of the Turkish café where women in black
aprons bear trays with samovars and cups of tea

and coffee under the trees, glasses of clinking ice—
And though I might have said so a few anguished times
in the past, I do not want to die tomorrow: I know
I have to sometime, but hold on, not just yet:

for there is a sliver of fragrance
I cannot place— or are those ripe mangos
on the counter? But really, I cannot die today
or tomorrow unless I know what it is exactly,

if not approximately; what has turned my head
just now, away from any of the mercurial
self-absorptions of the moment, away
from minor aches and pains and worries

that must pale when reckoned against the vast,
incomprehensible mystery of the universe—
This light alone, this sky, almost enough
by itself, as if bombs did not explode

in cities daily, turning what they touch
to fire, to ashes, skin grafts and phantom
limbs— What’s death if all is change?
What’s life if not mercurial change?

In response to Via Negativa: Shore Leave.

On every street, news of a death: often a child, often a girl, but even the old; even animals, stray or feathered or penned. It was the middle of the war; or several wars. No one can really remember now. All we know is that the angel of dark omens, whose name is interchangeable with others we can’t even speak, returns in the night to mark each door of the unfaithful with a sign. What sign? Some say the blood of an animal, some say a crescent nicked sharp into posts with the point of a curved fingernail. Plague and boils. Golf ball-sized hail that bends the good wheat and the crops of yellow corn. Waves of ice the winds push ashore, splintering with the sound of onrushing trains. But what does it mean to be unfaithful? The children go out to hunt for frogs or locusts in irrigation ditches. If their hunger is wrong, then are the well-fed merchants saints? Who are those men who fold their gold-ringed fingers and watch from their offices in the sky as buildings collapse? The waters turn red with blood or oil, the fish are dying or have died. Smoke and rubble from the factory, bones and garments of the dead. The flash of a hummingbird’s wings in a patch of herbed green is rare as the miracle of the Dark Madonna; she used to visit the poor in their hovels, bring her cool touch to their fevered aid. Night cloaks what comes, or returns. Who can explain the mud-smeared grass on the carved hems of the statue, buckled to its plinth? But we’ve lost count of the plagues. Remind me of stars. Every day, the cities shimmer with dust and heat. What falls, falls to the earth. Birds tumble out of the sky, still vaguely warm— as if they’d flown through a torch, as if a red welt flared out of their throats at the moment they perished.

In response to Morning Porch and Via Negativa: In the Hague (tanka).