Author: Luisa A. Igloria

We learned about the world
through stories— how a jealous 
sky swallowed a woman’s ornaments
and a beast rose from the waters
to steal the lustre of the moon.

We threw ourselves
into the only weapons we knew—
Our bodies, dancing old rituals,
clanging the music we fashioned 
from metal and fire.

Astrologers point out planets 
aligning. Stars die and give birth
to new ones. Craning our necks to see, 
do we wonder if they ever want to see us?
When it rains, we put pails underneath 

leaks in the ceiling. We open the lids 
of metal drums, so they can store water
for the dry seasons. Birds rise in droves, 
their dark bodies practicing their own 
cursives on a slate. 

When a shingle in the roof
of heaven comes undone, we know 
we'll hear the echo of thunder, 
that voice saying the world and all
in it remains unfinished.

Each time any of us comes back
from the brink, what kind of triumph
is it? Is it the soul or the muscles
trained a lifetime to hold things in,
to burble and breathe under water?
And those of us who have pulled
someone back, or stood in a hallway
after the chaos has settled, how
did we find the strength to return 
again and again to this work? 
What made it possible to steady 
our voices, our hands, to open 
the purse-strings a little wider, 
a little closer to the bottom? 
We're taught love is generous. 
Or it gives without making a tally, 
doing up sums. But love is also 
the crumpled bag under the sink, 
every shred of Kleenex in the bin, 
bottles of Acetaminophen+
Caffeine, endless hours before dawn 
wondering what helped and what didn't. 
Sometimes this is called patience. 
Other times, watchfulness and waiting. 
Maybe it's the soul, unfurling damp 
wings over everything it can reach, 
or the body stretching before what 
it believes could be the last long 
stretch it can run without stopping. 
    

It settles behind your eyes

It rests its forehead against the door jamb 
and listens to the hum of laundry machines

It's the sound of a spoon 
absently circling the rim of a cup

The residue under fingernails that speaks of trying

The way branches droop even after they 
have given up their fruit

The inside of a coat pocket 
where receipts have been stuffed

The pot of mint on the sill cranes toward light
that only partially filters through blinds

Still, you want to praise it for bringing you 
back into the smallness of a moment

Not asking to witness, not speaking in tongues

Proof of how you train your body toward something 
so real it leaves an undeniable mark 

This is how the body speaks— of its thirst or hunger,
its pangs wrought by memory or a full bladder rousing you 
from sleep at 3 AM. The house breathes the way some places do, 
a kind of engine humming in the background. You walk downstairs
to the kitchen in your bare feet for a drink of ice water, then 
give in to the urge to snack on leftover dim sum from dinner 
at Jade Villa just hours ago— four round tables lined up 
to make one long one, talk mingled with the smells of leek, 
chili oil, pressed duck, and the deep orange clutch of chicken 
feet marinated in soy and jalapeno, steamed until any memory 
of them scrabbling through gravel has melted almost unctuously 
away; and one of the students who won the essay prize at school 
is shyly dipping her soup spoon into a bowl of noodles 
and the other is cheerfully and efficiently clicking 
her chopsticks from one dish to another, everyone else 
reaching in, too, for flavor. The poets on the farthest 
end of the table are laughing and the visiting scholar 
on the other end is trading jokes with the futures trader, 
and no one quite notices when the waiters come to fill 
and replenish cups of water and tea. Your colleague 
is rhapsodizing over the thick clouds of chicken and corn 
in the soup, and you give your whole mind to all of this, 
for here as in the world attention is a practice that asks 
nothing from you except to be here. When you walk back
into the night and the air is cooler and all are hugging 
and waving goodbye or someone is suggesting you find 
somewhere else to go and have margaritas, you know 
the world is waiting to slip into your mouth again— 
another kind of communion, the kind you have 
every day, the kind that stains your fingers and leaves 
a slight film of oil, even now in this kitchen where, 
standing barefoot on cold tile, already you are chewing 
on the future. You know you will be tested by one more 
terrible thing or another, just as Rilke said the purpose 
of life is to be defeated by greater and greater things— 
let's say love or unavoidable circumstance— which molds you 
and gives you the chance to do this work for which all other 
is but a preparation. Not despair, but training; the practice 
of lifting what you can, then being lifted by what you cannot. 
Days and nights feed you so you can wake and feed others, 
so you give in again, opening your mouth to say yes.

one of us sends a link to this article.
 
And when next we meet for our regular
cocktails and conversation, we share

our amusement over bowls of mussels
steamed in wine and garlic, hunks

of fresh bread on the side. At last,
recognition that women who know what

they want aren't fanged or intimidating. 
One of us says casually, between bites— 

We don't really want to train anyone 
how to be emotionally mature, or have

to explain what we want, period. And so,
if they've finally learned what we know,

well and good. We want companionship, 
a voice responding in conversation not

in grunts but thoughtfully. Someone 
who doesn't assume we'll naturally 

remember birthdays, call plumbers, doctors 
or teachers, absorb every emergency like 

a sponge. Perhaps it's true that someone
younger might now be wise enough to know

they have their own growing up to do. 
Though some of us are close to retirement

and a few have actually crossed that line, 
we are not old-old, which is important.

We're not afraid of being fully ourselves.
Tired of following protocol for its sake, 

we've arrived at our certainties, 
embrace our desire, enjoy the view.  

We drove one day years ago 
to La Trinidad, where a near-toothless 
woman who could see the future lived, 
surrounded by farmyard— heads 
of cabbage and cauliflower, bean rows, 
creeping vines of sweet potato on one side 
of the house where tin washbasins leaning 
against the wall reflected the sun’s rays 
like the two giant radars on Mirador Hill, 
built in 1900 and used for weather 
observation and typhoon forecasting. 

The clairvoyant did not take 
money for payment, only accepting 
a bag of groceries or bottles of cerveza 
which we put into her leathered hands 
before being ushered into her kitchen. 
I don’t know what things my mother wanted 
to learn about the days or years ahead, but 
she was told barren women had gone to seek 
advice and months later, conceived a child. 

For other less pressing needs like fair 
weather, no rain for important occasions, 
it was the nuns we went to, in their Convent 
of Perpetual Adoration. We wrote our petitions 
on little slips of paper then slid them through 
a window with a grille, along with a carton of eggs. 
The eggs were no longer warm from the hen, but 
they were speckled and brown and each could fit 
and be carried in the palm of your hand, 
then broken carefully on the rim of a bowl 
so the good sisters could bake bread.  

What I learned was this: we trust 
in whoever is willing to listen. Everyone 
and everything prays for something— the soil 
for rain, fruit for sun, vines for something 
to cling to. My mother for the body's doors to open 
or close in certain ways. When we kneel and 
offer what we can, it means the future can 
still be placated, can still somehow be known 
though nothing about our days seems to change. 

You ask if this    hurt is permanent 
   if recurrence         is the only language
allowed us       in our passage   
    Like you    I think certain    days feel 
finished before they even        begin
    while      others unfold more slowly 
I wanted to say    even the fields
    that look raked and empty     hold on
to something         Roots    stones   a memory
   of water glimpsed as a drying    puddle   
The body remembers how      to keep going 
    Day shift    to night shift while
the mind finds the cruise    control settings
    I want to say          it won't always 
be like this   but we know the difference       
    between now      and tomorrow  the day
after and the day      after    How life    
    is a management of moments   even those
that bear  down as the eye     of a storm

A hill station is a colonial construct.

A hill station means rest and recreation, which are also colonial concepts.

The hill station could only come into existence when the notion of indigenous land ownership was rendered invalid.

A hill station is a vision of utopia breaking through the tropical heat and swarms of mosquitoes.

A hill is smaller than a mountain but larger than an ant hill.

Station has a kind of military ring; or it can mean signpost, which can also mean the place where someone is tied or whipped like an animal.

A hill station is a dream of living close to the clouds.

Clouds are formations of precipitate, meaning they have formed by accumulation and are only waiting for an inciting instance to release their weight.

In the hill station, landscape is mapped by functions not native to the land.

What a surprise to discover underneath the hill station, stores of silver and copper and gold.

   

is what they call artists who didn't go
to art school or take a single formal
art lesson in their lives. And yet
visions in their minds took shape
in clay or burst open with oils 
on canvas. Grandma Moses pieced 
her quilt-square landscapes, Van Gogh 
his bending wheat fields and vibrant 
yellow-green interiors. Fingers   
listened to every shape and shadow 
in the world. A tarnished teakettle 
on a windowsill is no accessory— only 
part of the equipment of daily life. 
Tea sets with missing cups. Mismatched
plates, silverware from yard sales;
armchairs covered with oily antimacassars
pressed to stiffness from the light 
of countless afternoons. Isn't this how 
you've always learned— figuring it out 
one trial at a time, as if from memory 
before it becomes memory? The lesson:
you prepare for joy the way you prepare 
for sorrow. How to stand without flinching
as orchids and velvet moths circle your head
and a black monkey coils a necklace of thorns 
around your neck, from which a dead hummingbird
with wings outspread now dangles like a pendant.   

~ after "Self Portrait with Thorn Necklace and 
Hummingbird," Frida Kahlo (1940)

My beginning poetry class is unsure
about tercets and triplets. They're both 
stanzas with three lines. The difference 

is that all three lines of a triplet rhyme. 
I ask, Who has triplets in their family? 
The girl who always sits front, center, 

raises her hand; she's one of a set 
of triplets. She looks slightly confused 
when I ask, Which one of you is here?