In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.
Poet Luisa A. Igloria (Poetry Foundation web page, author webpage ) was recently appointed Poet Laureate of the Commonwealth of Virginia (2020-2022). She is Co-Winner of the 2019 Crab Orchard Open Competition in Poetry for Maps for Migrants and Ghosts (Southern Illinois University Press, September 2020). She is the winner of the 2015 Resurgence Prize (UK), the world’s first major award for ecopoetry, selected by former UK poet laureate Sir Andrew Motion, Alice Oswald, and Jo Shapcott. She is the author of What is Left of Wings, I Ask (2018 Center for the Book Arts Letterpress Chapbook Prize, selected by former US Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey); Bright as Mirrors Left in the Grass (Kudzu House Press eChapbook selection for Spring 2015), Ode to the Heart Smaller than a Pencil Eraser (Utah State University Press, 2014 May Swenson Prize), Night Willow (Phoenicia Publishing, 2014), The Saints of Streets (University of Santo Tomas Publishing House, 2013), Juan Luna’s Revolver (2009 Ernest Sandeen Prize, University of Notre Dame Press), and nine other books. She is a member of the core faculty of the MFA Creative Writing Program at Old Dominion University which she directed from 2009-2015; she also teaches classes at The Muse Writers’ Center in Norfolk. In 2018, she was the inaugural Glasgow Distinguished Writer in Residence at Washington and Lee University. When she isn’t writing, reading, or teaching, she cooks with her family, knits, hand-binds books, and listens to tango music.
A HUNGRY HEART
And I have only my hungry heart, my/ wobbly heart: I cart it everywhere I go.
1.
It is when things are exactly
where they ought to be, that
you begin to wonder where
you might have lost yourself
or found yourself needing
all these quicksilver thoughts
of longing, of desire pulsing
through your hungry heart,
your wobbly heart, and you
wander among the debris
of past lives, old loves, fallen
dreams in crumbled houses,
carting your throbbing heart
through every dark chasm
posted with forbidding signs:
“no hearts accepted here”,
and bravely you walk away,
still carting your defiant heart
through uncharted streets of
lost loves and wanton desire.
2.
Now, you find yourself lulled
in a spring garden as a flower
stripped of its honey colours,
a mere tendril, a bud worn
as some valediction, and still
you dream and chase the
will-o’-the-wisp, and cart your
heart, your wobbly heart,
to parts unknown where signs
forbid the chastened lover.
—Albert B. Casuga
04-26-11
Back to read this for the fourth time. It’s such a distressing poem. I want to hammer on it and talk back.
& at the same time it’s so cool and poised and almost matter-of-fact, that there’s no arguing with it. But I would, if I could.
A fourth read is complimentary, indeed. Distress, as in reacting to an old grandmother counsel one against falling in love more often than being coy. Thanks for the good read, Dale.