Lyric for Waking

Walk, said the master in that miracle of waking.
See. Or hear. In this labyrinth of partitions,
the merely unmiraculous voices clatter against each
other every morning. Theirs is the sound of copper,
of coins and cups with their sleeves of corrugated
cardboard. It is always warmer out than in. Or
in than out. On the street corner, where the kids
from the Governor’s School for the Arts are waiting
for the bus, one girl says to another, “Stimulants.
I just take stimulants.” A thread of green unravels
from the edge of my sweater. If I pulled it, wound it
into a ball, how far would it take me out of the cave?
The voices are also breathing. A warm wind blows
over the tops of trees in the city, flutters
like long ribbons of gauze— imagine them peeling
off our faces, startling like fish from the depths.

Luisa A. Igloria
10 19 2011

In response to an entry from The Morning Porch.

Abed

Even as a kid I never fully believed that sleep would come. I would lie awake waiting suspiciously. But under the covers I found a cozy chill, the warm dark of a toothless maw, the tick of my pulse, a sneeze & an ache, a day home from school, a place to breathe secrets or to weep, farts, fears, oblivion, the occasional breast feather of a goose, & a far-off love whose only unchanging characteristic was a penchant for walking everywhere in bare feet. Her name, I suppose, was Sleep.

Letter to S, with Fading Sunlight

The pebbly look of clouds at dusk, as though washed
limpid by sky clear as water.

And yes it’s hard for me to pass grocery store shelves
bedecked with sale signs, the sidewalk tables

at the corner cafe where tiny jugs for cream
and lidded bowls for sugar gleam whitely—

and not think of you wondering where next
month’s sustenance is coming from.

You say you take a cup of coffee in the morning,
bread, an egg sometimes. What else?

Someone points out the wild rose bushes
next to the broken-down wall, how they are

choked with ruffled blossoms—
everything sunlit, struck, blazoned

as the air above fills with indigo,
even as the light is dying.

Luisa A. Igloria
10 18 2011

In response to an entry from The Morning Porch.

Composition

Weekends, on the second floor of an old building at the end of the girls’ high school, the art teacher set wooden eggs and cylinders on a table by the window. Outside, spicy smells of wood-smoke: moldering leaves and dead twigs the gardeners raked into piles under the guava trees and burned. Think of light as a thin finger of ochre you halo around a shape, he said. Think of the angle as it hits the roof. Camouflaged in the trees, the shadow of a bird that looks upon the scene and sees the worm’s dark squiggle vanish into the dirt. And there are always ruins— the remnants of a bell tower in the foreground, the dark sweep of a volcano’s skirts steepling away in the distance; or something Grecian, cool skins of marble chipped in the places where they might have spoken or gestured or sung of flight— veined lip, suspended arm, knobs beneath the shoulder blades where wings were broken off. And always, stones strewn like jewels in the grass.

Luisa A. Igloria
10 17 2011

In response to an entry from The Morning Porch.

Occupied

As in: pre-.
The windy street-corner sermon,
the row of poplars waving
all their gold cards at once.

As in: otherwise-.
The gray-suited men
vanish like deer into November
the moment they stand still.

As in: certain territories
where the new occupants
must build a wall
to keep out the old.

And the space beside the wall
becomes a place to try one’s luck,
a place to wail.

Aerogramme

At first light, the mother with the bones grown brittle as a sparrow’s gets up to wash her face in the ancient sink. The ceilings are still damp from the last hurricane when the roof leaked in more places than she had pails for. On the wall, faint prints of mold shaped like whorls of ears— they listen as she prays aloud or talks to her husband who left this world more than a decade ago. Far away, farther than the sights of a bird perched on some craggy roost, I follow her every move in the falling-down house: my lips touching the rim of her coffee cup, my fingers opening and closing on the shapes of bread and cheese and fruit I want to heap upon her plate; the rings of silver and gold and pearl I want to slide back, lovingly, upon those thin, arthritic fingers which once sewed every seam of my world neatly into place.

 

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

Dear errant winds at dusk,

what do your long fingers
want to trace? Downtown,
at the intersection, a woman
walks with her marine in a dress
of gathered green. Its silk
petals flutter, and she
is an artichoke whose heart
shelters under overlapping
eaves, listening to the sounds
of the orchestra tuning up,
feathering; cradling the throats
of wood or brass for warmth;
and in the end, putting away
notated sheets, packing up
or dismantling instruments.

 

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

When does the hunger abate;

and in the woods, the downward flight of leaves, when does that cease? Even in dreams we move from window to window, waiting for morning, for the light-tipped crowbar to break the seal. We’ve eaten the bread, we’ve spooned the soup, we’ve burrowed into the bedclothes stripped of all but last night’s crumpled wings. Oh tender moths brushing against our sleep, even the gravel on the walk has multiplied. Harder than rain, I’ve prayed to the wish-granting gods though you see my lips forming only words like yolk or honey or dust, coin or sparrow or coal.

 

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

Lorelei


Watch on Vimeo

I hadn’t expected to be so impressed by Blackwater Falls. The West Virginia state park was just a place to camp, conveniently located close to two microbreweries in the towns of Thomas and Davis, not to mention a portion of the Monongahela National Forest which my hiking buddy Lucy and I planned to explore the next day. But we dutifully went down to look at the falls after pitching our tents, and were blown away (see the photo in my postcard). The tannic color of the falls (whence its name) was striking, and the location in a wooded gorge couldn’t have been more picturesque.

I made an audio recording of the falls, then switched to the video camera. At a certain point, Lucy — who has an excellent eye — drew my attention to the water spraying off a large boulder at the foot of the falls and suggested that might make a good film “for a poem by you or Nic S..” I saw immediately what she was talking about.

After several more days of relishing the unparalleled silence, breathtaking scenery and wilderness quality of the “Mon,” we made our way back to Central Pennsylvania, and I discovered to my shock that Via Negativa and all its associated sites had been down for two and a half days (sorry about that). But my gloom at the unreliability of my webhost was soon cancelled out by my excitement at seeing what other, more diligent online poets had been doing during my absence. Luisa had continued to write daily poems for publication on Via Negativa even without the benefit of access to The Morning Porch archives for prompts, which is especialy impressive considering all her other commitments. And Nic S., who had recently decided to close submissions to Whale Sound, her online audio archive of contemporary poetry, had just launched a new audio project called Pizzicati of Hosanna, featuring her readings of work by dead poets in English, French, Spanish and Italian. One poem, Neruda’s “Fábula de la sirena y los borrachos,” seemed like it might make a good fit for my waterfall footage.

I whipped up a fairly literal translation — good enough for subtitling, I thought. But finding the right soundtrack consumed quite a few hours more, using various search terms at Jamendo, ccMixter and Soundcloud. Part of the problem was I couldn’t decide on the mood I wanted to establish. But once it became clear it should be elegiac (rather than, say, angry or dissonant), I quickly found something I thought might work. I shared the result at a private Facebook group where a few of us aspiring videopoets critique each other’s work, and was encouraged by their positive reactions. Brenda Clews suggested I increase the sound of the falls after the poem ends. I decided to go a little further and include waterfall sound throughout the title and credits, using the higher-quality audio from my portable recorder rather than what was on the video.

Here’s my translation, for those with dial-up connections who don’t feel inclined to wait for the video to load:

Fable of the Siren and the Drunks
by Pablo Neruda

All those gentlemen were there inside
when she came in completely naked
they’d been drinking and they began spitting on her
fresh from the river she didn’t understand anything
she was a siren who’d gotten lost
insults streamed down over her smooth flesh
filth drenched her golden breasts
she didn’t know how to cry so she didn’t cry
she didn’t know how to put clothes on so she didn’t put clothes on
they branded her with cigarettes and charred corks
and laughed until they fell down on the bar room floor
she didn’t speak because she didn’t know how to speak
her eyes were the color of distant love
her arms were made of twin topazes
her lips were cut from coral light
and she went out that door as suddenly as she came
no sooner had she entered the river than she was clean
she shone like a white stone in the rain
and without looking back she swam anew
swam toward never again swam toward death

Listen to Neruda himself reading the poem at Palabra Virtual.

Incidentally, speaking of Brenda Clews, she’s just launched a weekly series of blog posts reviewing videopoems, “videopoem Fridays.” Here’s the first installment.

How I Came to Writing

In a faraway city in the mountains, monsoon
rains descend and it is soft typewriter sounds

on the roof all day and all night, rain
and fog all month; not a sliver of sun

returned, in a carriage or otherwise. Dark
pink bougainvillea blossoms give up

and plaster themselves closer to the wall.
Crevices flourish with signatures of moss.

They might not know it, but even they
have stories to tell. All is elegy,

departing or gone; incessant rain,
language the earth understands.

 

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.