Month: November 2011

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Homiletics

This entry is part 32 of 37 in the series Bridge to Nowhere: poems at mid-life

1.
To hold the attention of a Sunday
school class, my brother said
he once had to eat a piece of chalk.
He never said what the lesson was about,
just that the chalk was tasteless
& thoroughly indigestible.

2.
When Borges came to speak
at Penn State, he sat folded
into an easy chair on stage,
still as a lizard on a heat rock.
He quoted Basho to show
that metaphor isn’t essential—
the “ancient pond” haiku.
But as he delivered his pronouncements,
he kept smiling at something
three feet above our heads.
And seeing the smiles pass
across his blind face, we all
began to smile too,
pleased at our proximity
to such a famous solitude,
which we were sure
must’ve been flooded with light.

3.
I’ve kept all the glass ashtrays
from when I used to smoke, lovely
as the windows of a church
in which I can no longer kneel.
Has it really been 12 years?
Borges said: Life is a dream,
to which someone in the audience objected:
That’s a metaphor!
No, he intoned, it’s the truth.
And for some reason
everyone broke out laughing.

Based on this post from August 2009.

Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

Resistance

Imagine how long it took to form each
solid face of rock, those shoulders

hunched in grey-cloaked silhouette
against the coast— how long

wind and weather chipped away
(to flake, to rubble, and to grit)

what yet withstands the elements
and lodges in the flesh of the unshod

foot. Updrafts of air that wide-
winged birds will ride, alone

in so much space; cathedrals of fog,
buttressed above all that unrelenting

flint. And yet each loosened orb,
each pock-marked surface, moon-like,

gouged by water, wrapped in yellow strands
of kelp, scribes me with grainy hope.

—Luisa A. Igloria
11 03 2011

In response to an entry from The Morning Porch.

Thanks also to Beth Adams for the inspiration from some of her recent work.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Magic Carpet

This entry is part 33 of 37 in the series Bridge to Nowhere: poems at mid-life

On a windy day in March,
we stop at a Chevy dealership
near Orbisonia, Pennsylvania,
for a closer look at an enormous American flag
on a too-short pole. It seems intent
on demonstrating some elemental
principle of travel.

As we watch, completely straight & sober
but feeling more stoned by the minute,
it becomes a country unto itself,
complete with its own square of sky.
Slow waves of wind beginning
out among the stars find endless,
inventive ways to pass through the striped field,
the alternating strips of crop and fallow
following the contours of a land
continually in flux, like a farmer’s dream
of swimming deep into the soil.

The medium becomes the only message.
And anti-nationalist that I am, I find
I would almost pledge allegiance
to this well-made thing
& the wind that gives it another, freer kind of life.
Where were we going, again?
We both agree we could sit here all day,
if it weren’t for the likelihood that sooner
or later someone would report us
to the police for suspicious activity.
We pull gingerly back
onto the old blue road.

*

I’m mining the Via Negativa archive for poetic material. This derives from a 2005 post, Stars and stripes.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Ab Ovo

This entry is part 1 of 34 in the series Small World

The egg was breathing
so quietly you wouldn’t
have known it was alive.
No clouds appeared in
its immaculate atmosphere.
It was a belly in search of a buddha,
a featureless head, a round number.
It balanced on a single point
with far less effort than
a ballerina. After a while,
it got the idea that it was a bean,
& one day would open green wings
& lead the way to the sun, which
didn’t look entirely unattainable.
The strongest hand
couldn’t crush it.
Who’d have thought that warm center
it had always taken for a heart
had other plans?

Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

Intersection

The gate— green and rusting in patches;
gravel along the walk. The heads of orchids
nodding over the neighbor’s fence. Not far
from there, the road that descends into the park.
Memory from childhood of looming pines,
scuffle of loose stones underfoot; fretwork
of darkening blue, burst corollas of Queen
Anne’s Lace. Returning in the evening,
listen closely, listen closely—
in the wood the sparrow calls, and you stop
what you are doing; and you turn your head
toward the mountains though there’s nothing
in the window but the hoarfrost and the moon.

—Luisa A. Igloria
11 02 2011

In response to an entry from The Morning Porch.

Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

Night Shelves

Les étagères de la nuit: “Reliquaries [in Saint-Pol-de-Léon Cathedral, Brittany] containing the skulls…of people disinterred from under the church floor, and later from the cemetery.”

 

Further up in the highlands where I am from,
it was customary to strap the dead in full regalia
to a ceremonial chair, in view of all who came

to pay their respects. In time— a month,
perhaps more— smoke from fragrant leaves
and twigs rendered the body leathered,

leached of weight and fluid, light enough
to fold then carry into a limestone niche,
up in the hills where only the wind,

amorous to the last, has permission
to thread its voice through desiccated
flesh. And even then it is not the end—

Rocks and trees house spirits, parts
of souls that traffic through the gaps
between worlds: spasm of powdery moth

wings on the window screen, faint whiff
of jasmine at dusk in a garden worn
nearly to ruin; the sudden blur

by the abandoned hummingbird feeder.
Even in another part of the world, in that
church crammed with relics —a thorn from

the crown of Christ, a bell, 32 miniature
boxes the size of birdhouses— the bones
of the severed body defy all final exiling.

Why else would the little chapels holding skulls
buffed to ivory, bear the lettered names of the dead?
Why shape their apertures like hearts and sweet clover?

—Luisa A. Igloria
11 01 2011

In response to an entry from The Morning Porch.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Saint Death

Santa Muerte, hear me: you are my last shot.
Lady of the Night: my jealous skeleton.
I promise to tell no one about us—
how you inhabit me, put the world in my hands.
How I dress you in red robes
& in green.
How your hourglass almost stops time.
People might guess when they smell
your incense on my clothes
& see me glowing
from the decomposition of my troubles.
We’ll exchange knowing glances,
your other admirers & I—
we are in this together.
Our shadows don’t disappear
when the sun goes down;
they simply become one.
Señora, you have us for life.

*

See the Wikipedia article.