in the shoals, harness dangling, haunches wet.
You want to stand just like that, mouth hanging open,
blinking, stupefied by all the light, deepest gold
and apricot just before it shades to velvet, thick sludge
of indigo poured into the inkwell. You want to trail
your tongue along the braided silt of the estuary,
send your moans running with the tide between the banks,
not caring whether the tourists in their little paddle boats
might hear. Days without end of the same gray dawns,
the same dun noons; petal flutter of small white moths
against half-closed eyelids. I don’t want to be the animal
caught in amber, relic before its time, beautiful in ruin.
The smallest tokens of life undo me: filmy lattices
of pink-white blossom; sweetshrub, pale froth of sea
holly. Tell me please before the light goes in:
where do I go, where can I run, from here?
—Luisa A. Igloria
04 15 2012
In response to cold mountain 34, 35 and an entry from the Morning Porch.
OTHER POSTS IN THE SERIES
- Cusp
- Interval
- Bel Canto
- Cures
- In the Summer Capital
- The Hourglass
- Glossolalia
- Frost has silvered the grass
- Fragment of a Poem Disguised as SPAM
- Clear bulb of coral inside a paper shade,
- This
- Lament
- Kissing the Wound
- Mythos
- Fire Report
- Intermission
- Dear animal of my deepest need, you want to linger
- Ghazal, a la Cucaracha
- Heartache Ghazal
- Rituals
- Founding
- Rift
- Devotions
- Ghazal: Some ways to live
- What heart heard of, ghost guessed:
- A single falling note above
- Precaution
- Flush
- Rotary
- La Caminata
- Paradiso
- Dear nearly weightless day,
- Chance
- Ghazal of the 1 o’clock caller looking for Pomona
- Breaking the Curse
- Instructive
- Flicker
- Milflores, Milflores
- Bad Script
- Ghazal of the Eternal Return
- Provisions
- Lavender
- Letter to the Underneath
- Stories
- Flickers
- Tall Ships
- Light
- Beneath one layer, another and
- Please
- Arbor
- Landscape, with Summer Bonfires
- Yield
- Fire-stealer
- Dear language, most thick
Favorite lines:
“I don’t want to be the animal
caught in amber, relic before its time, beautiful in ruin.
The smallest tokens of life undo me:”
I love that this reminds me strongly of Oliver’s “When Death Comes,” and yet is completely different, with (for me) a stronger sense of questioning and uncertainty about living and hunger.
Hello Seon Joon… Thank you. I met a new workshop group (I’m teaching four Sundays at a community based writing center called The Muse) this afternoon and we talked (and read poems) about hunger and uncertainty and desire (necessity) all afternoon. I’m still in that groove… your latest cold mountain entries and Dave’s MP images strengthened all that.
I like this direction–looking forward to more, as it seems you are in a vein!