September 2012 – Page 5

September 12, 2012September 12, 2012 by Luisa A. Igloria

Riddle

Fractal, fracas, frisée. I’m reading through
the Fs. But then, from there, a short frisson

away to other worlds. In the shade, the quiet
makes the letters squint. Or have I fallen

down a rabbit hole? I see myself among
the curly ferns— I’m still as small

in many ways as in that first rupture;
and everything thereafter, its adjustment.

The key has always been in my skirt pocket—
how could I have forgotten? The pages

bookmarked, I shrink, I crawl; I grow toward
the garden’s checkerboard of grass and roses.

In response to small stone (146).

September 12, 2012 by Dave Bonta

Why poets need experimental filmmakers

Peter Wullen:

Poets are egotistical and selfish creatures. They don’t like others to play with their words. But in these videopoems the ego is finally abolished. The words stay visible and primary but somehow they disappear inside the videopoem. The viewer or reader has to look very carefully to find them. The meaning of the videopoem is the perfect integration of word, sound and image.

September 12, 2012 by Dave Bonta

Indicator Light

This entry is part 22 of 34 in the series Small World

Light-emitting diode,
baleful regardless of color,
our passport to a firefly future
of light without heat:
how it glows in the darkness,
like the wood-rot fungus known as foxfire.
I reach for it & startle
at the apparition of my finger—
clearly the finger of an alien
from some planet with a distant sun
& too many moons.

September 11, 2012September 12, 2012 by Luisa A. Igloria

Arc

“… & thus the place/ we occupy/ seems all the world.” ~ David Wojahn

Tonight I rinse the dishes and the cutlery
with which I’ve fed my living and my dead
(their spirits hovering on the rims of orange

plastic until I shelve them in the cupboard)—
While I work, I listen as a famous poet reads
on TV a litany of names and how they paper

the walls in the dim warehouse of memory—
And I think, as many as there are names, there are
poems and days, and tasks that will not end.

Fragments flutter out of the sky, down from the trees,
which we are left to gather or to count. They’re far
too many, the task so formidable— often, the only

respite: on that hinge that swings the door of days.

In response to small stone (147).

September 10, 2012September 11, 2012 by Dave Bonta

Nipple

This entry is part 21 of 34 in the series Small World

Mouthpiece
for the body’s instrument.
Its silence is another language.

Mountain peak.
It makes its own
wet weather.

Mouse-pink
& sensitive as a newborn
through old age.

Missed bit
of a continent submerged
in the unconscious.

Mouthpiece.
The scuba diver
can’t speak.

September 10, 2012October 20, 2012 by Luisa A. Igloria

There’s a bird that comes

This entry is part 43 of 47 in the series Morning Porch Poems: Summer 2012

There’s a bird that comes to perch
on the dead cherry—

Is it the same that returns each day;
was it a man or a woman once,

a child, a snail, a blind ascetic
walking through the hills?

The sound it makes is dull percussion
on the side of a hollow bowl.

Is it the same, but now a winged soul
that troubles the wood

all through the year? A landmark:
pocked, scarred, familiar—

Safe in the relative way we
ourselves return,

to seek the ghosts of previous
hungers; then striking out

again for all that green, still
achingly out of reach.

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

September 9, 2012September 9, 2012 by Luisa A. Igloria

Morning, I am slow waking in your patient light—

it is so difficult to write to that future which none of us
can see, and harder still sometimes to find the right voice

for addressing what they said was only the wind,
or unborn generations disguised as distant foothills;
nothing more menacing than landscape or weather,

hope like the legend of a country ready to be
colonized by benevolence, if not for a revolution
that spread like wildfire up and down the coast.

I told my daughter the story of the general’s wife;
how she took up his cause after he fell in battle,
how she was captured. And she paused, considering

the grave weight of sacrifice; or more precisely,
the little heft one body signifies against the tide.
Closer at hand, night brings shrouds of phantoms

into view and they are everything we’ve come to know
so intimately from daily life— The stolen words, the lies
of men of state; their bland oblivion to what they see

only as the tedium of pedestrian suffering.
And we may be slow, as slow as morning
that forgives so much as it begins to trace

the circle over again: so much like history,
so much like what repeats as many times
as it will take, until it finds the break.

In response to small stone (145).

September 8, 2012September 9, 2012 by Dave Bonta

Bullet Casing

This entry is part 20 of 34 in the series Small World

Squat bottle.
Who drained its amnesia?

Organ pipe.
Why emit so high a C?

Empty bud.
Where did the flower open
its red petals?

Molted exoskeleton.
What imago wouldn’t flee
such a narrow corpse?

September 8, 2012September 8, 2012 by Luisa A. Igloria

Pumapatak*

This entry is part 42 of 47 in the series Morning Porch Poems: Summer 2012

Maomaoyu : fine hair rain—

Natsu âme: summer rain—

Buhos : downpour, Noah’s rain—

Bagyo : storm—

Ambon : drizzle—

Ulap : clouds that bring both mist and rain—

Agar-arbis : what we say up north—

Hil ulán, kaw uyán, uran : in Hiligaynon—

Some syllables are rain themselves—

*Drops are falling.

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

September 7, 2012April 5, 2015 by Luisa A. Igloria

The asterisk calls. It leaves a message:

It says, You stood me up. You don’t return
my calls or texts. You didn’t go to work
yesterday. I wanted to ask whom you met
for lunch. What did you eat, and where
did you go afterwards? I waited at the bar
till 1 a.m. then took a walk and fell asleep
on a bench at the end of the pier. I woke
quite stiff, feeling crumpled at the edges.
No one bothered me, not even the seagulls
raucous for their breakfast. From above,
I must have looked like an ink-colored speck,
mere footnote amid the city’s detritus.
My fingers hover above the keypad as I listen
to the prompt: To erase, press *7.

In response to Via Negativa: Asterisk.