Year: 2012

Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

After Apocalypse

This entry is part 1 of 29 in the series Morning Porch Poems: Winter 2012-13

 

The woodpecker’s red head still shines, and wind or rain or snow will fill the hollows in the coming days. When houses sway on their haunches, the toe and finger joints will creak at first light. In the cold, the muscles along one side of the neck have stiffened. You can turn your head, but with some difficulty. Pain is how you know the world has not in fact ended. The hours lengthen gradually as the earth tilts forward. Day after day you are learning how to trim the wick. The flame of desire is no longer a conflagration, out of control in the woods. Now it burns steady, a little pilot light.

 

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

The end of the world as they knew it

Before this farce of an apocalypse spiritual awakening passes from memory, I’d like to take a little more time to think about what the end of the world means for a civilization. One of the odd things about the New Age obsession with misinterpreted Mayan “prophecies” is the unwillingness to actually learn from the Maya themselves, who are not only still with us but who have managed to preserve an impressive amount of their traditional knowledge, and have not been especially shy about sharing it with curious anthropologists. New Agers like to see themselves as freed from the shackles of Judeo-Christian thinking, and love to pay lip service to indigenous wisdom. But reading books like Time and the Highland Maya, by an anthropologist who apprenticed herself to K’iche’ Maya priests, or the Popol Vuh, translated by her husband with the same priests as consultants, might challenge one’s preconceptions, and definitely requires sustained grappling with a very different worldview.

This unwillingness to learn from other cultures is deeply rooted in Western Christian culture. There’s a good Christian/Greek word for that sort of willfully ignorant pride: hubris. And for at least one outpost of Western civilization, such hubris — along with rigid conservatism, extreme religiosity, environmental degradation and a changing climate — brought about the end of the world as they knew it. I’m talking about the Norse settlements on Greenland.

If you’ve read Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel (which I don’t necessarily recommend — it’s full of facile argumentation and poor scholarship), you already know the outlines of this story. But this documentary, produced for the PBS series Secrets of the Dead back in the millennial year, does an excellent job telling the story in the words of the scientists who finally pieced it together. And it was great to hear from the Greenland Inuit, who arrived a little later than the Norse but survived the Little Ice Age just fine. “Apocalypse? What apocalypse?” Which, come to think of it, is probably also what the Mayan peasants were saying when their parasitic city-states were collapsing 1000 years ago.

(By the way, if you’re interested in documentaries about the vikings, there are a number of other good ones collected on the new sagalicious page over at Twisted Rib.)

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Ichigo Ichie (one lifetime, one encounter)

A tea gathering cannot be repeated, and the host and guests feel that this is an encounter that can only occur once in a lifetime.
—glossary, Japanese Tea Culture: The Omotesenke Tradition

The room isn’t right: too bright, too perfect,
despite its location in the most venerable
Zen temple in all Kyoto.
The one white lily is a cliché.
And the participants are far too numerous:
15 more than the optimal five.
Examining the implements cannot fail
to become a perfunctory exercise.
The wealthy ladies of the tea ceremony club
from Sakai—hometown of Sen no Rikyū—
sigh for the lack of wabi & sabi.
But then their special guest, a tall,
funny-looking foreigner, enters the room
& hits his head against a ceiling beam
with a satisfying thump.
He grins foolishly & everyone laughs.

How like Daruma now the kettle appears,
round & stolid! And the bamboo whisk
marooned in the dark bowl—how at home!
The foreigner settles into place
& the circle tightens a little
as everyone strains to hear his murmured Japanese,
so beautifully flawed.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Disposition matrix: fragments

the melancholy of a straight line of same-sized trees

the principal’s chair like a golden cloak

how many roads

running toward the shooter, shouting

the vacuum of grief quickly fills with kitsch

I went to bed hungry & woke up full

“Would you like ketchup with your freedom fries?”

survivors at Virginia Tech described him as looking almost innocent in his scout uniform

I dreamt about writing a book titled war canoe

dried wildflowers could be incorporated into a quilt full of names

all young males in the target area are presumed to be terrorists

the terrible coolness of indifference

how many roads must a man

both of them running, pitching forward

according to the Washington Post, the expanded kill list is known as the “disposition matrix”

the melancholy of angels that never learned how to pollinate

“How many bees would you like?”

in my dream I loved how the deserted street felt to my bare feet

the children hidden like stowaways in lavatories & closets

coats from the Army-Navy store

a fisherman’s sweater knitted to look like fish scales

just as bullet points rarely liven up a slide presentation, the sound of a gun is far duller than you’d expect from the movies

it was dark before I reached the end of the block

“How would you prefer we got rid of the crows?”

after the power comes back, the clock can’t stop blinking

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Luisa Igloria on audience

The Bakery:

I am aware that much of my poetry works with recurrent themes involving place (I am always writing about my hometown— Baguio, it seems), the complicated dynamics of family, the often tangled relationships between history, time, and memory. […]

At the same time, I am aware of the desire to make a clear and accessible connection to readers, whoever they might be, while remaining true to my heart’s first subjects and passions. The notion of a “universal audience” has about the same significance and importance to me as the arguably comparable notion of a “global citizen.” (That is to say, the construct of universality which posits that underneath all the indices of identity, history, gender, etc. which mark us, we are essentially all the same, might be useful in certain contexts, but also undeniably dangerous for its potential to conflate the details of our histories, which are singular.) But also, I cannot believe that what I write would have relevance only for an audience “just like me,” or that such an audience really and truly exists.

Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

Uncomplicated

Two I called mother— one of them birthed me, two of them raised me. When I look around today, I realize it’s not as uncommon as I once thought.

But: two pairs of arms, two sets of fingers, two hearts, two histories, two lullabies, two tongues— how could it not be complicated?

One threw whole sticks of butter into the pots and mixing bowls: cake, spaghetti sauce, it didn’t matter.

One carefully quartered pieces of chicken, stripped tendon to bone, counting out meals and measuring cups of grain in advance.

One whipped egg whites to perfect foam, picked fish of guts and littered bone.

How many loves, how many heartbreaks, how many triumphs and regrets?

And is it any wonder that today, I prefer savory over sweet, unruliness of bramble, tumble and surprise of wild flowers?

No need to pass the salt and pepper for they have taught me the language of laurel, eucalyptus, ginger, star anise.

And I did not know then but now I do— Because this road is long, they’ve stamped their tinctures of herb and camphor on all the stations of my body; and their fragrant signatures on my brow and on my hands.

 

In response to Via Negativa: Mom at 36.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Mom at 36

While she talks on the phone,
her blue pen seems to have
a life of its own,
makes abstract flowers
& filigree
& Gordian knots
all around the list of birds seen
on her morning walk.
I watch fascinated
as I eat my allotted three
fresh peanut-butter cookies,
each bearing the print of a fork’s
uncomplicated foot.