In response to Via Negativa: Filigree.
Poet Luisa A. Igloria (Poetry Foundation web page, author webpage ) was recently appointed Poet Laureate of the Commonwealth of Virginia (2020-2022). She is Co-Winner of the 2019 Crab Orchard Open Competition in Poetry for Maps for Migrants and Ghosts (Southern Illinois University Press, September 2020). She is the winner of the 2015 Resurgence Prize (UK), the world’s first major award for ecopoetry, selected by former UK poet laureate Sir Andrew Motion, Alice Oswald, and Jo Shapcott. She is the author of What is Left of Wings, I Ask (2018 Center for the Book Arts Letterpress Chapbook Prize, selected by former US Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey); Bright as Mirrors Left in the Grass (Kudzu House Press eChapbook selection for Spring 2015), Ode to the Heart Smaller than a Pencil Eraser (Utah State University Press, 2014 May Swenson Prize), Night Willow (Phoenicia Publishing, 2014), The Saints of Streets (University of Santo Tomas Publishing House, 2013), Juan Luna’s Revolver (2009 Ernest Sandeen Prize, University of Notre Dame Press), and nine other books. She is a member of the core faculty of the MFA Creative Writing Program at Old Dominion University which she directed from 2009-2015; she also teaches classes at The Muse Writers’ Center in Norfolk. In 2018, she was the inaugural Glasgow Distinguished Writer in Residence at Washington and Lee University. When she isn’t writing, reading, or teaching, she cooks with her family, knits, hand-binds books, and listens to tango music.
What it means to be the one who has to listen for the bell.
What does it mean to be the one who listens listens listens as a monastery-mate, a colleague-in-prayer, a friend? slowly, gently, robs his body of its life forces, simultaneously nourishing and poisoning the very flesh that has harboured his being since before he could remember?
At the same time, does he not rob Death of his carefully-cultivated accoutrements, his material manifestation, his millennia-old aesthetic of green and black, of yellow and purple, to be triumphantly, silently replaced by white, pink, and eventually gold?
What if a brief, involuntary moment of inattention meant that I missed his daily ringing signal, and sealed the sacred space before its time?
Would he know my error?
Would I?
Is he so far beyond, so close to the other side, that the speeding of his demise would mean so little and the result be the same?
Or would the spell be broken and the process ruined? Would I usher in Death in all his putrid glory, maggot-flesh and reeking liquefaction, the ultimate humiliation?
Why is this wait killing me?