Remembering our dead, we’re told to fill
a plate of food, pour
a cup to set
on the sill or under an alcove light.
But years pass
until the logic
of the empty bowl with its celadon sheen
seems a more
honest gesture: the shorn
branch, the broken cistern, water
going nowhere
but back into the ground along idle chains.
Their faces are fixed in that last
darkness— as I imagine mine
will be, folded
away into the first or last
layer like an artichoke.
It takes a while
to get the hang of peeling apart
the armor: one leaf at a time
until there’s nothing
left but that small mouthful of
tenderness. After that, even the voice
disappears. Nothing,
after all, is inexhaustible. What I give
now— advice, a loan, a payment;
judgment, confidence, comfort—
teeters in that traitorous
interval of too little
and too much. Little soul, if only
I knew
what it really meant to journey;
if only I could still be here
for my own
rescue, for that untrammeled taste.
Poet Luisa A. Igloria (Poetry Foundation web page, author webpage ) 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 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. 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.