~"Est et non" (It is and it is not)
Write a dream, lose a reader,
a poetry teacher once proclaimed:
as if there were a difference between
story and dream, dream and poem, one
a train track cutting across the mountains
and the other the sound you hear as you turn,
restless in your sheets, close to morning.
There are plants that flower only a single
night of the year, ghostly as hallucinations:
and the stems out of which their creamy
throats rise, the scaffold that sometimes
,we call origin or history. Then
there are stories about philosophers
going to bed inside the oven of night
waking to a dream where a book lies
open on the table; words flickering
on the page become a dream dictation
they take with them back into the world
where problems spill beyond the edges
of chalkboards, with no solution in sight.
But the body of a dream is more
than a triangle or a cube, even if it is
less than a single thread of a whirlwind
that can spin you around on one foot
like a top; and the book of instruction
is a book of verse, out of which the warm
smell of ripe melons brings the body
back to itself. Therefore I can find
no difference between the ticket I buy
in the dream for going back to a country
I'll never see again, and the low
warning note that sounds as real trains
depart from the platform. There are so many
people in the dream station: magazines and
coffee in hand, checking time schedules;
crowding the counter for lost luggage.
Poet Luisa A. Igloria (Poetry Foundation web page, author webpage ) is Co-Winner of the 2019 Crab Orchard Open Competition in Poetry for her manuscript Maps for Migrants and Ghosts, forthcoming from Southern Illinois University Press in fall 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. 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.