A world ablaze: I wanted that
too, but not in the manner of
a raging California brush fire.
Not like the man who drives
into town for his high school
reunion, then spends two days
driving along the Calaveras road,
setting pieces of fast-food paper
wrappers on fire with a cigarette
lighter before chucking them
out the window just to see
what happens. By ablaze
I meant the mind leaping
out of the darkness of its
miserable self-containment
to see how, if heated metals
bent toward the same task,
a bridge might arc over
the yawning gorge. I meant
there was danger, but also
promise of beauty; of ships
that humans could build and fill
with provisions so they might move
forward out of calamity instead of
perishing in the current.
By ablaze, I meant the dance
girls in the village learned
when they were young, balancing
three votive candles, each stuck
inside a glass: one on the head,
the other two carried on each open
palm. The gold flicker on their faces:
something a tea light could never
reproduce. I love the quiet
blue flame of a stove's pilot
light, the brilliant sparks
before molten glass twists into
a clear vessel with an awestruck
mouth. I've walked into cathedrals
just to gaze at rows of lit
tapers in rows above the metal
box, ready to accept a coin or
slip of paper with petitions
for the world not to end in violent
conflagration, but burn as in glow,
as in the Latin ardere, which is
also the root of ardent.
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.