Eadweard Muybridge
History doesn't stop
though we'll take a few hours
to climb into the porthole
of sleep, then take out the trash;
peel a bowl of potatoes, crack
an egg, boil coffee, wipe down
the counters, read a book, curse, laugh, cry.
I don't know which planets will align with
the sun some coming weekend, or
whether they'll be visible through the rough
breaker of trees. This morning,
in the bay, wind carves a high,
scalloped path through waves. History
is aways turning each crest like that,
so we are figures in a flip book or
stop-motion film where the horses run
eternally in silhouette over the Palo
Alto track and boys play never-
ending leapfrog. It is 1893, or 1874,
or 1833. The woman in the green
silk gown and Gibson girl hairdo
and the man with his arm around her waist,
sporting a thin mustache and tuxedo tails,
twirl round and round without stopping
for a breath. When the photographer caught
up with his wife's lover in Calistoga,
he said "Here's the answer to
the letter you sent my wife," and shot him
point-blank. I've never seen a bison,
which is ecologically extinct.
But there's an animated sequence
from 1887, remastered in 2006, where
the animal is cantering over a field.
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.