When you dream that someone who is still alive
has come to sit at the foot of your bed
as a ghost, it's either a premonition or your fear,
aided by dinner's beef and potatoes, still heavy
in your belly. That's what happened one night
when you didn't get home at the time
you said you would, from a trip to Manila. In my room,
under the drape of mosquito netting, I opened
my eyes and saw you in a bright checkered shirt
you didn't own, hat in your hands, wordless, eyes
smiling. When you died it was at the very end of July,
more than a decade later: most of the city
still in ruins from an earthquake, the furniture
scuffing the floor with each aftershock.
For so many years that followed, I'd see you everywhere:
the hem of your yellow robe disappearing around
the hallway, the smell of your aftershave trailing
like a curl of smoke. You'd come into my dreams
and speak, and it was the sound of your voice as I
remembered it, though I barely retained each
salutation. I was told my grieving was the reason for each
return; or my incessant questions, having been
pushed to the front of the line. And unless it softened
or I learned how to be the grownup and the parent,
your ghost would keep rowing back, unable to ford
the crossing. I don't recall the exact moment
I must have finally learned to let you go. You don't
visit me in dreams anymore, though I still address
you in poems. I wonder who's dreaming that I've returned,
though I haven't left like that yet; what look or gesture
could communicate across the ether everything our
witless hearts are so incapable of putting into words.
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.