I know I was wrong
a good many times, even terribly
wrong more
than a good many times.
But I was also sometimes good,
sometimes malleable, though those
are not
the same kinds of things.
It is possible I was selfish,
that I didn't care, or did
not
care enough. But I was also self-
less, if by that we mean the acute
awareness
of how in the end we don't
even belong to ourselves. I was
foolish to think I could make
anything
bend to my will,
though I offered my hand or
my cheek or the pulse that beat
below
my collarbone. I had
so much, even enough to give
and give away; but also
impoverished by
the daily effort
to keep the brand of ordinary fortune
neatly stitched under the collar
of my coat. I know
I felt
too much but also often kept
that thing we call the heart
bottled in its own liquids,
rocking
itself to sleep
most nights in a country
into which I allowed it to be
smuggled. It's possible
that I know
about beauty but more about pain,
that the body is constantly
endangered when exposed
to the modal verb
plus the past
participle: it could have been,
it may have been. This is how
I know I've tried to fake
the impossible—
twirl
the cape over the bull's
lowered head while trying
to keep my wrist steady.
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.