"...you/ must create a likeness of/
the dark for dark/ to disappear." ~ Alice Fulton
Once we might have felt time
to be endless, but not endless-endless.
For we've always known even such
endlessness has limits, which is why a clock
can have a second hand, a minute hand.
The seconds clip around, miniature racehorses.
The hours pull their slower weight across a smooth
track which lights up under its crystal dome at night,
at the press of a tiny button. Sitting next to you, our
shoulders touching, I can see out the window
how the early darkness makes a well into which the whole
yard falls: a world with its own history, a world
that began for us even before the tree in the garden raised
a few last fruits to the sky like darkly leathered flags,
refusing to surrender. In time, we say; or out of time, ahead of time,
one day at a time— always measuring how much we let it
have: how many silver distances burn in the cup of the porch light's
blinking beacon all night, how many moth bodies fade like aubades.
Poet Luisa A. Igloria (website) 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 was appointed Poet Laureate of the Commonwealth of Virginia for 2020-22, and in 2021 received 1 of 23 Poet Laureate Fellowships from the Academy of American Poets and the Mellon Foundation. 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.