In lieu of a new-new poem today, and in the spirit of the season,
I'm sharing a poem I wrote in 1997, which was published in the December
issue of Poetry Magazine that year. May we look to gentler times.
***
"The mystery kept secret for endless
ages is now made clear."
1
The way it came to you
was through the story of
the carpenter, working one
day in shade to plane
the wood—
Both hands, blistered and
attentive to disturbances, finger
the knobs and raised welts of surfaces,
rubbing where the heart is the color of raw
wheat or honey
The shavings fall
away like wings among the small
pebbles near his feet, curled seraphs'
ears near the ground, listening
for the footfall of his
intentions
What of the woman who is already
taking her place at his side, at night
laying the tools in the basket, whose
hands have kneaded the dough
and wrapped the warm body
of bread in napkins, leaving
the outline of her fingers
in its sides
After all it is early enough, still
possible to turn the other way,
name it an act of will—
To shut the window and remain like this
inhaling only the musk of cedar and sandalwood
among the cunning drawers and cabinets,
the hasps and boards that do not need
to sing when they are joined
What of the course he might not
have chosen but is given the chance
to repudiate or consider, the salutations
of light falling in a certain way
so as to make objects compelling,
to render in relief the outlines
of chisels, sawteeth, nails,
instruments
A seam on the burnished wood:
now barely noticeable, unsolicited
memento, remnant of a casual
encounter with lightning
Unimportant
except for the slight
alteration in design, the way
coming life is hardly yet breath,
a flutter beneath the ribs, but
already married to the coming
days of this life.
2
A woman sets a table
and cries out in surprise
On the barren
horizon there are no figures yet
but something rises to her tongue—
wintermelons, red rice, freshwater
fish, green mangoes, extravagant
longings
The empty doorframe fills with
space that throbs, a rectangle of light
spilling on the stone patio
Hand midway between her heart
and her belly, she is wondering
whose is the extra place
The blue plate shimmers on white
linen, the figures etched on china
bow decorously, each to the other—
a man and a woman, behind them
a three-tiered pagoda, a willow
tree, the grandmother at the upstairs
window, carefully turning on
the night-light
Poet Luisa A. Igloria (website) is the 2023 Immigrant Writing Series prize winner for Caulbearer: Poems (due out from Black Lawrence Press in 2024), and 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.