Author: Luisa A. Igloria

What you lose that someone else finds:
a note slipped into a fold in the cloth 
of time; another that slipped your mind.

Not the first time you feel as if blind,
flightless as a domesticated silk moth. 
But what you lose, someone else finds—

Luck had nothing to do with your state of mind.
Gravity pick machine, numbered balls in the broth 
of time. One after another they slip in your mind.

In thrift store bins, jumbles of left-behinds.
Atlases, maps; mismatched crystal, dish cloths.
What you lost that someone else finds

one bleak day, rummaging idly only to find
luck that flew out of your hands. It sprang forth 
out of time that for a moment slipped your mind.

One day, will you catch up to find
it accidentally broken, changed in worth?
What you lose that someone else finds
at another time slips into your mind.

Relief 
at finding a bathroom  
       
                    She says she feels
                 almost like a new person

If we are always tethered
to some idea or state

                          when are we most
                       ourselves

Pauses show
how silence is a palimpsest 

                   of meanings
                         The instability of

surfaces and intentions
At the end we are rendered into

              pulp and bone 
                   Only some things sift

completely into ash 
A practice in which the exterior
   
                                makes the interior
                             visible at last

Bodies of water with a menace of teeth
beneath the surface. 

Silvered arms of trees, unleafed, suggest 
a longing for taxonomy— 

How to remember origins, 
where we began. 

Trace them back to the root.

And farther back,
past the level of groundwater—

where there's less evaporation in deeper 
layers of soil. 

While we're asleep, our hearts 
send telegrams into the frozen skies.

The story is that an eagle mistook 
Aeschylus' bald head for a rock, 
and dropped a tortoise upon it. 
Did it shatter his skull or give
him a giant concussion? In any case,
he was supposed to have died instantly. 
Aeschylus, described as the father of 
tragedy, wrote: He who learns must suffer. 
And even in our sleep, pain that cannot 
forget falls drop by drop upon the heart. 
What of the tortoise— did it incur any 
injuries? In Maso Finiguerra's pen-and-
sepia-ink drawing of the scene, the idea 
of catastrophe makes a light impression. 
There's the writer, seated placidly by 
a stream, book on one knee, nodding off 
perhaps because of the leaves rustling in 
the grove. Strangely, the before and 
after of the turtle's fall is rendered 
in the drawing. One moment it hovers 
mid-air like a cartoon alien ship. 
In the next, it's landed smack 
on its back on the artist's head. 
The eagle itself wears an expression
of mild dismay, perhaps having just 
then realized it aimed at the wrong 
target. But such is the nature of tragedy— 
how the small, seemingly inconsequential 
thing leads to the undoing.

My student was talking about a film 
he described as terrible— about terrible 

human beings and how they did terrible things 
to each other, with no relief at the end. Not 

even a shot panning away from the broken window-
pane and into the shadowed hills, not even the noises 

animals make in the woods, magnified by the dark. Why 
even does it exist, he asked? why do people watch it? 

A movie can be like a poem, and a poem like a movie.
Nested images, personae, mood, some kind of setting. 

A poem can seem to have several movies nested inside 
it. But even the bleakest poem couldn't have complete

cynicism: otherwise, why was it turned into a poem?
Someone took all the koi out of the small pools

by the entrance to a battleship— nine guns, three
main gun turrets— now turned into a museum.  

We recall seeing the flash of orange and gold
scales as fish darted through moss-green water.

Chained by two anchors, the ship almost doesn't 
seem connected to something as terrible as war.

 
Behind the small folding bookshelf
in the guest room, I find three
canvasses. Each one bears traces 
of the start of a project— landscape, 
portrait, indeterminate still life; 
none of them complete beyond a first 
thin layer. I must have seen things 
then that beckoned as finished visions, 
but that now I must conjure if I want 
to complete them. Not to make 
a copy of the thing, but to manifest 
the heat that cut through the distance— 
wheel of yellow, bowl teeming with fruit; 
girl blowing a profusion of dandelion 
seeds into the wide open sky.

Such an office has been established and forgotten  
and revived too many times to count. Smaller variants
exist— Whistleblower Hotline, Consumer Complaint 
Department, Ombudsman's Office, Ethics Committee.
It's a ministry because it's almost a vocation
to which you swear a vow: to transparency and
accountability, freedom of speech and of the press,
observation of due process, establishment of sanctions.
But it's growing a global network, staffed with  
the compassionate and civic-minded. They are not 
allowed to take bribes nor award ghost contracts 
while looking the other way. They will visit families 
whose dwellings have been swallowed by flood, and 
document the absence of well-built dikes, dams, 
and bridges despite billboards along the highway 
lauding progressive infrastructure. They cause 
warrants to be issued for officials and businessmen, 
and demand scrutiny of financial records. After 
following the money, it should become clear who 
enabled and who signed off on, who claimed they were 
only following orders while tucking millions into bank 
accounts. They receive reports leaking secret 
conversations about the launching of torpedos against 
small sailing vessels. They gather in the hundreds, 
blocking garages before illegal enforcement units 
can get into their vehicles to make yet another raid 
on ordinary civilians— the ones they've been ordered 
to bring to private detention facilities whose earnings 
rake in hundreds of millions a year. Sometimes they 
are actual ministers: a pastor brandishing a bible 
in the faces of those who dared to enter a church 
with evil intent. Most times they peacefully organize 
food and coat drives; they chant or play music, 
hold up signs on the periphery of courthouses.

The former leader of a small 
southeast Asian nation sits 
in a jail cell awaiting trial 
at the Hague. Well-appointed, 
with its own kitchenette, but 
jail nontheless. When the petition 
for his interim release is denied,
his followers weep and embrace
carboard standees. Elsewhere,
families of victims in his "war
on drugs" follow the news by video
link, and clap. They clutch pictures
to their chests too— of husbands 
and children felled by bullets 
fired by death squads, masked 
and riding tandem on motorcycles.

At the beginning of the holiday 
season, the 12 Days of Christmas 
plates come out of their Williams-
Sonoma box shaped like a rope 
tension drum. The song's a counting 
ritual: it starts with a bird 
in a fruit tree, adds on increments 
the sum of which supposedly equates 
to "true love:" turtledoves and 
domesticated fowl, golden rings, 
a jubilee of animal and human
antics and pastoral labor. It's also 
a counting down to the end of another 
year— how we've moved through space 
and time, how we sense the dark 
slip beyond the hills as we reach 
for a spark to kindle the broken twigs 
in the hearth; how the flame sputters 
as if catching its breath, before growing 
brighter and pouring out of itself. 

Though they have the same plush, velvety look,
Marimo aren’t moss but a rare form of algae found

in freshwater lakes. Scientists say they're among 
the first plants to have moved from water to land 

over 500 million years ago, even outliving 
dinosaurs. No wonder they manage to stay alive 

for over a hundred years, though kept in glass bowls 
filled with water and a bed of smooth stones instead 

of out in the wild. The need for tangible softness 
must be a trait passed on from one generation

to the next: somehow, part of the strategy for
surviving extremity— the open hand allowing

for flow in ways that a clenched fist 
would not. Take kissing— mouth to mouth 

contact not only for the purpose of passing 
or masticating food— and how there’s evidence

neanderthals and humans kissed. And moss 
spores taken into space, with little to no direct 

contact with light, not only surviving but 
germinating after returning to earth.