Author: Luisa A. Igloria

Please take one, says your host, 
passing the basket of rolls. Before 
you take it, you're supposed to unfold 
your cloth napkin then fold it once more 
across your lap so it resembles 
a triangle, though the rectangle is  
also a common and acceptable shape. 
Water to your right, salad fork to 
your left. All the hierarchies of silver-
and glassware, every item in its proper 
place. And you're to tear off small 
pieces of bread to butter sparingly— 
though you prefer the ease of Lazy
Susans and all the dishes, family 
style, ranged on its perimeter: one spin 
to the hot pot, a quarter turn to three 
pepper shrimp and crab legs, things 
you need to pick up with your hands.  
Don't you love the taste and smell 
of sauce that lingers on your fingers, 
even when all the dishes are taken away? 
Only the prim little cups of tea remain, 
and the crimped and folded cookies 
waiting to give you your fortune.

We say we know
all there is to know 
about the dead.

Moths cluster around lamps
and we think their wings 
make the shape of grandmother's 
voice, the way she limped 
when she walked;

how grandfather liked 
to stand in the doorway, 
waiting for evening to loosen 
the knots in his blood.

Who says the fly 
on the windowsill was sent
to keep an eye on their wandering?

They've been gone from this
earth so long, they should be 

allowed to come and go 
as they please, with no
requirement to remember 
their former life 
among us.

—always, about the past. Always,
about histories which follow us
like wraiths out of the mist;
neediest, like ghosts and old
lovers, when the cold sets in
and strips the landscape
to the bone.

When you look at statues
in the shade, obelisks or plaques
overlaid with fleur-de-lis; or a marker
saying on such and such a date
arrived so many men— strange, wild,
picturesque— you see with your winter eye
their color like that bronze into which
a small proportion of gold is worked
by the molder—

how they tested the winds
pulling through the galleon’s rigging
by holding up their fingers before they
jumped ashore, shedding chains as they went.
Lacrustine, wrote Lafcadio Hearn of their village
on stilts in 1883, listing in the current:
a secret guarded by reeds and waste—

vicious crabs, alligators
slinking through mud, their jaws
unhinged. Chickens with one leg,
limping along.  Not even the post
ventured here, where clouds
of mosquitoes reigned and made
a sound like the boiling of
innumerable caldrons. 

Rumors persist about the deep
green of their eyes, the way
they danced with the shrimp,
their bodies supple as fresh-water
eels. I didn’t come by boat or ship,
and the only card game I know
is matching pairs—

but when I read that on stormy
evenings the card-dealer called out
22 as Dos paticos en laguna, I can see
the poetry in his eye: the way I learned
to describe the world. That’s
how all migrants and seafarers

must think: not knowing
the words in a foreign tongue—
for gale, for ice, for snow— they’ll look
for ideograms in the bodies of
whelk and birds and fish; they’ll talk
with their eyes, with their hands.

  

 

In response to Via Negativa: Blizzard.

If we traveled 
on the speed of our desire, 
where would we be by now? 

The moon's milky glaze on the road 
leads to the sea: and every window's
antlered with light— 

but if you knocked on the doors 
to ask for lodgings, they might 
or might not open. 

Evening falls in the countryside.   
A donkey brays and farmhands 
round up the sheep. 

We all come back
in the night to gnaw 
at something.

In the middle of the field 
lies the heart of a saint, 
or the bones buried by the dog. 

There's a name for the kind 
of hunger that can't stop eating
only because the mouth is lonely.

 

[an erasure poem]

mysterious          
silver-splashed 
hoofed
ungulate

lost
for nearly
30 years

shy
fangs
silver-backed

two-toned
flanks

stolen
species
forest
traps

always have best choice, first choice, 
and they're allowed to change their minds 
but we can't ever be fickle— we're mere 
mortals after all, and fools to invoke 
some sort of urgency like the heart, 
so if winter has been here forever, 
how much do you think spring 
will cost because from experience, 
the cleaners always make a killing 
once they're corporatized, though I 
would so like to be a woman of more 
than domestic and womanly service 
and sacrifice of parts because I know 
in the end, Death redeems nothing; and 
still the gods always have the best 
choice, a choice in weapons for war 
and for marketable words; in women, 
in wives, in boys they also take 
pleasure in as well as animals 
in the forests and fields like dogs 
or oxen or pheasants or swans, 
anything with a neck that can both 
bend and snap; and the waterways 
are littered with the afterhusks 
of all the choices they made 
before they changed their minds 
before a previous set of choices 
so now we have to talk about 
resilience and climate change 
and ocean rise while they keep 
harping on their days of glory 
when people and things knew 
their place and the parties, 
the parties, weren't they wild 
and fabulous— though it's not 
clear anymore if there was a true 
before and after, because we also 
got confused: and didn't Yoda say 
Always two there are, no more 
no less: a master and an apprentice 
and we know he was talking about a Sith, 
so what's up with how the gods always 
have at least two sets of names, one 
supposedly for use in those kingdoms 
overshadowed by whitewashed palaces 
against skies and seas of tourist blue, 
one for that kingdom from which our 
notions of legislation and law 
and the virtues of the middle way 
were supposedly drawn— but who 
actually knows why Hercules was 
Heracles, Artemis was Diana, 
Mercury was Hermes, who's also
associated with Prometheus... or 
am I mixing them up and being 
an unreliable witness, and I say 
witness for haven't they also come 
interfering in my own affairs, some 
cop on beat peering lewdly through 
the open car window to ask if everything 
was alright as I sat, right breast exposed 
and feeding an infant on my lap; then 
there'll be those making impossible demands 
like which half of your child or dog or cat 
or house or some other form of beloved 
would you most wish to keep after it 
has been severed in half or kidnapped 
by some tyrant of darkness, but if 
your hand so much as flew up to cover 
your mouth in fear or alarm or made 
a fist as if to strike out or protest 
then god help you, they'll say, god 
help you, which you know is code 
for you are so so very on your own. 

Veined, my limbs long for the dream of undulation as jellyfish, for a latticework of mangroves in which to play at hiding and being found. They crave the dusk that settles beneath closed lids, respite from the moon’s floodlight parading like a noisy wheel, a carousel on repeat, a steel drum. Cool lengthening in moist earth, pearl tooth of a radish manufacturing roots. Once, after a storm, I reached behind the cauterized stump of a tree and found a cascade of brown scalloped fins. They were beautiful as all fruiting bodies are that grow from lightning: a burst of cells, a frantic multiplying as answer to the threat of their obliteration.

What is silence? Something of the sky in us.
A rift that opens, so two not speaking

can step through to find a street 
still blunted by rain, part 

of a fence leaning against another 
part that isn't broken. There's no need

to point out what needs to be done.
Once, on a mountain road wide enough
 
for only one vehicle, two
met in the middle, unable

to proceed. I don't know how each
made its way to its destination:

if passengers got down from the bus,
shouldered their belongings and made

the trek to town on foot. It's not
so easy to return to the beginning

when something keeps nudging you 
forward. A stone thrown over the edge 

falls for a long time, and you strain 
your ears to hear the sound it makes.

A week ago I spent a whole day
in the same building: only moving through
three floors, carrying papers to class
then to a meeting. The tiny brass bell
on my belt-clipped key fob made its usual
tinkly sound, but I never noticed how
my car key got detached or where 
it must have fallen. Not until I made
my way to the parking garage and tried
unsuccessfully to pull the driver's side
door of my car open did I realize 
it was lost. By then it was dark,
since we'd just come off Daylight 
Saving Time. A nearly full 
moon was in the sky, reminding me
of how I'd overheard some people talking
about Mercury being in retrograde: which
is to say that the planet, observed
from Earth, seems to be moving in
reverse direction. If you believe
what's mostly an optical illusion, this 
apparently causes spasms of misfortune: 
as if the swift messenger of the gods 
himself has tripped; and, limping, 
is unable to convey messages of good 
fortune or the souls of the dead 
to the underworld. Maybe the universe
is peeved at the inconvenience—
its favorite courier lagging behind,
bungling deliveries. So it becomes 
the favorite scapegoat for everything 
that goes wrong: the refrigerator's busted 
light bulb, the broken-off engagement,
the check that bounces. The yelling
match, the slammed doors, the tears
and fast-food bingeing. The nerve
snapping at the slightest hint 
you too must somehow be at fault.
     

 

A world ablaze: I wanted that
too, but not in the manner of 
a raging California brush fire. 
Not like the man who drives 
into town for his high school 
reunion, then spends two days
driving along the Calaveras road, 
setting pieces of fast-food paper
wrappers on fire with a cigarette
lighter before chucking them
out the window just to see
what happens. By ablaze
I meant the mind leaping 
out of the darkness of its 
miserable self-containment 
to see how, if heated metals
bent toward the same task, 
a bridge might arc over 
the yawning gorge. I meant
there was danger, but also
promise of beauty; of ships
that humans could build and fill
with provisions so they might move
forward out of calamity instead of
perishing in the current. 
By ablaze, I meant the dance
girls in the village learned 
when they were young, balancing
three votive candles, each stuck 
inside a glass: one on the head, 
the other two carried on each open 
palm. The gold flicker on their faces: 
something a tea light could never 
reproduce. I love the quiet 
blue flame of a stove's pilot 
light, the brilliant sparks 
before molten glass twists into
a clear vessel with an awestruck
mouth. I've walked into cathedrals 
just to gaze at rows of lit 
tapers in rows above the metal
box, ready to accept a coin or 
slip of paper with petitions 
for the world not to end in violent 
conflagration, but burn as in glow,
as in the Latin ardere, which is
also the root of ardent.