Author: Luisa A. Igloria

When we walk into the house, the storm door takes
a moment to shut itself.

Now I try to pay attention to where else there might be
small signs of resistance.

The bony side of my big toe chafes against the inside
of my leather shoe.  

Someone was telling me about a game developed by a 
mathematician, designed for the observation of how a seed
or cell evolves within a system.

Any live cell with fewer than two live neighbors dies, 
as if by underpopulation.

Or reproduces and lives on to the next generation.
And so on.

When my daughter found out about dogwood berries,
she picked two from a tree we pass on the way 
to our favorite cafe.

My most elusive memory is of a field of white,
rippled and alive; and of my feet barely touching
the surface.

I always think I have time, until it proves me wrong.

We wait for the promised taste of custardy sweetness.

Some kinds of ripeness are needed by birds before
their long migrations.

 

The simple perfectness of a half moon floats into the sky near midnight.

It puts fog lights and the incandescence of street lamps to shame.

I have been reading about retrocausality, which physicists say 
is the possibility that future outcomes might reach backward
to shape conditions in the present.

There is a dress with a mustard yellow print I found in a drawer,
which I once imagined wearing to an indeterminate event.

If I unfold it from its tissue wrapper, put it on now 
then go out to dinner, will it be like the me today 
reaching back to the self that desired this years ago?

We are always thinking of time as a progression of increments
moving in one direction.

Sometimes I cannot seem to tell what day it is, but the smell
of burned toast means Monday. 

Or I become stuck in a memory, which is a moment built up of 
strings of ticking parts. 

I clipped a stalk of jasmine from a bush, but it did not die
even if it could have.

In the future, I am already setting its flowers in a vase.

On the sill, some nights, the water pulls the moon down
its smooth glass throat. 

Heat saturates
every aspect of this world.
If not heat, then cold.

On the bottom step of the patio,
unmoving: the perfect wire 
symmetry of a dragonfly.

In a clump of grass a few 
meters away, the armor
shed by a lone cicada. 

When the stars emerge
tonight, will they let down
a ladder for them to ascend?

In the shadow of the fig
tree, the secretary spider
keeps writing.

A thirty-four foot bronze statue 
of Neptune looks out over the oceanfront,
trident in one hand and loggerhead turtle
in the other. Two dolphins and an octopus
clamber up the statue's stone base. I know
there's more than one god of water, more 
than one god of fire and more than one 
story about the way this earth was created, 
which creature holds its core steady. Otherwise, 
the underworld is an idea too strange to fathom. 
Too difficult to think of how, when a wave recedes 
so far and so clean out to the horizon, it could 
return with such force to be an act of judgment.

How can it be? exclaims the mother seeing her child
off on yet another first day of school. What will you do,
asked my own mother, if something terrible were to happen
to me? I didn't know how to imagine such a scenario—
couldn't. Can you? She owned a closet full of dresses
she sewed herself— such soft, beautiful fabrics. 
Such lady collars, perfect darts, perfect seams. 
But I would never have fit into any of them. 
What a waist! What a waste. They've all gone up 
in smoke. I buy most of my clothes now. Ready 
made is what they used to call it. As if you could 
step into an outfit, close the door, turn on all 
the lights. I thrift some, but infrequently. Who knows 
the romance of the single hook and eye or the hand-
smocked bodice anymore? I would run to the neighbors, 
I answered. I'd shout for help. I'd run my fingers
feverishly down the phone book as if it were 
a dictionary, looking for the word doctor or fire.
    

Behold, sunrise on the cobblestones,
       a path slippered with moss leading  
to the river. Behold, meaning to regard
       but also keep fast or close. Millions 
of views, whether it's of the moon
       at its zenith or the tides cresting 
and swallowing barns and silos, garden
       sheds, bleachers in a stadium
one state away. Is that your father's 
       threadbare bathroom robe fluttering 
on a half-submerged dogwood tree, its topmost  
       branches still laden with custard berries?
Are those his yellowed dentures conversing 
       with dented weather vanes? A blue and pink 
axolotl swims into view on the wall of a thrift 
       store. Henceforth wherever you walk,
the ground at night is softened with stars.

(after Van Gogh, 1881-82)

I didn't know that Van Gogh spent 
some years as an independent preacher 
in the coal-mining town of Borinage. 
When his brother visited, he found 
Vincent had given most of his clothes 
and money to the poor, but despaired
of being able to save anyone. It's after
this period that he determined to devote
himself to his art, saying in a letter 
how happy he would be if some day he 
could draw the ordinary laborers he saw
there, so that these unknown types would be 
brought before the eyes of the people— take 
his painting of miners' wives in winter, 
bearing sacks of coal on their backs. Bent 
over from the weight and clothed from head 
to toe in the same color of their burden, 
they shuffle homeward at the gloomy end of day. 
The earth is cold and hard because of the time 
of year. And yet their husbands, brothers, sons 
toil beneath the crust, gathering for their heat 
and sustenance. Here, where I live near the river, 
trains rumble past multiple times a day, carrying 
coal across Virginia to Lambert's Point, from there 
to be shipped to different parts of the world. In nearby
neighborhoods, like the women of Borinage, housewives 
wipe coal dust off window sills and furniture, the rims 
of cups and bowls. Fingers and lungs pick up dark  
smudges. In the distance, freezing rain; a blue-grey haze, 
cross-hatched tracks. Delirium of industry for profit.  
 

Today we don't hear the epistle 
of the river

                Only the sound of pages
                rippling in wind

A storm has formed off 
a nearby coast
  
                Who is making those pictures
                now of hurricane paths

Coloring in the arrows 
of its intentions

                It has been a short and  
                fickle season
             
Near moldering fruit, 
a swallowtail butterfly fans itself  

                Overnight, it seems the gods
                have eaten more than their fill

 

What is to become of this storm-
wracked world, this burning world? 
The moon is supposed to loom large
tonight. Imagine a flourish of chords,
the sense of a swelling and building.
It's as if anyone's life, pushed to
the center of that stage, under flood-
lights, might still aspire to a long 
and dazzling run. Instead, I feel 
like the silence in the rafters before 
and after every performance— the seats 
folded back in place, scraps of playbills
swept away along with any ovations.  

Almost the end of summer, cicadas still 
        in the trees and some fallen on the grass— 
their trebled hum a veil beneath the growing 
        moon, which also does what it does without
premeditation. How ardently we look for significance
        beyond perception. A weatherman explains 
the occurrence of circles in the clouds: millions 
        of particles in the air will bend the light, and
as that light bends, it makes a perfect ring. I was
        a young mother when someone guided my thumb  
to the hollow atop my newborn's head, to feel the space 
        between the bones of the skull where they 
had not knit together yet. Even now, I still turn 
        toward the idea of an opening, some keyhole 
through which I can thread my undimmed longing.