Author: Luisa A. Igloria

In the late 1890s, fashionable 
Filipina or not, likely you sported a head-
ful of long, flowing tresses. The daughters

of ilustrados put theirs up with tortoiseshell
combs or filigreed paynetas, while the women
who did your laundry let dark waterfalls of hair 

cascade over their shoulders while they beat 
wet bedspreads on river rocks. Lengths long
enough to brush the floorboards, to move 

like another layer over a many-paneled 
skirt. Until, across the ocean, women sheared
the centuries away with scissors, revealing

not just a face but cheekbones. Your hair-
dresser suggests a French bob—a cut 
that hits at the jawline, just enough

layers to add texture to thinning 
hair and a look that says tousled, 
effortless, undone. Clippings 

gather at the base of the chair 
as she works, each strand lifting 
a weight you barely even noticed

before. But that sounds about right:
first the loss, then the feeling of air
moving freely across your nape again.  
 

There are many tiny keys in bowls
and drawers throughout the house.

They should be able to open things like doors
and locks for luggage, but no one remembers

now which ones are coupled. And I myself feel
sometimes like a misplaced rudder, other times

like a sock whose pair went missing, somewhere
between the wash and dry cycles. Years ago,

when I left my first country, my mother placed
a plaster saint in my hand and wrapped my fingers

around it. Its painted skirt is still blue, its halo
a chipped gold. It stands on a shelf of drawers

dwarfed by the telescope which was a birthday
present for my husband, but which he has not

yet trained upon any corner of the night sky.
Time unsheathes its slim blade, releasing each

year’s envelope of unpredictable directives.
These open with no need for keys. Sometimes

there are folded maps inside, islands and oceans
inked in the shapes of rare fish and birds.

Yellow light, midnight:
my laptop battery dies.
I should have closed all
open tabs, wound down early.
Soon the alarm blares morning.

"Go ahead, Lord, break our harp.
We have thousands upon thousands of harps."
                                                                                ~ Rumi


They hang in clusters of russet and gold. Or belled
in orchards, blushed like pear or hachiya persimmon.

Branches bend and the ground receives the weight
they cannot hold. We pick these up too, and save 

their impatient sweetness. In our houses, splintered 
and blackened boards must be sanded down again 

and made smooth. Not all of the season's cold has entered, 
and so the grass has not quite stopped growing. In the bowl, 

bananas that were bruised from ripening were sifted 
with flour and sugar and egg. What rose in the heat 

of the oven was a transfiguration. Resisting his attacker,
a wounded pilot maneuvered the cockpit door open 

as the plane plummeted 17,000 feet in under two minues.
Silence refused to take a seat. Ruin refused a victory.
 


 

When did you become the one who rose early 
and went to bed late, the one who made the meals 
and negotiated other openings in the day so sheets 
could be changed and clean laundry folded? You 
went from one thing to the other while answering 
and composing email, scheduling conferences, 
marking papers, writing reviews, helping a child out 
of yet another predicament. And still the days never 
run out of tasks, never seem to stop asking for you 
to give: time, money, effort, sleep, though none 
of these things you do is original or heroic—only 
necessary.  You make a list on the side while out 
to dinner with a friend,  and she says I am not 
criticizing you. You do what you have to do. 

Early October:
they go behind the curtain
to administer death.
The universe has other plans.
Death returns the prisoner twice.

Bells split the evening,
and a sentence is split, too.
Who wants to come back
an unintended postscript,
a stone rolled back into place?

Would you say animals
are lonely, or that a cloud
yearns for what it doesn't
understand?

Even a puddle left over
from last night's rain, drying
in the sun, holds what it can
of the sky.

It was a time whose fine details are blurred,
like landscape through a window streaked
with rain. The city I grew up in, mirage 

of lights and midnight arrivals, departures.
Who said to me once, You write so well
about suffering? That gave me

pause. And another time, I am so glad
I don't have to think of things like that. 
Trees bent by the long monsoon, 

unceasing eddies in the lake; mildew
collecting intentions on the bathroom
walls— Do these, too, speak of suffering? 

One afternoon we listened to music
composed on the spot, pulled as if silk
out of the air by numinous beings.

Years of training and practice
behind the sureness of the first key
touched, and then the next. Perhaps

this is how the agonies of choice 
and doubt can be haltered. There 
they are, where you've led and left

them in the meadow, quiet now
in the clover. They nuzzle the grass, 
the soil, each other. When you call 

to them, they come. It doesn't
matter if one limps, or if they've 
seen better days. 



 

May the falling needle stop short of disaster, and the reaping 
just short of grim. May the curtains open again to let us know 
there is an encore or an interim. 

May the miracle of your blueprint system create a new 
defense against attacking cells, and the lesions on
your back transfigure into a blindingly empty field.

May the atoms of a pure and orderly crystal 
attempt (in theory) to reach precisely zero, but
may this state remain impossible to achieve.

May the many sums subtracted from my life-
time (work, years, tears, failure) build back
an edifice impossible to subdue.

The heel that falls clean 
                                       off a shoe. The fray
that begins before the garment's 
                                       final stitch. Shards of torn
underlayment the roofers 
                                       tossed to the ground. 
Massive sheets of ice
                                       and rock that shear
off the mountain, plunging 
                                       7,000 feet into the river 
below. Displacement 
                                       releases energy in all
directions. Then retreat, 
                                       followed by a wave
that knocks down everything
                                       in its path.