Author: Luisa A. Igloria

The body doesn't e[r]ase or quiet  
immediately or of its own accord. 

It is a town with nerve [ending]s 
all lit up through the night, 

windows shaded, doors bolted shut
against wind or animals that howl

at the slightest noise. The body
is an archive of what tightened

the knots along its spine, what
made the jaws clench to [w]ire 

as if in place. Once there was
a bird which feathered the rooms

inside the chest, before it hid then
flew through the bars of the ribs. 

The body takes notes, keeps score. 
In its fortress it pours stones 

instead of water into jars. It knows
it needs to unlearn construction

and defense, to practice compos[t]ing
instead of ruthless accounting. 

The field that flinched from fire
passing through learns that green 

grows again. The shoulders soften
and the bird returns. The lake where

the body floats is still dark, but warmer 
and looser now on the back of the neck.

When you said, seemingly out of the blue, 
but I do take care of you, the sentence
shifted the air and landed with a quiet 
weight. It asked me to consider how I 
may have been hard, how I may have 
sounded uncaring, or at least  
haven't thanked you enough. 

It reminded me that most of my life, 
I've tried to survive by tightening, 
by fiercely keeping close to myself 
or bracing to meet threats head-on, 
whether I was well-prepared or not. 
I am reminded of fragility, not 
in terms of ornament but as a condition 
also inherent to how we walk in the world. 

Last night, on the news: a man 
walked through a museum garden 
swinging at glass sculptures, 
reducing them to shards on the ground. 
What impulse was that, what was it 
to which he must have been brought 
to the brink saying no more, no farther?

So often we're told to make ready
in gladness, but prepare for the worst. 
Time doesn't bend easily, though there 
are times when it softens. Surely, 
even the most stoic must recognize 
the enormity of what 
can't be mastered. 

Today, for instance, the light 
is brilliant again, after heavy 
months of wind and winter. Just 
like that, it spills across the room, 
almost careless in its generosity. 
Whether or not we remember to praise, 
it asks only to be received. 

Near freezing again overnight.
On waking, I feel tight in my joints.
And in my trigger finger, bone on bone
clacks almost like metal on metal.  
This flesh machine continues to calculate
the sums: how much the world has milked 
from it, how much it has been underpaid. 
How it's still being told there are 
debts outstanding. The world must love
survivors— it applauds us for returning 
to the labor of days, calls us resilient,
inventive, worthy of praise before setting
       the next deadline. The cost is mere 
       footnote, the side effect of living.

a Lenten calendar notes that it's also the Optional
Memorial of St. Patrick. Therefore, the meditation 
it offers has nothing to do with leprechauns and 
whiskey or stout, nor with grocery stores announcing 
sales of corned beef and potatoes today. Instead 
it's about the man cured of his long infirmity (but 
which one? there were so many) who was exhorted
by Jesus to go forth and sin no more, for something
worse may happen to you. This might have helped
the Utah mother of three who tried to poison 
her husband twice and on the second try succeeded. 
She was just convicted the other day. In the stamp-
sized picture of a green-robed saint on the same 
page, Patrick looks a little put out, no doubt 
at being designated only an "Optional Memorial" 
instead of today's actor in a lead role, especially 
after Sunday's triumphant Oscar win of Jessie 
Buckley and Comhghairdeas flying all over 
the place. But every day is a new turning point, 
and these days every day feels like Lent and 
suffering and ashes, and Lord knows everyone 
has all kinds of terrible crosses to bear.

This morning on the radio, the woman
who came back from the brink of a terminal 
disease said all she wanted to do was bite
into a piece of bread spread thick with butter, 
drink the good bottle of wine she'd been saving 
for a special occasion. Then she wanted to steal 
some art off the walls of the clinic she'd gone to 
for so many months, do something ridiculous, 
audacious. Also, she said she doesn't believe 
there's anything else after this life. No 
shining country after crossing the threshold, 
no luminous chorus singing like piped-in muzak 
in a tunnel or train station. I was amazed
at how sure she sounded: not a bump of doubt 
in her throat, not a sudden wriggle like a small 
animal hiding in her pocket. You might know
what I mean if you've ever awakened at night 
with the remembered sweetness of egg in your 
mouth, or smelled the yeast in a rind of old 
bread hours after you tucked it into a bag.

Is it unreasonable or a flaw
to ache long after what others say 
was a trifling matter, an oversight?

To feel too much under the skin
a wound that reopens with a careless
word or gesture? In the winter garden, 

hardy root crops grow alongside rosemary, 
thyme, and camellia. Pine, juniper, and 
winterberry wear snow like a light 

garment that doesn't choke them. How 
is it a flaw to be moved by the world, 
to be undone by what was felled 

or disfigured, torn from its bed? 
May we be tender through the frost 
that comes to kill everything,

the scrubbing after the stain that 
reddened the walls and toppled 
the chairs to the floor.

There goes the neighbor with the dogs
he's trained to walk alongside him without

leashes, the neighbors in Lululemon leggings,
puffy vests, and fingerless gloves getting  
 
their ten thousand steps in. It's still cold, but 
the man on the corner stops to wipe his forehead 

after vigorously mowing the lawn. The woman across 
the steet parks her van and unloads her paper 

(not plastic) bags of groceries. The brown 
crusty end of a baguette peeks out from one.
 
In the middle of the world's daily burning, 
our desire for something small and good 

has not evaporated. Our hands touch and gather
tiny salvations and bouquets: garlic and lemon,

dill and laundry soap. Someone pours honey
into a cup of tea and stirs, then sets
 
the spoon singing for a second on the rim
of the cup. Duty and pleasure, necessity

and extremity— they come knocking on the door,
sometimes asking to be let in at the same 

time. And all we can do is open, since we've 
known them all our lives and they, us.

There's always someone we applaud:
for endurance, for courage, resilience
in the face of terrible fortune. Go back 
to the old tales and find her counterpart:
the girl who spun and swept until the room
turned dizzy with gold, the girl who tufted
feathers and turned them into shirts without
holes. She poured water into jars not designed
to hold, carried wind and fire in paper, 
counted millet and wheat, pebbles and
pearls. No one asked why she must keep
doing this. No one asked her to stop.
The rules were already in place, but
being rules surely they could be broken,
amended, rewritten, undone. Tell her 
to put down the spindle, tell her 
to throw the needle into the hay.
Tell her rest shouldn't be 
a door to another test. 

     Again, the blare of warnings, agitation of
bodies fleeing rooms or hiding in place.
     Can't fathom the terrible seed that ticks then
detonates inside an anger so great, it must
     express itself in violence. No training prepares 
for what we fear the most when guns
     go off in a hallway, a classroom. Not theory nor
hypothesis. Bodies falling to the floor: the
     irrefutable conclusion. Sirens down the boulevard:
just moments ago we pointed out blooming trees, 
     kalanchoe shrubs tucked along walkways. Mid-morning 
limps now toward noon. What lightness there was
     moves slow like a barge, though we tell ourselves 
not to forget it does exist. Sometimes, just
     one unexpected gesture does that. One kindness
prodded to the surface that breaks the crust,
     quieting the turmoil winged black as crows.
Remember what in us is soft-boned, fragile,
     sweet— sometimes all we can do is hug each other
tight. Every day, new ripples of violence 
     unspool. No one is unmarked, though we 
vow not to let it change the human in us. 
     We will ourselves to survive, though rearranged 
exquisitely by grief. In this, just as
     yesterday and tomorrow, life goes on. Birds on  
zoetropes flicker on a spinning drum.

We saw a blood-red moon
dangle over an arena awash with blue
light, and all I could think of was how
pain is a kind of weather, waiting
to pass through us as we count
the days to the season's turn.
Spears of wild garlic begin
to push up at the edge of the yard.
Soon, the pruned limbs of the fig
will recover, and start to push green
clusters out. Some mornings, the light
arrives like a sentence completely formed
for a state you still can't properly
articulate. Does it say endure, does it say 
you are more than a passing thought, more 
than the slow movement of color under ice?