Author: Luisa A. Igloria

In the night, plaintive bassoon
of calling frogs; and just before

first light, an owl’s insistent
questions— And I know

all threads will lead, as they must,
to the place where they first started:

to the one our steps retrace
a labyrinth of paths to find.

Behind the grille
of the confessional,
who listened to our
reconstructions of sin
and shortcoming? Who
took it upon himself
to say what merited
a decade, two decades,
three, four, five
of murmured prayer
in punishment?

 

In response to Via Negativa: Listen.

They say the present is now.
Do the roots of the plant
distinguish air from ether,
ether from tubes
of succulent green?

 

In response to Via Negativa: The art of parting.

How long does the heart hold in its knotted-up angers? Five bitter knobs of green plum on a plate, to dip in salt.

*

The taste of glutamates and nucleotides. In other words, what’s savory stands out from a background— gash of seawater in a runnel of sand.

*

Chilled water in a metal cup. The white flesh of a coconut, young flag swirling to the bottom.

*

What is the condition of wanting something you have no name for yet? I scanned the grocery store shelves, the produce bins— and registered only the color green.

*

My love dropped a rind, a disc of volatile oils, into the broth. Far away, a hundred mouths opened in an orchard awash with amber.

*

Some days, I feel as though I skim only the surface. There are so many things to mend, to read, to wash, to pay.

*

I stacked loose granite slates against the rotted wood of the shed. Before they took them away, the animals had made a bed in one corner, and left their droppings in another.

*

Is it my imagination when I say I remember the way water, soup, cold milk coursed down my throat— to flood the ducts ending at my nipples, positioned in my nursing daughter’s mouth?

*

We did not see how the moon hung larger than a hive, a paper lantern, a parchment dish. And yet we ate from it nightly.

 

In response to Via Negativa: Missing.

Graphium sarpedon

The Buddha regards the slender lunes
of blue and crossed white, the bands
laddering up and down each wing to make
those familiar blue-green triangles. Pressed
between two sheets of glass, immobile, far
from any treeline or canopy: in which humid
rainforest of his archipelago was this one
gathered? He picks up the framed souvenir
and walks with it to the gift shop counter,
prodded by a faint, familiar throbbing
where his thorax or abdomen might be,
had he wings more swiftly to traverse
the interstitial spaces in this life.

 

In response to Via Negativa: Henri Matisse: The Cut-outs at the Tate.

I was a new moon blade slicing
through the hidden rooms of night.

I was the gear activated
when coins dropped into
the vending machine,

and the bag that crinkled
downward in its short
doomed flight.

I was the silk of an inverted
pyramid, an ordinary umbrella
made helpless in the wind.

I was the reservoir and the rain
barrel. Of course I looked for you
behind every sliding door.

 

In response to Via Negativa: Henri Matisse: The Cut-outs at the Tate.

Before I left
the house each day,
my mother pinned

a disc of beaten
metal above my heart,
beneath my shirt

of pressed cotton;
on it, a modest
constellation

ringed a shape
and form— a woman
veiled and robed,

her features rubbed
beyond recognition
by time and fingers

fervent with
supplication.
Sometimes I held

its wafer edge
between my teeth,
considering:

why not rose,
why not honey?
This little

copper moon,
its iron and
protective tang.

This day is ash:
it dwindles in the tray,
a dozen or more bent scrolls
that each held a tiny stub of coral.

 

In response to Via Negativa: Dispatch from the Front.

“my private bone, my chance heart…” ~ D. Bonta

My private bone, my chance heart, I took
the temper of your pulse and bound it
to my compass. I thumbed a ride on the first
galleon out of town and scrubbed the decks
of my passage. Some strangers were kind:
they tore off pieces of bread and sheets
of parchment, on which to collect
my signature. By lantern light,
by moon and monsoon, my loneliness
looked back. But the point from which
I started was a ghost promontory, a wraith
that walked its ramparts in the mist;
a spray of volatile scent that traveled
from nocturnal hearts of blooms to strip me,
sway me, in the middle of a windowless room.

 

In response to Via Negativa: Retreat.

does the body make room
for all that luggage? How
did the high wire snap
in the quiet night? How
did the boar lend bristles
to the wood that tames
your hair, and the camel
squeeze through the needle’s
sleeping eye? There’s more
to the dumbness of silence
than the slow sift in
piecemeal time.