Author: Luisa A. Igloria

and I drink to the choices
they would have us believe
are also ours:

No, poeta, there are more
than three— more than yesterday,
today, and tomorrow. Or,
following your ultimate

subtraction
which leaves out the denuded
rose of yesterday and the ashes
of the diminished present,

only tomorrow exists.
But I argue there is in addition
such a thing as post-,
which is brilliant shorthand

meaning we are among those
chosen somehow by history to receive
the mantle of what they call
enlightenment.

*after Nicanor Parra, “The Last Toast;” with thanks
to Dave Bonta for the reminder

In response to Via Negativa: Love song to a mobile device.

Let us now stamp our feet
and with our tears make a circle
in which we’ll mourn the places
where names were lost to memory—

Every garden that bloomed
with sago palm, every patch
of chayote; every ridge tilled
and buttressed or mossy

with stone. The pair of funeral
shops next door to each other,
men playing jueteng on benches
outside. The corner store and its

madonna, nursing her baby
at the breast, handing you
your sack of bread and change
through window grilles. Who lived

here, whose blood fed the roots
of lilies and deciduous trees?
Try to remember: this is where
all the rivers used to live.

In response to Via Negativa: Ceremony.

After a hard rain, one
tree limb shattering through
the windshield of a parked car.

A humid haze not yet lifted
from the ground, clumps
of trampled fern.

We thread our way as if
the dogs of evening were not
already pulling at the leash,

as if autumn’s early telegrams,
yellow as goldenrod, were not
already here.

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

What kind of water rushes
toward a border of land
and then retreats?

What edge
constantly resists?

How can the shortness of a blade
serve as garrote to a life
severed at the neck?

How do we find a way to thank at least the sand
for being there, its myriad pinpricks of glass?

What in the shapes of leaves
predicts the sorrow
of their fall?

How do we stay in the river’s limpid heart,
and how do we listen through bone?

How do we sift the sunlight back
through trees and drink
again of green?

In response to Via Negativa Oceanologist.

It gets tiresome,
explaining how we
got the grand

pianos into the trees,
how we learned chromatic
scales and savored grace

notes before breakfast,
at the same time
we did drills

in a few other
tongues, including
your own. And yet,

you insist your
benevolence gave birth
to us in little beakers:

so malleable for packing
into crates, shipments for
the empire’s vast network.

In response to Via Negativa: Anthropocene.

“There is nothing
but us together,
born to one another,
to settle against.” ~ D. Bonta

The fair’s over, the tickets
all sold: even the siamese twins
have gone to make children of their own
on a dusty farm. My clothes are in some
museum basement, mothballed and moldy,
impossibly old. I traded them in for a train
ticket, a trip up the coast, the chance
to stand by myself, bareheaded,
in an orchard reddened with fruit.
Not yours, you reminded
through a bullhorn; Now don’t get
any ideas. What an echo you make
through the years; what a nag,
what a scold, what a miser, what a drag:
always talking tithe, always in your tower,
in surveillance mode. In other words,
dear: you haven’t changed.

In response to Via Negativa: Dyad.

you want
what you want,

having been fed
from youth

the milk of
personal choice—

open your mouth
and squeak the greasy

wheel: ask
for premium not

diesel, make the cart
tilt, the vehicle

wobble, say hey,
this here’s broken

and I won’t settle
not even if

everyone’s on
the same factory shift

In response to Via Negativa: Downsizers.