Author: Luisa A. Igloria

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.

the Buddha wonders where all
the tall ships are this year.
It seems there are only two
small craft festooned with banners,
almost invisible amid the numerous
tents vending everything from Hawaiian
ice to cinnamon roasted almonds and
funnel cakes (lifted, sputtering, from pans
of grease). The Buddha thinks it’s a sad
day when the amount of merchandise
being hawked outnumbers the people
who are out on this gorgeous but baking
hot day; but what does he know? So he
lines up like everyone else for a funnel
cake and deep fried Oreos, and washes
everything down with a lemonade.

You only think
the weathervane
is fickle as any
wind; but don’t
forget what stays,
what keeps it
steady at the base.

 

In response to Via Negativa: Homesteader.