Author: Luisa A. Igloria

Strange cries that filter through the fog
and trees: blur of goldfinch and raven wings,
loping legs of deer. In between these acts,
a silence which I color every now and then
with my own speech, or tears.

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

Cranberry, Sparkling Berry, True Red, Movie Star Red, Red Delicious, Sunset Red— how many names for these little tubes of pigment lined up on a drugstore wall? My older daughters and I come here to find a name for the color of our changing moods. In the fall we turn to russet shades, to nutmeg and chocolate and spice; in spring we might crave the fluttery pink of orchids, the softer wistfulness of mauve. But here we are on the precarious brink of summer— just like that pair of tanagers foraging in the rain, not two feet from the porch: though it is the male in his costume of brash red that trails the drab female onto a branch, and returns my level gaze. Of course it is the same old story all over again. The Beatles sing “Why Don’t We Do it in the Road?” and Mrs. Robinson lights her cigarette, rolls her stockings back up her legs. Elaine and Benjamin have barred the church door shut and are running, running away and into the bus.

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

What was that thread of music I heard just now,
what was the sound of my name, my secret name,
the one the elders bestowed on me in childhood

under the aegis of a spotted moon to confuse
the gods too generous with their gifts of fever
and blood and the blisters than ran up and down

my limbs like steps to their dollhouse-sized temples?
It comes back as the warbler lisps at the woods’ edge,
as the green-feathered trunks run dark with rain

so I think I hear old tunes on an upright piano—
my father and uncles gathered in the living room,
singing “Wooden Heart”, “Begin the Beguine”,

“Let Me Call You Sweetheart”, and “Besame Mucho”.
And the self that was me is still there, scribing
time under the bedclothes, fingertip to broken skin.

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

(after “Flight of Swallows Over the Field of Gold” by Clive Hicks-Jenkins)

“… [his] breath kindleth coals, and a flame goeth out of his mouth.” Job 41:21

What you are made to understand from
the beginning is that everything is winged—
not just the swallows scissoring the air
across the warrior’s bolero jacket, but the field
itself caught in the blue curvature of furrows
coming unfixed from the landscape.
Against the screens (are they sycamore,
are they birch?) at the edge of the woods,
and the ivory of the pennant which billows
from one end of the lance, who could tell
a gray tail’s flicker from the side of a nine-
pointed leaf? Even the beast’s glorious
vermillion wings unfurl, as if to say there
has been no shame in using such power,
subdued now under the calm gaze of the one
who has yoked the rippling energy of this
world, as if he could make it do his bidding.

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

Because I admired a glazed plate veined with
obsidian and blue-green, my friend took me
to visit a potter in his studio. He worked
the local clay, prodded the wet mass on the wheel
into a wide-lipped vessel from which to pour
the milk or wine, mugs from which to drink,
dishes to hold warm slabs of meat or beautiful
smoked fish as if they merely leaped from the cold
arms of the river entire, as if their iridescent,
speckled bodies did not thrash when the air
left their lungs… I read of how long
the Buddha sat in the canopy as leaves
of the bodhi tree fell on his plain robes,
fell in the dust at his feet, or swirled away
in runnels of rain— until the torch of desire
burned clean and the pulse in the wrist
ticked like the faintest fragrance in the wind.
I don’t know that I have learned yet
what the green fists of bracken in the grass
have learned, how to open their complex fingers
to the sting of rain as if to say Let it come—
Sunlight gilds every surface today
but also knifes through every anguish;
and I don’t know who or what I address
as I lift my face and say Not yet.

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

“In my end is my beginning.”

There is a mole on the outer corner of my left eye,
another on the upper part of my thigh. The distance
between them: the time it takes for a tear to evaporate.

Where else on the body might you read what’s insisted,
recapitulated, what’s written small? Here is the mouth
with its characteristic stutter, the eyelid with its

recurring tic. Here is skin laid like an embroidered
table runner across the abdomen. On the field
that soon shadows in late afternoon, birds gather.

See the stroke of white on their tails, the faint
orange patch crowning their foreheads.
I want to decoupage the fragments of shadow

they’ve left on the green, the sad, sweet
impermanence of their flickering. Driving home
tonight, I hear on the radio about two comets

that must have collided in space, leaving trails
of dust: they’ve formed a pattern, a kind of tattoo
engraving the otherwise uniform dark.

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

If this is the middle, how long does it last? Once only, I may have come close; but I was never that girl who might have lain in her two-piece suit across the bed of a truck or on a beach under an overhang of rock, saying Let’s give them something to talk about, baby. Forever the wallflower then, even in math class: moving the popular girl with skin like almond cream to stride past in study hour and yank in disgust the extra pencil I’d tucked behind my ear. That calculus is over. This rain at dawn, though: in the half-light, how it makes the green more vivid, how the faltering songs of wood-thrushes chime like timepieces from another world. The flare is brighter still from pent-up longing. The world hasn’t gone away; its roots push deeper. The wind on my tongue tastes like salt from the sea; this late in life I want to roll up the cuffs of my jeans and walk without stopping along its wavering edge.

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

Take me back: I tell you I have come too far
from myself. A pebble drops into a well
but I cannot hear its thunk to let me know
it has come to rest. From the kitchen in my
childhood home, I could see the church belfry
clear across the roofs of houses, and the thin
grey cord of birds unspooling overhead at dusk—
Imagine the carillonneur in his wooden cabin
under the bells, striking out the music with his feet
and fists. Through the green wall of woods today,
the dawn sky leaks through a hundred holes.
I rummage in the bowl of random fortunes
and my hand picks out only those with no
coherent answer: Do not walk by yourself
in the dark. Or, It is better to have a hen
tomorrow than an egg today. And my heart
after all remains a sieve— Come sorrow; come love;
come mutable chord and struck descant of things.

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.