Category: Greatest Hits

“Mira: you will never see faces like this again” —C.D. Wright
And so therefore yes, every [expletive] poem is a love poem.

Sunrise: from a thousand feet up, the cry of a lost shorebird, circling the long brown waves of hills. Picturesque, no? Almost like a Breugel. Do not ask what it is grieving for, but why. And Obi-wan Kenobi sensed the destruction of Alderaan: “I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror, and were suddenly silenced.” See if in another part of the frame there is a figure falling, fallen, drowning, drowned; if just beyond those hills, that smudge is the smoke of cities burning even as they churn into open water, the land a cracked template that will no longer hold. What are those bodies doing on the rooftops of buildings? For whom do they open their mouths and cry? Prayers and lamentations, oaths, pleading. Who has not lost anything? I would be the dog that wants to embrace its doggy life, would want to suck on the gristle right down to the bone; I don’t know about you, but that’s what I know of immanence. I would be the horse that wants to scratch its behind on the tree as long as it still could. The children want to skate in a pond at the edge of the wood because there, the trees light up like fire; and the cold that stings their faces and the thin patches of ice make the blood beat hard in their chests. What do you love? What do you love? Everything that can be given, everything that can be taken away.

—Luisa A. Igloria
03 12 2011

In response to today’s Morning Porch entry.

Dear unseen, constantly unsated ones,
I’ve fed you on your feast days, remembered
to bring you water or wine in clear shot
glasses. For you the first pared slices of fruit,
the first hot mounds of rice scooped into doll-
sized bowls before the steam even hit
our faces. Sizzling oil and fat, sugar, sage,
citrus. Cake and cream, batter and bread,
even the crust at the bottom of the pan.
Should I have offered you sweetbreads:
say, my own liver, my lungs, my heart?
I’d pictured the afterlife as a kind of zen
garden: a long corridor lined with suites
in a 24/7 spa where souls washed clean
and free from grasping desire now
wander in a state of fragrant, aimless bliss.
So why have I heard you snarling in the dark,
hatching ruinous plots and making mine-
fields of our backyards? There are new
holes there today that can’t have been made
by the lone squirrel disinterring its breakfast,
cleaning off the dirt with its teeth.

—Luisa A. Igloria
03 09 2011

In response to today’s Morning Porch entry.

Midpoint of noon, in the quiet for a moment
the day coheres. Worry is a beached
white whale that’s come to rest
awhile on the outer lip of afternoon.
In Spanish, the word for rest
is Descanso— when the shutters
are turned for siesta against
the searing light, when the little birds
fold into the leaves of the naranja tree.
Slow down, I whisper to the bell
of my own constantly fluttering heart.

—Luisa A. Igloria
03 05 2011

In response to today’s Morning Porch entry.

Can you keep a secret? They will never know. In my e-mailbox at work this morning, this message: When wearing one of Practically Genuine’s clones, you won’t have to worry about being caught. How? We manufacture all our products (from the inside/out). Using the same metals, markings, materials as the originals ensures the perfect clone. In 1936 the pantywaist was a type of child’s garment with short pants that buttoned to the waist of the shirt. In Old English, a stole is a long robe, a scarf-like garment. Clergymen wore it. Frankly, I much prefer the sixteenth century use of doublet (root, Fr. duble) as “one of two things that are alike.” Keep this quiet and your friends, family, co-workers, and loved ones will never know the difference. Six inches of fresh powder. A pair of squirrels will wrestle in it, then go up the big maple, couple on the trunk, retreat to separate limbs. All those little gropings in the shadows. Do you need a translator? Think of it. History is full of copies, some of them cutting themselves out of the landscape right now.

—Luisa A. Igloria
02 22 2011

In response to today’s Morning Porch entry.

Dear buoyancy, dear levity, dear
little digression; dear necessary respite
from gravity and circumspection, your voice is
just audible over the wind like a junco’s chitter—
Leaves like tongues lift off from the newly melted
forest floor, busily trading all kinds of news
from the world— for instance, why did I not know
before today of Qaddafi’s all-girl coterie of virgin
bodyguards, smart as models in their khaki outfits;
or of how he sometimes likes to camp out in five-
star hotel gardens in a sumptuous, heated Bedouin
tent guarded by a camel? Or of Unsinkable Molly B,
the cow that jumped a slaughterhouse gate and fled
authorities by swimming across the Missouri river?
(She’s safe now in a Montana sanctuary.) They say
that Elton John’s in town this weekend: I want to know
if he’s traveled with the same grand piano that workers
in Tsarkoye Selo scratched their heads over, wondering
how to hoist it through the narrow windows of Catherine
the Great’s gilded ballroom. And what about those three
men in Malaysia who made off with 725,000 condoms
(still missing), or the Mexican woman now on her ninth
day of a hunger strike, demanding an invitation to Prince
William’s wedding? A 35 year-old naked man was captured
on surveillance video taking sausages from the kitchen
of a retirement home. Who knows why these things happen?
Perhaps an inexplicable longing seized them all in the night,
some order not to be disobeyed flashed on in the cortex
of the brain. Once, my daughter’s piano teacher mistook
a gift of strawberry body butter for yogurt. She called,
half laughing and half in pain, saying she was just
so hungry, that it smelled so beautiful and good; and
suddenly she wanted it, more than anything in the world.

—Luisa A. Igloria
02 19 2011

In response to today’s Morning Porch entry.