Love Poem with Skull and Candy Valentines

This entry is part 62 of 95 in the series Morning Porch Poems: Winter 2010-11

 


“…And everich of hem did his besy cure
Benygnely to chese or for to take,
By hir acord, his formel or his make.”
—Geoffrey Chaucer, “Parlement of Foules” (369-371)

In Cosmedin, Rome— in the Chiesa di Santa Maria,
a flower-wreathed skull sits preserved in a shrine
more ornate than any foil-covered box of candy—
that’s Saint Valentine himself, as the hand-lettered
strip of bandage across his brow proclaims.
“Protector of love,” martyr of Terni, he got
couples hitched at a time when (would you believe)
it was illegal to marry. The stories say he was “beaten
with clubs and stoned; and when that failed to kill him,
he was beheaded” outside the Porta del Popolo.
Poor Val, his aquiline nose may even have been broken.
But he seems to have kept most of his teeth, which rest
(some gaps between, though they say that can be sexy)
just inside the edge of the reliquary frame. His gold box
resembles a 1930’s RCA TV, or the consoles in the Dr. Who
episode where an alien disguised as a woman is trying
to take over the world. Even here, the theme is love
and monsters; or love and sex, lust, appetite, desire–
everything you want but can’t actually have, so naturally
you want it even more. On the eve of the festival
of Lupercalia, young Roman boys and girls wrote
their names on slips of paper and put them into jars;
then they held a grand old raffle to find out who
they’d walk hand in hand with the next day, share
a honeyed sweetmeat with, maybe spoon a little,
golden in the olive grove. Did the trees make noise
under the cloudless sky, touching in ways we
rarely do? Everyone loves a little sugar every
now and then; why not them too? Cushioned
in red and gold, the saint would understand
the meanings of excess: candygrams and chalky
conversation hearts (“Sweet Dreams”, “URDGR8ST”,
“Be Mine”, “Big Hugs”), little mounds of milk
chocolate goopy in their maraschino centers,
cardboard boxes lettered with their swirly
tic-tac-toe of X’s and O’s; lacy thong, slinky
sarong, velvet codpiece. Welt of pepper and spice,
ascetic stripe of sea-salt on the hungry tongue.

Luisa A. Igloria
02 14 2011

In response to today’s Morning Porch entry.

Woodrat Podcast 34: Platonic love

A poetic celebration of non-romantic love and close friendship. Contributors include: Augustine, Brenda Clews, Jason Crane, Risa Denenberg, Ann Drysdale, Kate Fitzpatrick, Stephanie Goehring, Howie Good, Uma Gowrishankar, Joanne Hudson, Pat Jones, Sid Kemp, Maria Koliopoulou, W.F. Lantry, Ami Mattison, Carolee Sherwood, Paul Stevens, and Marly Youmans.

Podcast feed | Subscribe in iTunes

“The Starry Fool” by Marly Youmans originally appeared in Mezzo Cammin, “Epic” by Stephanie Goehring in 42opus, and “L’Hirondelle” by W.F. Lantry in Damazine. The music in “Veils to Clothe Venus” by Brenda Clews is by Buz Hendricks, used by permission. The podcast theme music is “Le grand sequoia,” by Innvivo (Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike licence).

Link roundup: Tenrecs, monostiches, kale and other wonders

The New York Times:When Democracy Weakens
Bob Herbert wishes Americans would take a cue from the Egyptians.

NPR: “An Immigrant’s Quest For Identity In The ‘Open City’
I have been reading the glowing reviews for Teju Cole’s new novel with great pleasure, but it was especially fun to hear this interview come on the radio while I was kneading bread this morning. I was all like, “Hey, I know that guy! I’ve published his stuff at Via Negativa and qarrtsiluni!” So good to see a member of the old blog neighborhood make it big.

Grant Hackett: Monostich Poet blog
I don’t link Grant’s poems in the Smorgasblog because they’re too short to excerpt — a monostich is a one-line poem and he excels at them. I don’t know anyone who packs more mystery and suggestiveness into such a small space. He used to blog at Falling Off the Mountain, but took that site offline late last year. On the new site, he seems to post at the rate of about one or two poems a day.

Moving Poems forum: “What comes first, the video or the poem?
Check out the variety of responses to my question from videopoets at all skill levels. I am going to have to remember to throw out questions to the community like this more often.

Voice Alpha:To read or to recite? Dramatic versus Epic
Dick Jones — poet, musician and retired drama teacher — wades into the debate about how best to present one’s poems to a crowd. Surprisingly, perhaps, given his background, he comes down rather decisively on the side of reading.

Call for Submissions: Festival of the Trees 57 with Rebecca in the Woods
Rebecca is one of the best young naturalist-bloggers out there, so we are very lucky to have her as host of the next Festival of the Trees.

Linebreak: “To Failure:” by Christopher Ankney
My first reading for Linebreak, a magazine I admire. Don’t know the poet from Adam, but I know the subject all too well! It was fun to learn the poem this way, over a series of half a dozen takes, even if I was a bit too tired to give it as good a reading as it deserves.

BBC Earth News: “Madagascar’s elusive shell-squatting spider filmed
Speaking of failure, check out the first spider in this clip from the redoubtable David Attenborough & co. (a win for photography and evolution). Then there’s…
Bizarre mammals filmed calling using their quills
Tenrecs! Stridulating!


(Watch on YouTube)
In a rare trip off the mountain, a chance remark at the coffee shop led me to discover that I was surrounded by fellow kale afficionados, and one of them later sent me the link to this video. What used to be an obscure vegetable back when we started growing it in the garden in the early 70s has now apparently achieved cult status. Who’d have thunk it?

Letter to Arrythmia

This entry is part 61 of 95 in the series Morning Porch Poems: Winter 2010-11

 

Dear arrhythmia, dear perennially
side-stepping, asynchronous and rapid
tachycardia, I’ve learned not so much
to fancy up my footwork than to fake
a passable improv: not even time
to do my nails, check my hair or lines
for an audition call— but here we are
again in the molasses of a telenovela,
gliding from moments of near hysteria
then shimmying to the Copacobana
as doors revolve like windmills
in the background… And it’s true, then,
what they say about you: how you break
knees, break hearts, and then ask
Will you dance? Sometimes I want to stop,
just be the wallflower, enjoy the view— be
the one the waiters come and tend to,
their silver trays bobbing with fancy,
pileated tufts of napkins. Oh but I’ve never
known the ease of a downier partner:
only you dealing and dealing it out;
sometimes, more than I can muster.

Luisa A. Igloria
02 13 2011

In response to today’s Morning Porch entry.

Landscape, with Mockingbird and Ripe Figs

This entry is part 60 of 95 in the series Morning Porch Poems: Winter 2010-11

 

Like a wren, like an oriole, like the quail—
there’s the mockingbird improvising in the grass.
Chittering call of a Cooper’s hawk, jay that calls
and calls until his double answers. Who
hears my voice crying out in the middle of the day,
who knows to tell the echo from its answer?
The Japanese beetles have gored open
the sides of figs velveting the tree.
You picked my hair clean of shadows.
You dropped little stones in the beaker
so the water rose and I could drink.
Sweet smell of clover, sweet-fingered fruit
ripening to rot upon the sill.
Above the sheets, a spider couples
with its prey. In their eyes’ prismed glass,
our limbs bond into brittle sugar.
That isn’t steam beneath the ceiling.
Outside, small birds continue feeding.
A strangled cry. Finally, the jay calls like a jay.

Luisa A. Igloria
02 12 2011

In response to today’s Morning Porch entry.

How to write a book review

Read quickly. You’re not being paid enough to spend quality time with this book, and besides, you can usually tell within the first five pages whether the author has written the book you want to read, or something that merits only scorn. You can try opening it at random and reading ten different pages to get a flavor of it. Or make like Marshall McLuhan and read — or rather skim — just the odd-numbered pages.

If it’s a novel, you’re not supposed to give away the ending in any case. Reading all the way to the end is for suckers and college interns eager to suck up to the editor. The important thing is to demonstrate critical acumen in the review, which is best done by adopting a tone of lofty condescension, unless the author is a friend or someone who might conceivably be asked to review your own next book, in which case you are better off to hail the work as groundbreaking while at the same time naming other writers in the same genre to which is bears a close resemblance. These writers can be selected more or less random — the more off-the-wall the comparisons, the more you’ll come across as eclectic and perceptive (not to mention well-read).

Important note: don’t be too hasty in emailing this off to your editor. Fact-check to make sure you have the basic details right, such as the main character’s name and situation. If you screw that up, you risk blowing your cover and looking like a total dumb-ass.

Poetry is a trickier case, but one rarely encountered by the professional reviewer, since so few major publications want to risk driving away readers with reviews whose sole value is to garner a little extra high-brow credibility for the publication. If you are called upon to review a book of poetry, the safest approach again is to open the book in a number of places at random. Select four or five reasonably interesting quotes, decide what they likely mean in the context of the book as suggested by the blurbs and publisher’s description, then decide whether or not this is the sort of poetry you like and respond appropriately, either with fulsome praise or scathing condemnation. Since the American poetry scene is riven by factionalism, such extremes of rhetoric are the norm.

Poetry review editors also sometimes ask for three or four books to be included in the same review. On the surface, this might seem to make your job even harder, but not really. Now you only need to find one or two exemplary quotes per book, and their greater variety will push you to greater heights of creativity in your connective prose. If you’re really feeling puckish, and if the publication isn’t one that specializes in poetry, deduce a trend. Whatever you do, don’t engage with the subject matter of the poems, unless to belittle the poet (Sharon Olds’ obsession with sex, Mary Oliver’s rhapsodies about nature). You’re better than that. Remember, poetry is all about language, in the same way that painting is all about paint. Leave the achingly sincere analyses to the Christian Science Monitor and small-time bloggers.

What She Wants

This entry is part 59 of 95 in the series Morning Porch Poems: Winter 2010-11

 

Nearly noon, but only a few
hours since I washed my face
upon rising. The day needs
to bloom harder, needs more
roundness— The swell of plucked
bandurria strings, the glisten
of corn chaff flying, soft
stripes of light dipped in saffron
wash; this thin milk passing for air
bursting instead with pollen,
as if some goddess had carelessly
flicked the dust off her sandals,
as if it were August, and all
she wants is the green-gold
mango hanging from the tree.

Luisa A. Igloria
02 11 2011

In response to today’s Morning Porch entry.

After Luisa: two poem sequences

Yesterday and today, Dale Favier left poems in response to Luisa Igloria’s poems in the comments at the Morning Porch, and both times it prompted a further exchange between Luisa and me as time permitted. Here are the results.

Jessie’s wearing a knit belt,
a band of vivid pink.

She whistles the beginning of something
again and again.

I glance down at my coffee.
When I look back up

she’s pulled on a gray sweater
and gone to look at the sky.

—Dale Favier

*

(This made me smile in two ways at once. Well done!
—Dave Bonta)

*

Things That Make Me Smile
In Two Ways At Once

Flounced ruffles
Swagger-me boots
Lost and found capers
A long drink
of something mint
Dimpled time
A lie-in
Bright circlet
inside a small hour
Homing like
the hummingbird
That little dish
of nectar partly
hidden in
the leaves—

—Luisa A. Igloria

*

Jessie’s wearing boots of mint. She whistles the hummingbird out of the leaves in another story, one without curved bakery cases and metal tubes that hiss into small cups. In this dimpled time, nectar drips from gold cages, & a sad lawyer feeds himself to a lie-in. She hums & taps her toe. She homes in.

—D.B.

*

Bedtime Story

But what if she hasn’t learned how to whistle? Will the hummingbird come out of hiding, will it part the leaves for a pucker, for a yodel, or if she crooned? Will it flutter its wings more rapidly than eyelashes? Summer is a long way away. Summer is stripes of vermilion, the plumage of birds of paradise. She looks out where the wind has started sifting fine snow again. The birdbath is an upturned bundt pan ringed by tiny marzipan leaves. Knock on its sides and the echo circles the garden. When it’s cold, we want to suck everything down to the marrow, forgetting the fire in the feathers, the smolder in the song. The sad lawyer in the canopy bed stops alternately tossing in the sheets and sitting up to smooth them. She regales him with stories, pretending she is Sheherazade: short of the endings, before daylight, she braids their ends and coils them flat as coins. Laughing, she tells him he must find them himself. She hides them underneath the mattress, then wishes she were a florin, a ducat, a coronet dollar piece.

—L.A.I.

*

(three tanka)

That ache in the lungs
on a very cold dawn—
I almost enjoy it.
The blue near the horizon
is the earth’s own shadow.

Half-in, half-out,
a leaf flaps
from the frozen birdbath.
I pluck an unsightly hair
from the bridge of my nose.

In the post office window,
the clerk & I compared
ten dollar bills.
1001 spam emails
vanish with one click.

—D.B.

*

That ache in the lungs
on a very cold dawn,
that blue near the horizon—

Across the counterpane
I’ve chased my shadow
half-in, half-out of sleep—

I fill the chamber with ink
and the nib presses
against creamy paper—

Ink color named after a battle,
cornfields bordering
Antietam creek—

That ache in the wake
of language, words like pennants
marking what can’t ever be held—

As in a roomful of people
where I find I’m still always
speaking to you—

—L.A.I.

* * *

In the massage room is
a trickle-water fountain
which pricks the Reiki music
with little pings of drips.

That high harsh sound
of something tearing
is only my tinnitus.

I believe for a desolate moment
she is going to lay her head
down on my oiled chest.

—D.F.

*

A man built a city
in his basement out
of balsa wood, all so
the model people
riding round & round
on his train wouldn’t
get bored. Look!
There’s a fountain,
as artificial as in
real life! And trees
with an ageless foliage
that won’t show dust.
I crouch down & peer
under the table.
A rat trap has been
baited with what looks
like catfood. We have
just been introduced
to his wife’s collection
of orchids, & I am
still agog: all those
ornate enticements
for special lovers who
will never find them,
so far into the country
of winter in their hot
glass house.

—D.B.

*

So far into the country
of winter in their hot
glass house they find
the abandoned piano,
a yellowed score and jazz
notes drifting overhead.
She follows the scent
of ginger and he follows
her down the winding
corridor. The air is cool
in rooms carved from old
wood. He looks for twigs
to whittle, happiest finding
stray pieces that the wind’s
blown in, or that the surf
washes up on shore.
No matter, they can both
admire the heavy tapestry
embroidered with a garden–
all the vines and brambles,
clusters of fruit shot through
with gold thread; the lovers
outlined in white and sienna,
each with their haltered
animals: they bend toward a chink
in the wall that separates them,
press ear and mouth against
the place they might align with
the other; they hear the short
relay of filtered breath.

—L.A.I.

Landscape, with Water Fountain, Small Clouds and Endless Lyric

This entry is part 58 of 95 in the series Morning Porch Poems: Winter 2010-11

 

In the foyer, I’ve installed
a tabletop fountain: four
gradated stone-like bowls
balanced lip to bottom, one
atop the other; water pouring
from a fluted edge down to
the basin, where a tiny engine
drives the stream up and up
again. Miniature homage to
perpetual motion, its murmur
audible until we pull the plug
before we go upstairs to bed
at night. And it will never
ice over, never fill with pond
scum, floating koi or iridescent
insect bodies, its purpose simply
to distill some part of what teems
without cease outdoors, without
relief but only momentary stay—
Today, bitter cold; high wind
at sunrise sends small clouds
in search of sun— perpetual errand,
as leaves keep trying to transmute
the thin, harsh sounds of tearing
before they flutter to the ground.

Luisa A. Igloria
02 10 2011

In response to today’s Morning Porch entry, via Blackberry. And now Dale Favier has posted a response to Luisa’s poem…