The outline first, before the hidden
forms break through the rind.
In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.
Words on the Street
Disposition matrix: fragments
the melancholy of a straight line of same-sized trees
the principal’s chair like a golden cloak
how many roads
running toward the shooter, shouting
the vacuum of grief quickly fills with kitsch
I went to bed hungry & woke up full
“Would you like ketchup with your freedom fries?”
survivors at Virginia Tech described him as looking almost innocent in his scout uniform
I dreamt about writing a book titled war canoe
dried wildflowers could be incorporated into a quilt full of names
all young males in the target area are presumed to be terrorists
the terrible coolness of indifference
how many roads must a man
both of them running, pitching forward
according to the Washington Post, the expanded kill list is known as the “disposition matrix”
the melancholy of angels that never learned how to pollinate
“How many bees would you like?”
in my dream I loved how the deserted street felt to my bare feet
the children hidden like stowaways in lavatories & closets
coats from the Army-Navy store
a fisherman’s sweater knitted to look like fish scales
just as bullet points rarely liven up a slide presentation, the sound of a gun is far duller than you’d expect from the movies
it was dark before I reached the end of the block
“How would you prefer we got rid of the crows?”
after the power comes back, the clock can’t stop blinking
Luisa Igloria on audience
I am aware that much of my poetry works with recurrent themes involving place (I am always writing about my hometown— Baguio, it seems), the complicated dynamics of family, the often tangled relationships between history, time, and memory. […]
At the same time, I am aware of the desire to make a clear and accessible connection to readers, whoever they might be, while remaining true to my heart’s first subjects and passions. The notion of a “universal audience” has about the same significance and importance to me as the arguably comparable notion of a “global citizen.” (That is to say, the construct of universality which posits that underneath all the indices of identity, history, gender, etc. which mark us, we are essentially all the same, might be useful in certain contexts, but also undeniably dangerous for its potential to conflate the details of our histories, which are singular.) But also, I cannot believe that what I write would have relevance only for an audience “just like me,” or that such an audience really and truly exists.
Uncomplicated
Two I called mother— one of them birthed me, two of them raised me. When I look around today, I realize it’s not as uncommon as I once thought.
But: two pairs of arms, two sets of fingers, two hearts, two histories, two lullabies, two tongues— how could it not be complicated?
One threw whole sticks of butter into the pots and mixing bowls: cake, spaghetti sauce, it didn’t matter.
One carefully quartered pieces of chicken, stripped tendon to bone, counting out meals and measuring cups of grain in advance.
One whipped egg whites to perfect foam, picked fish of guts and littered bone.
How many loves, how many heartbreaks, how many triumphs and regrets?
And is it any wonder that today, I prefer savory over sweet, unruliness of bramble, tumble and surprise of wild flowers?
No need to pass the salt and pepper for they have taught me the language of laurel, eucalyptus, ginger, star anise.
And I did not know then but now I do— Because this road is long, they’ve stamped their tinctures of herb and camphor on all the stations of my body; and their fragrant signatures on my brow and on my hands.
In response to Via Negativa: Mom at 36.
Mom at 36
While she talks on the phone,
her blue pen seems to have
a life of its own,
makes abstract flowers
& filigree
& Gordian knots
all around the list of birds seen
on her morning walk.
I watch fascinated
as I eat my allotted three
fresh peanut-butter cookies,
each bearing the print of a fork’s
uncomplicated foot.
What’s mental illness got to do with it?
There’s just one particular form of mental illness that’s been found to be shared by a significant number of spree killers. It’s depression. At least a tenth of people in the U.S. have it, or have had it, myself among them. And there’s no conclusive causal link between the depression and spree killing.
You are not normal.
There is no normal. You may well be happy and well adjusted. I hope you are. I often am as well. But every single person is neurologically distinct. Normal is semantic, an arbitrary boundary on the bell curve between peak and long tail. Mentally ill, if it means anything at all, just means landing on the wrong side of that arbitrary line.
Thin fog, as in the corners of a tintype—
where a woman in a long skirt and a thin gauze panuelo poses against a plaster column
where two sisters gracefully incline their heads in opposite directions though the white soldier has his arms around their waists
where a narrow outrigger floats down a river not yet choked with plastic bottles and filth
where groups of women walk down a mountain trail balancing baskets of produce on their dark heads
where the mountains circle their strong dark arms with ink and scars
where these arms that pound the grain could also lift the sky
where a man is holding a scrap of paper he has picked up from a table, and try as I might,
I cannot decipher the message that might have been written there
In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.
Fire-stealer
“‘Heaven’—is what I cannot reach!” ~ Emily Dickinson
How can we be happy again, someone asked; how can we ever feel safe. The girl with the striped headband said, We can. I want to hug all those children who survived and tell them, I just know everything will be all right. Some of the people in the group stood under the far end of the dripping awning to smoke. It kept raining and stopping, raining and stopping, so there was nothing to do but go into the mall to watch a movie. When we came out, night had fallen. We crossed the grassy triangle and let ourselves through the kitchen door. We made dinner: garlicky chicken and rice in broth, a four day old loaf of bread split down the middle, buttered, quickly revived under the grill. Enough for everyone to share. Who was Tantalus? I heard someone ask in the course of conversation. There was ambrosia involved. Stolen nectar from the gods, which in my childhood was the name of a sweet rolled up in colored cellophane for the holidays, dense with citrus and dates and nuts. Punishment, always punishment— for giving in to desire and snatching what the body said it wanted, needed, wanted. The mouth being only the first passage. What the branches bore, gold and sweet and heavy— What the water offered to quench the hot little fire in the gut— The question is always: Does anything ever completely satisfy? Run for it, I want to say. Yes, run with that broken-off branch and the purloined sweetmeat, run even now and celebrate the brightest flame you can find to share with others huddled in the dark.
In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.
Poems vs. bullets
Today I happened to remember I’d written a poem in the voice of a hero from a previous school shooting. Romanian holocaust survivor Liviu Librescu, an engineering professor at Virginia Tech, blocked the doorway to keep the gunman from entering while his students got out through the windows, “into the garden.”
Let’s get real, you say. What good can poetry possibly do, faced with these kinds of horrific acts? I’d reply that anything that helps to deemphasize and demythologize the role of the killer can’t hurt. I tend to think that the mass media’s focus on the killers not only ensures that they will be remembered, but also encourages other violent, antisocial types to emulate them knowing they’ll get the same kind of notoriety. And notoriety might sometimes be just what such troubled young men are after. I love old-time murder ballads as much as anyone, but I think it’s time to put those behind us and stop feeding a gun culture that romanticizes lone killers and vigilantes.
I don’t believe that news reports should be censored, so how to combat the sensationalism? By elevating and memorializing those like Librescu who resisted, and who led truly exemplary lives besides. I hope it’s only a matter of time before we start hearing songs and poems about Sandy Hook Elementary School principal Dawn Hochsprung and the other heroes of the massacre.
More than poems of mourning — which are also necessary, and which we poets are always Johnny-on-the-spot with after every major cataclysm — we need poems of celebration and defiance. We can’t allow the killers to dominate our memories of these events, just as we can’t allow the gun fetishists to continue to hijack public discussion of the role of violence in our culture and how to change it. If we do, to coin a phrase: the terrorists will have won.