Via Negativa

October 21, 2011March 6, 2014 by Dave Bonta

Woodrat Podcast 46: A philosophical lunch with Will Buckingham (Part 2)

Will Buckingham with Sea Legs, Moomins, and the sea

The second half of my ~~epic bull session~~ wide-ranging conversation with British novelist, philosopher and blogger Will Buckingham (listen to Part 1). Will talks about how he got into Buddhism and why he eventually drifted away from it; how he turned his doctoral thesis about the literary qualities of Emmanuel Levinas’ writings into a work of philosophy for a popular audience (Finding Our Sea Legs: Ethics, Experience and the Ocean of Stories); and why he’s so fascinated with the I Ching.

“What I love more than anything in life,” Will says at one point, “is to have interesting conversations.” I couldn’t agree more. This conversation was definitely a high point of my two weeks in the U.K.

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Theme music: “Le grand sequoia,” by Innvivo (Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike licence).

October 20, 2011September 23, 2012 by Luisa A. Igloria

Threshold

In the shelled cities, in the ghost towns,
among the buff-colored hulls of strafed

buildings, the dead congregate: brides
who never consummated their vows,

their bridegrooms in whose mouths sand
rained the lost hours before they

could even fill with sweets and dates.
And the wraiths of mothers who pined away,

not knowing which part of the desert
they should water with their tears;

which rock cradled the tongueless
or sightless remains of husband,

brother, son— Above the oil fields
and endless plains, the calculus

continues, one end of the hourglass
swinging over to the other;

and under night’s dark tent, stars reel:
so many hornets released from the nest.

—Luisa A. Igloria
10 20 2011

In response to an entry from The Morning Porch.

October 19, 2011November 10, 2011 by Dave Bonta

After Dark

It’s never dark enough for me. I had to carry my fingernail clippings all the way to the woods & deliver them to the earth in secret so as not to feel completely parenthetical. A deer blew its nose at me from the other side of the shed. The sky behind it was pink with the lights from town.

Every time I read the word stone I picture the head of a sheep. Something about domestic animals makes me want to ruminate, grow a second stomach or a gizzard, eat the leaves off trees until the sky is dead to them. Wild things frighten me with their too-clever eyes & the sudden clatter of their too-many feet. Thank god the insects stayed small.

It turns out that if you blow on the slit in the back of a cicada shell, you can produce a high-piched whistle. (Remember, you read it here first!) Does it sound like a cicada? Of course not. It sounds like a very small appliance of unclear function. I saw an ad that said Hunters Wanted, & realized I was still wearing a blaze-orange vest. The sun had set hours ago, following an obscure schedule of its own devising.

October 19, 2011September 23, 2012 by Luisa A. Igloria

Lyric for Waking

Walk, said the master in that miracle of waking.
See. Or hear. In this labyrinth of partitions,
the merely unmiraculous voices clatter against each
other every morning. Theirs is the sound of copper,
of coins and cups with their sleeves of corrugated
cardboard. It is always warmer out than in. Or
in than out. On the street corner, where the kids
from the Governor’s School for the Arts are waiting
for the bus, one girl says to another, “Stimulants.
I just take stimulants.” A thread of green unravels
from the edge of my sweater. If I pulled it, wound it
into a ball, how far would it take me out of the cave?
The voices are also breathing. A warm wind blows
over the tops of trees in the city, flutters
like long ribbons of gauze— imagine them peeling
off our faces, startling like fish from the depths.

—Luisa A. Igloria
10 19 2011

In response to an entry from The Morning Porch.

October 18, 2011November 10, 2011 by Dave Bonta

Abed

Even as a kid I never fully believed that sleep would come. I would lie awake waiting suspiciously. But under the covers I found a cozy chill, the warm dark of a toothless maw, the tick of my pulse, a sneeze & an ache, a day home from school, a place to breathe secrets or to weep, farts, fears, oblivion, the occasional breast feather of a goose, & a far-off love whose only unchanging characteristic was a penchant for walking everywhere in bare feet. Her name, I suppose, was Sleep.

October 18, 2011September 23, 2012 by Luisa A. Igloria

Letter to S, with Fading Sunlight

The pebbly look of clouds at dusk, as though washed
limpid by sky clear as water.

And yes it’s hard for me to pass grocery store shelves
bedecked with sale signs, the sidewalk tables

at the corner cafe where tiny jugs for cream
and lidded bowls for sugar gleam whitely—

and not think of you wondering where next
month’s sustenance is coming from.

You say you take a cup of coffee in the morning,
bread, an egg sometimes. What else?

Someone points out the wild rose bushes
next to the broken-down wall, how they are

choked with ruffled blossoms—
everything sunlit, struck, blazoned

as the air above fills with indigo,
even as the light is dying.

—Luisa A. Igloria
10 18 2011

In response to an entry from The Morning Porch.

October 17, 2011September 23, 2012 by Luisa A. Igloria

Composition

Weekends, on the second floor of an old building at the end of the girls’ high school, the art teacher set wooden eggs and cylinders on a table by the window. Outside, spicy smells of wood-smoke: moldering leaves and dead twigs the gardeners raked into piles under the guava trees and burned. Think of light as a thin finger of ochre you halo around a shape, he said. Think of the angle as it hits the roof. Camouflaged in the trees, the shadow of a bird that looks upon the scene and sees the worm’s dark squiggle vanish into the dirt. And there are always ruins— the remnants of a bell tower in the foreground, the dark sweep of a volcano’s skirts steepling away in the distance; or something Grecian, cool skins of marble chipped in the places where they might have spoken or gestured or sung of flight— veined lip, suspended arm, knobs beneath the shoulder blades where wings were broken off. And always, stones strewn like jewels in the grass.

—Luisa A. Igloria
10 17 2011

In response to an entry from The Morning Porch.

October 17, 2011January 10, 2012 by Dave Bonta

Occupied

As in: pre-.
The windy street-corner sermon,
the row of poplars waving
all their gold cards at once.

As in: otherwise-.
The gray-suited men
vanish like deer into November
the moment they stand still.

As in: certain territories
where the new occupants
must build a wall
to keep out the old.

And the space beside the wall
becomes a place to try one’s luck,
a place to wail.

October 16, 2011 by Luisa A. Igloria

Aerogramme

This entry is part 21 of 63 in the series Morning Porch Poems: Autumn 2011

At first light, the mother with the bones grown brittle as a sparrow’s gets up to wash her face in the ancient sink. The ceilings are still damp from the last hurricane when the roof leaked in more places than she had pails for. On the wall, faint prints of mold shaped like whorls of ears— they listen as she prays aloud or talks to her husband who left this world more than a decade ago. Far away, farther than the sights of a bird perched on some craggy roost, I follow her every move in the falling-down house: my lips touching the rim of her coffee cup, my fingers opening and closing on the shapes of bread and cheese and fruit I want to heap upon her plate; the rings of silver and gold and pearl I want to slide back, lovingly, upon those thin, arthritic fingers which once sewed every seam of my world neatly into place.

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

October 15, 2011 by Luisa A. Igloria

Dear errant winds at dusk,

This entry is part 20 of 63 in the series Morning Porch Poems: Autumn 2011

what do your long fingers
want to trace? Downtown,
at the intersection, a woman
walks with her marine in a dress
of gathered green. Its silk
petals flutter, and she
is an artichoke whose heart
shelters under overlapping
eaves, listening to the sounds
of the orchestra tuning up,
feathering; cradling the throats
of wood or brass for warmth;
and in the end, putting away
notated sheets, packing up
or dismantling instruments.

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.