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Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

Theory of Abandonment

Here’s the quote now made famous in
the Disney movie: “Ohana means family;
and family means nobody gets left behind
or forgotten.” And no matter how cheesy,
I can’t erase it from my head, nor

the moment when the alien adoptee
recreates in the child’s bedroom
the scene, to frightening scale, where
Godzilla stomps through San Francisco,
terrorizing the people, chewing up cars,

tossing suspension bridge pilings aside
like so many pretzel sticks. And of course
he doesn’t know he’s only acting out
what some psychologists have called
the Theory of Abandonment: how,

given the trauma of neglect,
emotional or physical detachment,
the psyche responds with fear
or lashes out in rage especially
when the sphere of the intimate

comes to bear down again to make
its complicated claims on him. All
I can think of is how in my ohana
(so close in sound to the Filipino
tahanan) circumstances have made it

so that I’ve physically left my children behind
enough times—for school, for work, to build
a new life and relationships— I wonder if I’m not
the sole cause of their own difficulties whenever
that sad, dark beast comes down from its lair

to rampage through their lives. At such
times I can’t see, blind through my own griefs,
but to follow in their wake: holding out my arms
even as I step sideways through the pile of broken
toys, and the shards the hula girl lamp has become.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Encampment

Up and within all the morning, being willing to keep as much as I could within doors, but receiving a very wakening letter from Mr. Coventry about fitting of ships, which speaks something like to be done, I went forth to the office, there to take order in things, and after dinner to White Hall to a Committee of Tangier, but did little. So home again and to Sir W. Pen, who, among other things of haste in this new order for ships, is ordered to be gone presently to Portsmouth to look after the work there. I staid to discourse with him, and so home to supper, where upon a fine couple of pigeons, a good supper; and here I met a pretty cabinet sent me by Mr. Shales, which I give my wife, the first of that sort of goods I ever had yet, and very conveniently it comes for her closett. I staid up late finding out the private boxes, but could not do some of them, and so to bed, afraid that I have been too bold to-day in venturing in the cold.
This day I begun to drink butter-milke and whey, and I hope to find great good by it.

door awakening
like a new mouth

a couple of pigeons come close
finding the box too bold

venturing to drink and eat by it


Erasure poem derived from The Diary of Samuel Pepys, Wednesday 18 May 1664.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Aging masochist

Slept well all night and lay long, then rose and wrote my letter to my father about Pall, as we had resolved last night. So to dinner and then to the office, finding myself better than I was, and making a little water, but not yet breaking any great store of wind, which I wonder at, for I cannot be well till I do do it. After office home and to supper and with good ease to bed, and endeavoured to tie my hands that I might not lay them out of bed, by which I believe I have got cold, but I could not endure it.

night rose let me go
to bed and tie
my hands

I might be old
but I could endure


Erasure poem derived from The Diary of Samuel Pepys, Tuesday 17 May 1664.

Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

Memory Palace

Think of the doorway
leading to the house—

the brass knocker,
the two ornamentals

by the steps. Think
of the bay windows

that looked out over
the drive; upstairs

the room without
curtains, with only

a bed, a chair, a desk.
What was the name

of the tree in whose
branches night herons

came to roost; the name
of the river, and the boat

the neighbors tethered
at the pier? Who fell

from the mast one New
Year Eve stringing

lights? There’s a haze
some days over the water

and the scene dissolves.
Today it’s Tuesday

and almost summer.
Yesterday you tried

to remember a dream.
Tomorrow you’ll wake

and hope to recognize
whose hand you hold,

where you parked the car
before you got here.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Junkie

Forced to rise because of going to the Duke to St. James’s, where we did our usual business, and thence by invitation to Mr. Pierces the chyrurgeon, where I saw his wife, whom I had not seen in many months before. She holds her complexion still, but in everything else, even in this her new house and the best rooms in it, and her closet which her husband with some vainglory took me to show me, she continues the veriest slattern that ever I knew in my life. By and by we to see an experiment of killing a dogg by letting opium into his hind leg. He and Dr. Clerke did fail mightily in hitting the vein, and in effect did not do the business after many trials; but with the little they got in, the dogg did presently fall asleep, and so lay till we cut him up, and a little dogg also, which they put it down his throate; he also staggered first, and then fell asleep, and so continued. Whether he recovered or no, after I was gone, I know not, but it is a strange and sudden effect.
Thence walked to Westminster Hall, where the King was expected to come to prorogue the House, but it seems, afterwards I hear, he did not come.
I promised to go again to Mr. Pierce’s, but my pain grew so great, besides a bruise I got to-day in my right testicle, which now vexes me as much as the other, that I was mighty melancholy, and so by coach home and there took another glyster, but find little good by it, but by sitting still my pain of my bruise went away, and so after supper to bed, my wife and I having talked and concluded upon sending my father an offer of having Pall come to us to be with us for her preferment, if by any means I can get her a husband here, which, though it be some trouble to us, yet it will be better than to have her stay there till nobody will have her and then be flung upon my hands.

the usual urge for some glory in my life
hitting the vein

I fall asleep
a dog put down

afterwards the melancholy bruise
of having nobody


Erasure poem derived from The Diary of Samuel Pepys, Monday 16 May 1664.

Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

Dream landscape at the edge of this world

“As flies to wanton boys are we to th’ gods,
They kill us for their sport.”
~ Shakespeare (“King Lear,” Act 4, scene 1)

What to make of a dream in which
fields are littered with decapitated
remains, the sightless heads of the fallen
in even rows tilted up at the sky, their hair
matted with dried blood yet somehow
artfully arranged like fringes of grotesque
sunflowers? What to make of the pair of us,
winding hand in hand through grounds
made slick with the issue from these bodies,
the air rank and thick with flies? You were
frailer than I ever remembered, slight
in a thin cotton wrapper, undone by
the terrible waste surrounding us. I led
as if now the parent and you the child,
feeling as if somehow I’d been there before,
winding through maze-like paths flanked
by hedges made of reeds whose ends
were quilled blades. Ahead, an armored
shape emerged from out of its cave; I stayed
our progress, trembling in the crosshatches.
What might we do if we had plumes or wings?
And yet on every side, the puce from doves’
breasts dripped warnings on the rocks. Bent low
to the ground, at last we found our way to where
a dying sentinel stood guard at the edge of this
world: he dipped his finger in his blood and marked
our heads; then pointed out the exit in the distance.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Sedative

(Lord’s day). Rose, and as I had intended without reference to this pain, took physique, and it wrought well with me, my wife lying from me to-night, the first time she did in the same house ever since we were married, I think (unless while my father was in town, that he lay with me). She took physique also to-day, and both of our physiques wrought well, so we passed our time to-day, our physique having done working, with some pleasure talking, but I was not well, for I could make no water yet, but a drop or two with great pain, nor break any wind.
In the evening came Mr. Vernatty to see me and discourse about my Lord Peterborough’s business, and also my uncle Wight and Norbury, but I took no notice nor showed any different countenance to my uncle Wight, or he to me, for all that he carried himself so basely to my wife the last week, but will take time to make my use of it. So, being exceeding hot, to bed, and slept well.

is night the same
ever since we were in town

that wrought our time
in one drop

into a different
make of bed


Erasure poem derived from The Diary of Samuel Pepys, Sunday 15 May 1664.

Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

Banderillas

In the front yard, wet
with a weekend’s worth of rain,
two drakes have come to tussle
for the favor of a hen
who’s plunked herself beneath
the hydrangea. They circle round
each other, they stab and bite, aiming
for the nape where it’s most darkly
open, that curve shaped like the back-
side of a question, like the handle
of something one might take hold of
and hook as a trophy on the wall.
The hen seems indifferent
even when the feathers fly,
even after the one green-headed
drake runs the other off the yard
and onto where the sidewalk drops
to the edge of the road, then
comes back as if to tender
officially his credentials.
But she doesn’t sit in one place
either— moving through the grass
as if she’s not all that into such
rituals, as if the musk of sex
hasn’t stained every pennant
they’ve brushed against by now.
Nothing, at least as we can see,
gets consummated, though the very
air ripples with signals given off
by every lure: tipped spears
of lavender, white veils
of scent from overhead as tight
skirts of magnolias loosen.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Masochist

Up, full of pain, I believe by cold got yesterday. So to the office, where we sat, and after office home to dinner, being in extraordinary pain. After dinner my pain increasing I was forced to go to bed, and by and by my pain rose to be as great for an hour or two as ever I remember it was in any fit of the stone, both in the lower part of my belly and in my back also. No wind could I break. I took a glyster, but it brought away but a little, and my height of pain followed it. At last after two hours lying thus in most extraordinary anguish, crying and roaring, I know not what, whether it was my great sweating that may do it, but upon getting by chance, among my other tumblings, upon my knees, in bed, my pain began to grow less and less, till in an hour after I was in very little pain, but could break no wind, nor make any water, and so continued, and slept well all night.

I believe in pain
a rose of stone in the lower back

I break an oar
in I know not what
great water


Erasure poem derived from The Diary of Samuel Pepys, Saturday 14 May 1664.