Morning Porch Poems: Winter 2013-14 – Via Negativa

Flower

Luisa A. Igloria — Mon, 24 Feb 2014 01:38:17 +0000

Seed these words
in your everyday speech—

Acanthus or helichrysum;
indica, milagrosa, javanica;

perforate, constellation, for no reason
but that they introduce

a break in the aftermath of repetition.
Drone of some large, unseen motor

outside our windows every night
after midnight, bearing neither trace

of gold nor verdigris: you do not lead
to a trapdoor through which we might lower

our bodies into a waiting boat, damp seats
skimming prosaic language off our clothes

so they thin to the embroidery of chance,
texture of a different possibility.

The landscape opens like a tapestry:
under the moon, farmers roll

their cotton pantaloons and sink
toes deeper into the mud.

You would think young shoots
give off a uniform sound every time

there is a planting: o of surprise,
ah of falling and letting go,

allowing the dark to swallow
each body wanting to burst

toward the harvest,
arcing toward the stalk.

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

Signal No. 3

Luisa A. Igloria — Sat, 22 Feb 2014 02:31:00 +0000

After the first onslaught of wind, hail the size of golf balls, we heard the radio alert. Is there a safe room beneath the stairwell? Is it large enough to contain the plants seeded at all the children’s births? We would need to loose them under the light of a yellow moon, then anchor them with ivory amulets. Nothing in the dispatches tells you how you must learn to sit still, in the dark, until the mind grows quiet: until the eerie searchlights of danger diminish into soft two-note voices and the rain can be ordinary again.

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

from Ghost Blueprints

Luisa A. Igloria — Mon, 17 Feb 2014 04:28:18 +0000

The sycamore drops
brittle grenades in the driveway.

Where there were snow
angels in the yard, now

there are sticky fingers
of mud—

But other emissaries
are on the way:

over the harbor,
winds pungent with salt;

the moon’s coppered
edge a sharper argument.

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

Preguntas

Luisa A. Igloria — Wed, 12 Feb 2014 03:11:11 +0000

Who will sift the snow
fine as dust from the eyes of the clock?
Who will find the ring
buried in layers of cake?
How does the tendril on the vine
still believe in the rotary phone?
Who will take off his shoes
to walk across the blistered sand?
When will the child lay
her hand across the mouth of suffering?
Why is the rooster’s crow
indifferent to the progress of snails?
Why should I return
dreams that refuse to open?
Who will instruct
a wounded star?
Who will embroider the cave
with splendid suns?
What is required for you
to take up a weed and dance?

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

Aubade, with no lover departing at dawn

Luisa A. Igloria — Sat, 01 Feb 2014 04:43:35 +0000

In the crosshatched branches she sees a cardinal’s tufted red flag: and what it suggests is not spring, but how nothing in the neighborhood resembles the watery grid of rice fields, especially when the tips of new shoots emerge like stitches feathered in neat rows. At the corner, school girls gather in the cold, snapping their hair bands, twisting and untwisting their hair into ponytails. From their mouths, little spirals of frost; their quick fingers, their gestures that say they’re not considering things that will get harder with age. Not right now. The clouds are nubbed as a pilled flannel blanket. The bus comes into view: a yellow apostrophe, starting and stopping down the long avenue. Soon it takes them away, and they are not necessarily thinking of mistrust. A stray bird’s cadenza reminds her it is time to review the questions she has asked every day for most of her life.

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

Perpetuum mobile

Luisa A. Igloria — Thu, 30 Jan 2014 23:20:32 +0000

Bring a carrot or an apple
to the animal of the new year

that has come out of the gate,
that paws impatient at the pebbled

topsoil— Because it is ready
to canter into the field, offer it

a handful of blinding snow,
white as a portent for no sorrow,

cold as the slate which waits
to be turned into a track

where we’ll walk forward
and back, into infinity.

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

Cold Country

Luisa A. Igloria — Tue, 28 Jan 2014 22:35:56 +0000

We slept in rooms that were but thin
partitions against the cold— bare
wood, tin roofs, and with our coats
unlined; yet we had no word for winter
in our dictionary. That year I learned
to eat fermented things, learned to drink
coffee sweetened with sugar, lightened with milk
from a can. No children had come yet but I knew
the press of stones against the swelling riverbank,
the shale that cut through loam. I divined then
what the herbalist meant when she whispered
as her hands worked to massage the chill
out of my limbs: There is a space beneath
the ribs where hearth stones lie close
to rub against each other— take care
their heat does not go out.

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

Parsing

Luisa A. Igloria — Sun, 26 Jan 2014 22:20:59 +0000

When was the last time you felt
the white glisten of tears before their

harvest in a vial; or the random
punctuation provided by birds swarming

electrical lines? Across the valley
that winter the cold made the almonds

shrivel, the citrus crops shrink
their promise of little suns.

In the yard next door, a girl read
a passage aloud from a book using

that way of talking: lilt at the end
of each phrase, question where there is

no question. Overhearing, I wanted
to strip the rosemary of leaves,

offer a brittle handful— as if
they could be used as pauses;

as if the faint languor of scent
that remained in each virgule

might bring a different
nuance to the horizon.

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

Maze

Luisa A. Igloria — Fri, 24 Jan 2014 04:14:13 +0000

It collapsed upon itself from so much complexity.

The leaves that formed the hedges, uniform in size and shape, decided to grow new veins and stippled variations.

Someone installed a mobile of paper cranes under the blue awning of sky.

One way traffic, all left turns.

X marks the spot where, a long time ago, a red sweater came unravelled.

Every once in a while a peacock flashes its jeweled fan; this is called flirting.

Persistence is rewarded by a flask of ginebra and a matadora’s muleta.

Danger lurks where you most expect it.

The soil is your nearest radio station: this is why they say Keep your ear to the ground.

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

Panis Angelicus

Luisa A. Igloria — Tue, 21 Jan 2014 04:04:21 +0000

During the war, his grandmother was part of what they used to call a concert brigade. Once she sang at a programme that included the legendary Oistrakh. Bombs were falling through the sky, the city in ruins; and yet people came to listen, those who were not yet dead, those who refused to be done in by their daily ration of half a roll of dry brown bread, one cube of sugar, a hundred grams of vodka for courage. Snow fell, or freezing rain; and who anymore had good clothes? But they curled up like leaves in the shabby remnants of theatres, clutching their threadbare coats to their sides. They pressed their fingers to their cheeks as if they could inflate them with breath, as if the cadenzas might lead to a birth chamber— They would tumble like newborns into a world flooded with light: no echoes of guns, only a clearing in a birch forest filling with the cries of resurrected birds.

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.