Tag: Luisa A. Igloria

Forget your anger, rustled the leaves
as rain washed over them.

Forget the hurt that has lain
long in the hollow of your bones.

Easy enough for you to say I railed, fist
raised, tender all over as a bruise.

Once I believed that things could be amulets:
suds that prismed as bubbles, floating away

from laundry I beat on a stone. Feathers
that birds dropped in flight,

sliver of moon worn as a silver
fetish around my neck, the crackled

wrecks of turquoise taken up from the soil.
And if I gave back my anger, what then?

O life, o body, I want to sleep as I
haven’t done in years— but not so deeply.

In response to Morning Porch and small stone (233).

Tonight, as I read in bed
of The dynamic between falling
and being caught— a kind

of ecstasy— the eye
shutters toward the window,
toward the old church steeple

with its peeling paint
and broken cornices, scudding
clouds still visible against

a rapidly darkening sky—
And then the tremor
in the foot,

along the leg, foretelling
how the body drops into
the well of sleep.

In response to small stone (230).

the world has me too:
its dips and rises, that
light I chase from one
end of the day to the other,
the always-beginning-again
a needle that threads floss
through loop after loop
in a chain making daisies
and clouds and rain—
So near sometimes, so close
to gossamer joy I think
almost if I closed my eyes
I might find, by feel,
the coat that I rent,
the love that was lost,
the house that the years
ransacked to ruin.

In response to small stone (229).

Just look— how each
skinned thing sheds flake
after flake of surface,

detritus of dead cells and dust—
But how the callus grows in layers,
proportionate to the weight

and frequency, the heart leaning
hard into the wood, that place
where music hides—

In response to small stone (226).

So you could fall asleep, I whispered stories in your ear. I made them up, each one a new letter flying in the window from another world. I don’t remember any endings, only how they began: slight figures moving (I hoped, bravely) against a landscape. Even then, the first rule of narrative: something has to happen, then something has to give. The bowl that was empty filled and filled. I gave what I could, for what good was it, locked away in a safe? But the street overflowed with briars. The sea came up the walk. Wings beat the air, taking away the one thing that was loved most. That is how it goes, that is how it goes. And then when I am gone one day you might open a drawer and find a pearl in the shape of a tear.

In response to Via Negativa: Correspondent and thus: Compline, Christ Church, Palm Sunday .

In summer, I was redolent; in winter
I ate carefully from stores of water
and fat down in the cool cellar. Each

round of yarn that passed through
the hook, each heart-root planted
in the dark, reminded me of the more

difficult work to come: what to do
or say that will roll back the stone
from the mouth of the cave; how to offer

the ache in the side to the salt of the day.

In response to small stone (225).