Tag: Luisa A. Igloria

O I have been shriven, bound
and seated on the rump of a donkey
then made to dance in the square
amid a sea of waving palms—
I did my best, because the order
was to do so in the manner of all
acts of ransom, though the glare
dimmed all the faces in the crowd.

In response to Via Negativa: Fetish.

Each month I get a stack of magazines in my office mail: Poets &
Writers, Poetry— but lately, a catalog for Infectious Disease Control?

Who got me on that mailing list and why? I thumb through pages of colored
latex gloves, swabs and antiseptics, catheters inspiring unease. Control’s

anxiety’s dark twin, sibling to that rebellious sister who slips out the window
to smoke on the roof, who skips school to fuck a boy (the briefest bliss). Control’s

the sting of a belt, staccato laid on the flesh of my cousin’s back
while his mother cried He’s only a boy, stop, please! Control

is this same boy thirty years later, prodigal returned from the big city
to attend the father on his deathbed, about to wheeze his last. Who controls

the wind or rain, water that turns from blue to limpid against
the sandbar’s edge, almost clear as remission? Nothing to hold

here that instinct hasn’t first instructed: an owl flies by with a shrew
in its claws; and beneath, worms tunnel in the soil oblivious to our plotting.

In response to Via Negativa: Premonitory.

The ferryman came and whispered
in my ear, asking if I would like
to visit that town I might not ever
see again but in my dreams—

I said Is that your first question?
for I knew no one could gain passage
without a token— And he laughed
and patted the grey hollow between

his shoulders, saying Come, sister;
in the trees the leaves are lit up just
like lanterns, and your face is a tarot
that still points all ways but one.

In response to Via Negativa: Mare Desiderii.

All the shops are closed now, for it is very late in the evening.

But someone has left a window in the bookstore open
and the sale signs are flying out, the posters printed
with the covers of paperbacks—

Is that Chekhov’s “Cherry Orchard” or “The Interpreter

of Maladies?” There is a pleasing orange glow
reflected on the damp sidewalks and on the tops
of restaurant awnings. The hem of my long skirt

swirls around my ankles, and I feel a little

like the woman in Chagall’s “The Birthday,” toes
pointed as she floats toward the ceiling. Her purse
the color of a dove’s breast has dropped

to the table where a watermelon lies,
one pink cheek open, seeds scattered
on the patterned tablecloth. She is so surprised

by everything: the flowers her love has brought,
the sinuous kiss that buoys them up like two
balloons toward the ceiling. Her eyes the shape

of almonds saying something wistful, almost gone.

In response to small stone (222).

Scales torn from around
the belly of the gutted fish,
more silver than the edge
of the knife: this spill
in your hands. These
gills and guts.

In response to Via Negativa: Provisioning.

“An altar to the mutability of need.” ~ seon joon

Little dream of flying that used to visit
my nights, why can’t I reconstruct you now?

Those sheets of white unrolling beneath
my suspended feet, their quiet a billow

audible somewhere in the mind— I bite
my tongue and the taste of blood and salt’s

a welt that is the shape of a world:
is someone thinking me, or dreaming me?

I keep every button that has lost its mate, save
pieces of twine, draw the shapes of rooms

on drafting paper— These kinds of need
urgent as the ache that wakes me in late hours:

memory and scent of a name, shape of a face
becoming language at the touch of fingers.

In response to thus: Letter from Boston.

“Will the bird rise flaming out of broken light?” ~ Karen An-hwei Lee

When your arms encircled my waist from behind,
I thought a bird had come to light on my shoulder—

and I could not speak immediately for feeling
how densely overgrown the floor of the forest had become,

how at odd times in the night a ringing begins
on the shore of one ear and echoes across to the other.

You walked across the barrier and met me at the gate,
and it took minutes for us to realize we were in tears.

Now, days after, I look around: everything the eye
picks out wants to be the color of a sunset, of clementines.

Imagine small words like fragments of bone:
ten of them strung together are called a mystery;

and I know I have no qualifications to speak of but sometimes
I dare to address the future in intimate terms.

In response to Via Negativa: Pepys Noir.

I can’t remember exactly when we got our first
television set, a black and white console
in a sliding cabinet on spindly legs designed
to blend in with the living room furniture—

It must have been sometime in ’75, in time
for the “Thrilla in Manila,” or the ’74
Ms. Universe pageant which Bob Barker hosted
and which a Spanish girl named Amparo won—

But I know we did not have it in ’66 when the Beatles
snubbed Imelda and were harassed by an angry mob
all the way to the airport. And in ’69 the neighbors
invited us over to watch the Apollo moon landing,

after which lunch was served, but I wanted to know
most of all where the bathroom was. We were among
the last on our street to get one, but the novelty
never quite wore off— Waiting for the jeepney

that would take me to school after breakfast,
I watched wire cleaner antennae rise up and down
from behind Ray Walston’s bumpy head in reruns
of “My Favorite Martian;” and when I returned

in the afternoon, there was “Darna,” “The Three
Stooges,” or pre-war Tagalog romances where
beautiful women with marcelled hair let men in suits
and two-tone shoes light their cigarettes— And we

had no idea the scene from “Singing in the Rain”
had black umbrellas and yellow raincoats,
but my father pronounced everything dashing
and debonair. And he most of all stayed up

to watch the “Tonight Show” with Johnny Carson; he sat
in his old bathrobe on an ottoman pulled up to the screen,
glued to “M.A.S.H.” or “I Love Lucy” or Bob Hope specials,
chuckling despite canned laughter and broadcast delays.

In response to Via Negativa: The Seafarer.