Tag: Luisa A. Igloria

Is the moon spun of pearl, is it gathered
like honey and festooned with the smoke
from bitter herbs? Does milk foam better
with or without an egg in it? Is the bed
softer made or unmade, tousled by love
or not at all? Is a square of cotton or pressed
linen kinder for tears or for starch? And that
moment when the woman opens her eyes and looks
into the face of the one she walked away from
years ago— is that the depth or the height
of being, the tally of what has been lost
or found? I do not want to have to choose,
I do not wish to pare it down to just one
or the other— Everything is the ground
of our affections, everything is this moment—
the red dress you wear which is both brighter
and darker than flame, the surface of the table
which gleams like our skin, like our faces: rich
with the grains of the past and the not yet here—

In response to thus: close to the ground.

A lump lodged in the toe of a shoe. When I shook it out,
it was a spider large as a fourth of my hand, all brilliant
filaments. Dark body now gone: still I feel you twitching.

In response to Via Negativa: Default.

“In a painted sea, what to write?
A letter taking tomorrow back?” ~ D. Bonta

When the tide was low, I walked and loved the water and the sugary sand. When it was high, I stayed my careful distance and fingered threads, turned pages, steeped tea, listened to the murmur of voices in public rooms. They came and went, as if there were no tomorrow. I loved the varied colors of their customs, their buttonholes and hatbands, the air suffused with smells of tobacco leaf or oranges or lavender; I loved their dark heels of stacked wood, their calves wrapped in supple leather. Wind sped through the trees, which shed their leaves then budded as the season turned. Once, flying in as evening broke and the cities below filled out their grids with light, I watched as a couple kissed and kissed in their airplane seats. They sank into each other as if the air was tasteless, as if the sky was lackluster, as if their need for delirium was the color of the sun as it seized then disappeared at the rim of the sea. I wish you were foolish with me like that, I wish you’d come to me as if I were the last cool drink of water forever and forever in the world.

In response to Via Negativa: Out of Order.

“Agony is only a story I tell myself.” – seon joon

Be still I tell my heart when it startles almost out of its dress or when it jumps at the sound of thunder—

Be still for that loud report like a gun from an upstairs bedroom is only a heavy framed mirror falling from its flimsy wall hook and breaking on the floor—

Be still for that commotion in the schoolyard is an old-fashioned chase for no other reason but that school is out, not a fight being broken up by cops—

Be still as the little plane stuffed with travelers’ belongings idles on the icy tarmac as bits of frost flower at the window’s edge and the captain’s voice comes over the speakers announcing a third, maybe not final, delay—

Be still as the small machines blink to life on the night table with a message from halfway or more around the world, which can only mean either very good news or very bad news—

Be still in the middle of the airport terminal, Concourse C, ticketing, though your eyes are puffy with tears from hugging a friend you have not seen in 22 years and you know your flight to Boston is the last one out for the day because of a winter storm, but it doesn’t matter now because she is telling you that during her last visit to your hometown, she had a crypt made for her use “in the near future,” next to the one holding the ashes of her son—

Be still, be still, because this is merely another veil like the unseasonal snow falling softly outside, stenciling the trees whose branches were just beginning to send out little buds of green, beautiful points of ice shriveling the pink tissue of early crepe myrtles—

And be still when you recognize a famous poet in the crowded elevator, and you note the frailness of her bones through the unnatural pallor of her skin, and how when the doors open on her floor she sighs to her husband, I don’t know what I want to do—

In response to thus: Each thing called up dissolves.

The snow comes down in drifts.
Don’t look back now— only find
the opening in that corridor ahead,
quavering like a bar of music.

In response to Via Negativa: Before Orpheus.

Here is the bed they said
to lie in— until,
eventually, you realize
there is a window
or a door, corridors
leading somewhere
that isn’t here. Water
or wine? Stay
or leave? Wing or sea
might show the way.

In response to Via Negativa: Mindless.

Ablaze with prophecy, flames fed with oil or
petrol: pages devoted to fevered visions
of the end of days that I read with a flashlight,
covertly, after bedtime. How was I to tell
a beast from an angel, a beast from a man?
Lamps and temples, the sky’s invisible seal
yawning open; the terrible thunder of hooves.
Pity and penance too late— And sleep?
Sleep could be the shadow riding shotgun,
emissary of that fourth dark rider.

In response to Via Negativa: Four Horsemen.