Tag: Luisa A. Igloria

At the dim sum restaurant, the woman who recently arrived from China with her nine year old son to join the man she married, explains that in her province the women adore crackling pork and chicken skin. She says the fat underneath— unctuous, soft like jelly— is wonderful for the skin. Collagen, says the doctor at our table. Or at least that is what I think he says, though he shakes his head when the server offers a steamer basket of spicy chicken feet. Her skin is smooth and clear, rosy like alabaster. She’s wearing hardly any makeup, but her cheeks are flushed pink as though she has just come in from the cold. Now they are are talking about wedding rings, about how, at Christmas, her husband took her and the boy to visit his parents in Pennsylvania. How the snow, so high and light, was such a wonder to them both they played in it all day. And the ring! They only realized later that her wedding ring had slipped off her finger in the snow. I listen to the story and imagine the spangled grains closing around the gold band with its tiny diamond, every surface perfect and faceted with light. They bought a metal detector to help them search, until they gave it up for good. But weeks later, when the snow melted, her father-in-law found it and sent it back to them in the mail! With his palms face down, her son mimes the way they moved the metal detector over the snow-covered yard. Then he opens the new year envelope he has been given, unfolds a crisp five dollar bill and asks his stepdad if he is right, if that is the Lincoln Memorial on the back. The servers put two teapots on the table; the one with the chopstick sticking out of the spout is the flower tea.

In response to small stone (216) and Via Negativa: Flock.

“Memory and forgetting,
two versions of the same story.”
~ Eugene Gloria

If you think you have surely come to the bottom of the bowl and nothing else
could ever fill it again, why does the silverware gleam so kindly?

If night is a mattress filled with buckwheat and sheeted in linen,
why does the body perch on the narrow ledge of the warm radiator?

If you had two of the same thing,
would you give the other away?

If two of the same thing really make only one thing,
would giving it away mean you get to keep its shadow?

If one thing shone in your mind like a beautiful bird flying into a clearing,
would you desire to approach it with a leash?

If the intellect is a muscle, is the heart the arrow
that whistles quietly until it finds its mark?

In response to Via Negativa: Downer and thus: Savor.

Where is he now, the boy
in our fourth grade class
whose mother went missing

for days until they traced
a stench to a shipping
carton shoved underneath

the bed? Her body, hacked
to bits by a disgruntled
client: found wrapped

in old newspapers and stuffed
into a box that might have once
transported milk and dairy

products— I’ve forgotten
the specifics, but after
the funeral, we saw

how he went on, came
to school and met what each
day required with no small

dignity. And I remember
the collection taken up
in church for the family:

how, as the baskets
went around, all of us
wanted to empty our pockets

of change— still stunned,
as they filled, at how a body
could be so rashly divided

into parts and tucked, ear
by finger or hip by joint, bones
loosed from the purse that held them.

In response to Via Negativa: Changeless.

(after Patrick Rosal)

My kundiman is no swan song,
not yet. It has spoken, and decided:
this will be the year of the mother

and child reunion. I woke at dawn
just after the new year and thought,
no savings be damned: ten, fourteen

years and two continents make too long
a separation. And that song playing in my ear
goaded me on, pitched itself higher: Why not?

after all, you can’t take any of it with you when you go.
And so my kundiman took it apart for me, syllable
by syllable: Kung:: if di:: not man:: n/ever.

My kundiman asks: Do you get it yet? We don’t leave anyone
behind. It knows what any real lover knows: that No is never
an acceptable answer; that as long as the beloved hungers

or thirsts, the heart is a ghost moon above fields
of unharvested grain, is the lit end of a cigar
burning its prayer into the roof of the mouth.

In response to Via Negativa: The day the music died.

So long ago I crossed the threshold,
stepped through the gate and felt
unsure of what I’d chosen—

The neighbor’s wife had given me
a spray of white cattleya:
I could not see nor hear

the speckled warnings
crimsoning their throats
(like sex, unfurling)—

As with all things, it takes
a passing through to come
to any understanding; now

it seems possible that fear
can be undone, when finally it
turns into a kind of discerning—

In response to Via Negativa: Under the gun.

We saw a raven in the fork of a tree
spreading its wings: taut and dark
in the shadow of the belfry—

Even this far in the city, it is
a wild thing. It won’t come,
it won’t eat from your white hand—

In response to Via Negativa: Larks.

The poet’s daughter wrote: Only now, years after my father’s death, do I think I understand a little of what he must have felt, unable to feed his heart, unable to write his poems, because he worked so long for the machine that fed us, clothed us, kept us under one roof.

Sometime before he passed away, he cautioned as he sat in weak sunlight in the garden, checkered afghan over his knees, jacaranda blossoms fallen across the driveway: Don’t let the world take away that which allows you to burn— no matter what.

Yours, mine, others’— What can I do with a poem, Carlos, what do I do with poems?

And yet, to certain audiences who cut their teeth on the workshop model practically from babyhood, I am a fraud, not a real contender, a lightweight, someone with aspirations to those revered and most holy of names: writer, poet; or am I dilettante, gatecrasher, someone not invited to the party?

Step into this line. Credentials, please? And who is your patron? your escort?

A colleague once said he did not think I should “advertise” the fact of my National Book Awards (4, given by the appropriate award-conferring body in a closely refereed process, in a country that used to be a colony of the United States) because No American writer has won but one National Book Award in his or her lifetime. (Subtext: how could any of these possibly be real?)

Say the word “poet” in ___, and in at least two linguistic cases, you will have been perceived to have said the word “butt.”

Choose the best poet accessory: (a) Flowy sweater; (b) Flowy vest; (c) John Fleuvog T-strap pumps; (d) Notebook; (e) Moleskine notebook.

Do you remember that year-end party? (a) Only two in that group of writers did not skinny dip in the hot tub; (b) Only one in that group of writers did not skinny dip in the hot tub; (c) The wife of one of the writers in that group found out about the hot tub and ordered him to pack up and come home; (d) Only one of the writers in that group is a real star; (e) All of the writers in that group are stars.

Stars are a higher category of being. Why should they be governed by rules coming from any useful idiot’s office?

My friend returned from the ___ weekend writing institute. Her class waited for famous writer ___ to return their critiques. Maybe she forgot? However, they did remember what the famous writer ___ said in the cafeteria during the farewell meal: “Good poets write; great poets steal.”

Choose the best answer: (a) Poets know no other work except sitting on their butts; (b) Your butt is calling; (c) Your butt is your calling; (d) None of the above; (e) All of the above.

Verse is cheap, lives are cheap, plastic is cheap, cardboard is cheap. (Have you seen the twee desk accessories in Ikea’s new spring catalog?)

Often, I am the one that gets thanked last, if at all.

The big themes are still “Recycle,” “Buy Local,” “Diversify.”

A UK “poet” made the news recently when it was discovered “the poem he wrote” that had been awarded a prize was plagiarized.

Hurry along out of here, now. The useful idiot has to draw up schedules for the next group.

Sometimes it’s easy to dismiss the clerical types, the ones that mind the boring archives or change the lightbulbs in the storage room.

Since when did we care about red carpets? Since when did we perfect the sound of catalogues and couplets rolling down the conveyor belt?

In response to Via Negativa: Inaugural poet as useful idiot.