Tag: Luisa A. Igloria

This must have been the way the world was made: gleaming with wings, hillsides burnished before their dazzle dimmed. When dunes spat back their sand, we wandered through the vegetation in a daze, frightened by broken-off quills and outsized petioles, assaulted by a flotsam of smells, afraid to touch or taste or gather… What wind wrenched away, we’d have to carve back, painfully, by hand. The schools, the corner fast food places, the notaries’ and doctors’ offices, the grocery stores whose shelves were licked by giant tongues of water— What was it about disorder that brought us to our knees? Gradually we remembered what could be done with mud; which crystals broken off from rocks along the beach might pass for salt. It took a while before we sighted birds. The first bright sun came through thick drapes of cloud that looked like women’s breasts. The shore resembled none that we had ever seen before. Someone began to write an almanac of our days— New kinds of growth no longer matched with our old reckoning of time. Someone took pains to straighten a row of stones above the water line.

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

Find the rest in any pose,
the teacher said: as circling birds
eventually come to roost,
as the water’s thrashing
quiets after it, too,
has had its fill.

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

Venturing out afterwards,
we count the bricks torn up
in the last hurricane, note

the welter of leaves stripped
from branches; see, as if for the first
time, stark form— Few layers now

obscure the view, so surface
and foreground more closely match
the underneath. All the gaudy

accessories— frills of russet leaf,
curled copper, tongues of topaz yellow—
recede into silt and verdigris

at the edges. And the water
that with the tidal surge rose
through narrow alleys by corner

restaurants, came up the steps
of a public library built in 1904
(foreclosed a few years ago by the Old

Point National Bank). It barely grazed
the sidewalks on our own street,
though merely a block away

the neighbors had two feet of water
in their garages. And no, we can’t
predict which of these buildings

will sink into the sea (brick or aluminum
siding, stucco, vinyl, fiber cement); which
ones will weather the onslaughts of another

century. Soon after inventories of its losses,
the city and its neighborhoods rumble slowly
back to life. The gulls return—

not that they ever left—
and like us, pick desultorily
through oddments, through debris.

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

They climbed to the promontory
and took photographs of memorials,
brushing the dirt aside to read
the letters that told of who
had been there before. She wondered
if the black specks she sighted
above the ridge were vultures; if,
after all this time, such birds
might still take an interest
in cured and leathered bodies,
mummified and resting in their caves.
In the village, the rest house
had no heat. For bathing,
there were metal drums filled
with chilled spring water. It was
the last day of the year—
Bonfires flickered. Frost trails
formed at the ends of sentences.
They were unaware of their own
restlessness, soon to be eclipsed
by the years. Above terraces
lined by hand with stone
upon stone, the occasional burst
of a firecracker. Mostly, the wind.
Or the muffled sound of a gong.

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

That calm: before?
after?— The storm.

The pause
that brackets

the feathered cry
at dawn— The rooster

trills Deny, deny—
And still the waters

rush across the pier.
The turnstile

at the station twirls
in place. A wall

is shorn away to show
the flimsy hive.

The branch comes down
upon the roof.

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

Before I learned geography in school, Hokkaido
was simply my family’s favorite brand of canned
mackerel, opened especially in typhoon weather.
No matter that sheets of cold rain fell and fell,
and indoors we suspected we’d started to smell
a little biblical— And the power went out,
but we had candles, and a can opener!
We could still boil rice in a blackened
pot on the one-burner kerosene stove. Little blue-
fin mackerel, jumping (from which fishing port
off the coast of Hokkaido?) into the net, into
the can and into our steaming bowls awash in black
pepper, white vinegar, and thinly sliced shallots,
you were among the first briny tastes of other
coastlines that entered my mouth. And even now,
whenever rain pelts at the windows and the skies
turn the color of dull aluminum, when the winds
make the trees’ arms rise like wings of cranes
in the marshlands, I think of this word, Hokkaido.

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.