Tag: Luisa A. Igloria

Joyously. Because otherwise what’s the point? ~ D. Bonta

She wonders what it’s like to go back, or if the boxes of books and papers bundled with cord are still in the attic; she wonders what happened to the cabinet with glass doors, where her mother stored the hand-sewn dresses and gowns she wound up wearing only once or twice— Such sumptuous fabrics: silks and lace, brocade, velvet; panels of crisp organza. In that time, special was always an occasion, and egg cups could be ceremonial. The point being that here where she now lives, she needs to find rapture again, even in the window blinds.

In response to Via Negativa: How to question authority.

Not so much unremembered, as splintered into humid fragments: as in last night’s dream of being taken by the hand and led into a crowded house somewhere in the countryside. Was it some kind of storage shed, or stable? Sacks of grain stacked end to end formed beds, as in a dormitory. Old women spread cotton sheets across them and gestured at what would be my space. The windows had no panes. They looked out over dust-speckled fields, skies the color of soot. You were nowhere to be found. Light bulbs swung from wires in the bathroom stalls. The drains were slow. A child showed me a door that led into a yard. Someone had fixed the rainspout to double as a shower. We tilted our chins up, but only moths swirled out of the shadows, the touch of their wings slighter than drops of rain we were sure would come.

In response to small stone (112).

“Did I say the day was a sea? I may have meant the day is a diffusion and a scattering of trajectories…” ~ Seon Joon

Or an inlet. An inlet might be good. Might be a little enclosure, a leading into or away. Marsh, lagoon, bay, sound. Estuary, tide pool, terrace, shelf, strand. As in, to be stranded for a little while with me, myself, and I might learn to work free of pretense, defense— Tonight, even the youngest girl said, If we’re going out for dinner, can it be someplace where there isn’t a lot of noise? Guinness World Records lists the anechoic test chamber of a lab in Minneapolis as the quietest place in the world. They say, sitting in the dark in its double walls of insulated steel, concrete, and fiberglass acoustic wedges, you’d hear your heartbeats echoing, your organs paddling in their shallow pools: you would become the sound. The longest anyone has sat there is three quarters of an hour, before he begged to be released, became disoriented; I believe it. How many times have I woken at dawn from dread spreading through my chest, loud pounding in my ears, the telephone’s insistent chime? My students, facile with their shiny hoard of new discursive phrases, write of the liminal. I lodge there often, where possibility is its most ambiguous flower.

In response to cold mountain (55).

(after Beth Adams)

The only ones I knew, those that fringed the man-made lake in my hometown, interspersed with red bottlebrush trees.

I used to have a sepia print made by an artist friend who just passed away— The woodcut showed rowboats on choppy water, the City Hall in the distance; and, distinct at the edges of the frame, the long-fingered leaves of willows.

In their shade, early mornings, an elderly Chinese man came to lead T’ai Chi exercises: single whip, warding off, cloud hands, wild horse spreading mane. Shoes made no sound on the grass.

This is my dream painting: shot through with yellow gleam of lamplights, shadows hunched or hugging their knees like granary gods.

Moss lining the undersides of jagged stones— so even here, it might be possible to say there is still kindness to be found.

Is this what you mean? I’ve decided to stop knotting up my questions and lobbing them like weapons into the trees.

The sky at night can be the color of ash, can be the color of burnished metal.

If the nest is a purse, then it is so high up in the branches I could not possibly plunder it or probe its depths.

Dear mystery: daily, night after night, I think you’re testing me; I won’t fight with you anymore.

Branches sough, and shapes of leaves shift in the wind. One by one my daughters will fly away.

Lit, candles burn down into bowls of liquid wax, even as their smoky fragrance lingers.

Tell me in your own time what you want to say.

In response to Cassandra Pages: Night Willow.

Then there was the semester when it seemed nothing we read or wrote or did or said in class, could move this one student. He always sat at the end of the first row in a sprawl, arms crossed, feet thrust out so others filing in or out of the room would have to take care not to stumble over them. When called on, either he refused to speak, shrugged or mumbled Beats me or I thought we were reading another story today so I don’t know about that one, causing much eye-rolling among his cohorts in the room. Until the afternoon we were discussing Gogol’s “The Overcoat,” and we had gotten to the part toward the end when Akaky, coming back from the office party, loses his overcoat to thugs on the bridge; and the months that follow, when the clerk languishes from illness in his poor rooms and dies. In the general discussion, this kid in class said, almost blasé— I don’t see what the big deal is: it’s just an overcoat— and something snapped in me. I can no longer remember exactly what I said, only that I flung words I’d hoped might— what? cut to the bone? move a stone? Perhaps I cast on lines about privilege or empathy, something about the way stories are knitted to real life. But in every new class, with every new student, he’s there and we are all Akaky’s ghost: the story’s his, the story’s ours, from its collar of cat fur down to its tailored hems. The casting-on, the fitting isn’t where it begins, but in some prior intention we don’t often know until we rip the parts back to the rib to see how the toothed patterns helix and grow.

In response to Via Negativa: Reading the Icelandic Sagas.

Recalculate the seasons. Rewrite The Farmer’s Almanac. Research new forms of lightning vanes for multi-forked strikes. High, thin and cold cover of cirrus clouds: find out how to thin them more. Falling sunlight, melting ice. The pull of gravity reaching deep into the bones. And yes, there are days when nothing seems to work, and I don’t know how to comfort you. I try to remember what my grandmother said about herbs and hallucinogenics: which leaves, when chewed, bring on a clammy sweat and which, when pounded into paste, lead one briefly to clear water in the middle of a lake. Lying beneath a black sky you might feel the tremors beginning again under the earth. It is a hundred degrees, close to midnight. A fig tree at the edge of the field has put forth a few small knobs of fruit. Swelling out like hips, not quite ripe yet; but how sadly erotic they are. Winds like knives slash at the topmost parts of trees. Months ago, most of the water found exit hatches. Silvery rivulets drained into the ground, leaving their dry calligraphy behind.

In response to small stone (110) and What the Night Horse Said.