Tag: Luisa A. Igloria

If coffee has no effect, neither has milk or tea.
Dense fog curls outside the window, mimicking sleep.

In childhood, recurring dreams of flight across
billowing sheets of white, harbors of sleep.

In the early hours, your footfalls down
the hall rouse me from watchful sleep.

My bed is lumpy with hidden vegetables,
the mattress striped with wires: elusive sleep.

Wild silences of deep solitude, trapdoors
amid the roots: for tumbling headlong into sleep.

I once had a rusted key to a garden where
arms carved me makeshift rooms for sleep.

The tremor starts along the foot, a fright
like falling into the sudden depth preceding sleep.

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

Across the street, the neighbor pokes
through piles of furniture left on
the sidewalk, hoping to rescue

a vintage lamp, a serviceable side
table, a stool whose rungs might be
replaced. It’s early yet in the day,

the truck from Samaritan House
not yet there for pickup; expected
rain still a couple of hours away.

At church, in the Commons; at the down-
town thrift shop; or behind the high
school, a row of oversized bins

where we bring castoffs from time
to time, for donation or recycling;
winter coats the children have

outgrown, small kitchen appliances
and tchotchkes taking up too
much room— so many times I’ve felt

the urge to evict such senseless
excess from my life. Things multiply
in the dark; enjoy it now, you can’t

take it with you; or, out with the old
before in with the new— home-grown
platitudes for making room and yet more

room for stuff. I think of Basho on
the road with his notebook and traveling
cloak, of ascetics spending their days

in meditation under a tree. Oh habit
and earthly desire, what purchase we
still hold on this worldly life—

Stubborn to the end, enamored by
the promise of the beautiful, we cling
to every surface assuring love that lasts.

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

I am looking for the little cathedral
window Neruda found in a slice of lemon,

for the cascade of rain that rice
grains make inside a hollow reed;

I am searching in the wild rose bushes
for the tiny hearts of deepest red

the birds return to again and again;
for the five-pointed star exploding

seeds in the apple’s creamy interior. Warm-
wet or windy: but I want to remember

the day’s pallor is merely one scene
in the stack of cards dealt by that

unseen fist: deceptive green, curled leaf
caught too in the first blush of death.

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

What of the milk they nuzzled at birth,
and prior to that, what of water and blood?

What of the debris-spattered windshield,
the tunnel wide enough for only one?

What of the minerals gummed with salt and mud,
nourishing dark mixed of earth and flint?

What of the aster and the amaranth, then tiny buds
of forget-me-nots stripped from the field?

What of the year’s deepening light pooled in
the eyelids, a glaze the shade of pomegranates?

And what of the flanks of animals stepping through winter
wheat; then shadows of antlers crossed with the honeylocust’s?

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

The motet is a musical piece for several voices, where independent melodies may be seen to alternate with contrapuntal passages; dating from the 13th century, its name derives from the Latin movere, (“to move”), especially in its description of the movement of different voices against each other; or from a Latinized version of the Old French mot, “word” or “verbal utterance.”    

The year dwindles down in earnest, the swirl of
many voices decanting heat and timbre:
notes that move, fevered brass to diminuendo.

We hear them beating against the sky’s clear blue,
dark flecks like carets, bent to their patterned flight.
They’ll find their way to some other page, where wind

combines with other kinds of weather. Don’t rue
too deeply their disappearance; nor the fickle
hue of things steeped in the sun— that russet fruit

whose cheek has turned to blue; that gold persimmon,
its bitter juices puckering on your tongue.

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.