In response to an entry from The Morning Porch.
Todos los Santos
The gravestones are damp, shiny with recent rain.
Everyone we’ve ever loved sleeps beneath this ground,
smelling the grass, letting weather trickle into bones
that lie in their beds, broken rosaries wound through
what once were fingers clasped across the chest.
At their feet, pairs of good leather shoes, tightly
rolled blankets not yet riddled with holes.
In trouser pockets, soft bills, loose change.
A gold tooth that’s fallen into a circle of ash.
How long has it been like this? Soon, hundreds of
little flames flower atop white-washed tombs.
Moths in the branches sift smoke from their wings.
—Luisa A. Igloria
10 26 2011
In response to an entry from The Morning Porch.
Once Again
The light around the body, said the poet, a field of energy that tethers it somehow to a world full of rushing sounds: a field of noise and bodies— as when you first walked by yourself to market in that little town so long ago, and nearly swooned from the smells of brine and fish guts, long pearled strips of sausage blotchy pink in their casings and courted by flies; and on the ground, the women clasping their knees and tending baskets of wilted greens; a world in actuality only the size of a teacup nestled between the hills, the man-made lake in the park a marvel with its pleasure boats and one-tiered fountain (the same your husband looked at in a postcard years later and said was the size of a duck pond); a world you thought impossibly unbounded, somehow without end, though you saw how sharply the silhouettes of cypress and pine clung to your field of vision as a trick of night before it descended over the scrim of rusted roofs; how odd to find that light even here on the sidewalk, in this park where they have trapped the golden koi in a shallow basin fringed with cattails; and even closer, in the cheap bronze of a cerveza negra bottle someone drank from, before carelessly throwing it away.
—Luisa A. Igloria
10 25 2011
In response to an entry from The Morning Porch.
Monday’s News
The bits of broken plastic, a cellphone part, a crumpled bill:
evidence left in haste or panic on the sidewalk.
The neighbors peering out from behind their blinds.
The voice on the phone asking,
Shouldn’t you be telling this to the police?
The caller responding, I thought you were the police?
The flutter of a newspaper someone left on a bench;
the dogs sniffing under the bushes.
Crackle of radio static, news flash on who was caught—
including a twelve year old. The afternoon’s cheek
suddenly, intensely, desiring sleep.
Three croaks from overhead: ravens or crows?
—Luisa A. Igloria
10 24 2011
In response to an entry from The Morning Porch.
Dear scarlet-flushed, hydraulic,
banded muscle that’s caused this hammering in my chest and ears and brain, of course like all the neighbors I’m a nervous wreck but thankful for your still apparently rapid reflexes. Having gone upstairs to brush my teeth and get ready for bed, at first I didn’t hear it clearly, the sudden pounding on the door at nearly midnight, then louder, the sounds of screaming— woman? man?— on the walk outside, followed by flashing lights and the voices of cops yelling Put your hands up! Put your hands up! Now it’s all over the late night news— Foot patrols leading big dogs to sniff around in the bushes and in the mews, even a helicopter buzzing overhead, lights sweeping in arcs like wipers across a dark windshield. Reports are mixed— Drug bust, car chase; one caught, one still on the loose; or all of them now in jail. Your wild agitation diminishes, but never really the fear; and the sorrow as well for a world where no one opens windows to let in the night air anymore.
—Luisa A. Igloria
10 23 2011
In response to an entry from The Morning Porch.
Shirtwaist Elegy
There is an ache like a shield across the place
where my heart should be, fleshy like a fist
or callused like fingers and embroidered
with floss. Needles track a path around its contours,
their swish adjusting as they push and retract.
See the crown of the oak burning, brighter
than a furnace at the factory window. Hear
the treadle’s slap, the blouses spool paler
than spring blossoms and thin as linen,
from under the hands of girls. Whipstitch and chain,
darts that gather the billows in. The shirt I’m wearing
is made in Bangladesh, Turkey, or the Philippines,
where clotheslines crisscross sky: sleeves and bodices
flail in salt-laced wind— weft of signatures whose
facing edges I’ll button and wear against my skin.
—Luisa A. Igloria
10 22 2011
In response to an entry from The Morning Porch.
Landscape, with Night Sky Obscured by Street Lamps
Here where we crane our necks, walking home
where yellow lights flood the little streets
and alleys in measured increments, neither
can the trimmed points of cypresses figure
where the constellations lie. The hunter
seems merely an old bedtime story: its belt
and quiver and bow, its prey too small
from this distance to see. And that river
of stars dividing the greater distance
between time and prophecy I’m sure
is milky, its edges tinted lilac
or cool blue; and the vessels
that pour and pour yet never reach
the pinnacle of thirst. What becomes
of them when the dark unsettles, when
the lion opens its maw and the bird
flies, trembling, back toward the sun?
—Luisa A. Igloria
10 21 2011
In response to an entry from The Morning Porch.
Threshold
In the shelled cities, in the ghost towns,
among the buff-colored hulls of strafed
buildings, the dead congregate: brides
who never consummated their vows,
their bridegrooms in whose mouths sand
rained the lost hours before they
could even fill with sweets and dates.
And the wraiths of mothers who pined away,
not knowing which part of the desert
they should water with their tears;
which rock cradled the tongueless
or sightless remains of husband,
brother, son— Above the oil fields
and endless plains, the calculus
continues, one end of the hourglass
swinging over to the other;
and under night’s dark tent, stars reel:
so many hornets released from the nest.
—Luisa A. Igloria
10 20 2011
In response to an entry from The Morning Porch.
Lyric for Waking
Walk, said the master in that miracle of waking.
See. Or hear. In this labyrinth of partitions,
the merely unmiraculous voices clatter against each
other every morning. Theirs is the sound of copper,
of coins and cups with their sleeves of corrugated
cardboard. It is always warmer out than in. Or
in than out. On the street corner, where the kids
from the Governor’s School for the Arts are waiting
for the bus, one girl says to another, “Stimulants.
I just take stimulants.” A thread of green unravels
from the edge of my sweater. If I pulled it, wound it
into a ball, how far would it take me out of the cave?
The voices are also breathing. A warm wind blows
over the tops of trees in the city, flutters
like long ribbons of gauze— imagine them peeling
off our faces, startling like fish from the depths.
—Luisa A. Igloria
10 19 2011
In response to an entry from The Morning Porch.
Letter to S, with Fading Sunlight
The pebbly look of clouds at dusk, as though washed
limpid by sky clear as water.
And yes it’s hard for me to pass grocery store shelves
bedecked with sale signs, the sidewalk tables
at the corner cafe where tiny jugs for cream
and lidded bowls for sugar gleam whitely—
and not think of you wondering where next
month’s sustenance is coming from.
You say you take a cup of coffee in the morning,
bread, an egg sometimes. What else?
Someone points out the wild rose bushes
next to the broken-down wall, how they are
choked with ruffled blossoms—
everything sunlit, struck, blazoned
as the air above fills with indigo,
even as the light is dying.
—Luisa A. Igloria
10 18 2011
In response to an entry from The Morning Porch.