Postcard to Grey

How solemn the breastplates of soot
on the sides of old buildings.

How hard the rind; how the mouth
whittles away to get to its sweet.

How like a rumpled quilt, these overcast skies
above clumps of streaked magnolias.

How the train moves forward on the track,
how its whistle departs in the other direction.

How blind to the rain, these small
prisms of light that fracture at our feet.

 

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

Landscape, with Returning Things

From a nest on the mountain, from the skirt
of the nearest pond— something has flown away

in another time. Currents spill their salt
and the earth changes garments. And yes

it is a different season, but somehow the same.
What returns arrows silently through the trees.

Fear does the same things over. And love?
The heart resolves to face, or not to face.

The head says keep, the heart says bend.
What can we do but begin.

 

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

Letter to Silence

Dear silence, the deeper I fall into your
soundproofed well, the clearer I hear
these arias: beyond the window, a rapid
scrabbling of claws on bark; indoors,
a waterfall miming a moving drape.
The clicking of the laundry cycle, tinkle of
a brass bell in the shade of the dogwood tree.
Has the reaper come, has the harvest
started? Whether or not I am ready, the grain
explodes from its golden husk. And still I crave
the warmth more than the amber in the cup;
and still I am in love with the zest of oranges,
that opening of light crosshatched with blue above.
I’ve kept fingernails, eyelashes, hair; dried stumps
that fell shortly after birth from my daughters’ navels:
the smallest things that tether us tightly to this world.

 

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

Ghazal with a Few Variations

She rinses her face and smooths her hair. The street
comes to life, the smells of morning from the coffee bar.

Grab your ankles, press your forehead to your knees.
I used to be able to slide a raised leg along the barre.

Sometimes I’m seized with a longing for what I don’t know.
They indulge me when I sit in the dark at the local bar.

Just when she thought she’d cleared the tests, they called
her back. Don’t you know they’re always raising the bar?

His voice on the phone, now husky with age— how long
since he whispered in my ear in a college bar?

Thirteen cattail heads in the shallows, like swizzle sticks;
water clear as vodka— You’d think this was a poetry bar.

A couple wanders in; a blinged-out dude in cowboy boots. The street
philosopher, red-lipsticked waitress. All this in one night, in a bar.

The days are getting longer. Soon we can sit on the deck, drinks
in hand, watching the sun torch sheets of water beyond the sandbar.

 

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

Luisa turns 100! (posts, that is)

Luisa A. IgloriaYesterday’s poem, “Letter to Self, Somewhere Other than Here,” was Luisa Igloria’s 100th post at Via Negativa. What started as a spur-of-the-moment response to one of my Morning Porchisms at Facebook, re-posted here back on November 20, has blossomed into a regular feature — and a very impressive display of poetic virtuosity and persistence by a master poet. For the first couple of weeks, Luisa wrote poems in response to random posts from the Morning Porch archives, but soon settled into her present pattern of writing daily in response to that morning’s entry. The fact that she has been able to keep it up, with all her duties as a college administrator and a mother, and produce poems of consistently high quality is nothing short of remarkable.

I remain deeply honored, but I can’t say I feel any special burden of responsibility to write better entries as a result. Lord knows I probably should; I’ve written some stinkers! But experience has shown that Luisa is very good at making lemonade out of lemons.

Back on December 27th, I noted:

It’s interesting what this collaboration is doing to our shared geographies. The blizzard missed us here in Central Pennsylvania, and I’m not sure how many ravens are found in Luisa’s neck of the woods. But there’s no reason why poems that take the natural world for their subject should be held to a stricter standard of nonfictional reportage than other poetry. In the world of these poems, Luisa and I live on the same street.

A couple days later, Luisa added some details about her process:

I always try to respond to each post new and without premeditation, trying to keep my mind limber and not dwell too much or too long or agonize over things. I’m trying to develop a better receptivity to the things that present themselves as occasions for poetry. … Visits to The Morning Porch are helping me immensely.

She wrote a bit more about her use of “found poems” and other material in poetic composition in a note included with her January 23rd post.

[L]ike a magpie I’m drawn to shiny stuff, language winking at me. I’m inclined to think that this is really the area where we work hardest to mine that “originality” that is so highly prized. All this of course has something to do with notions of appropriation, and can often lead to the question of how comfortable writers might feel in “taking” or “taking over” lines, words, language priorly or in some other form used by others. Someone famous was once reputed to have said, “Good writers imitate; great writers steal.” It’s a tough job because all our cultural and other conversations are so rife with intersubjectivities and intertextualities. I think I much prefer what happens to my writing when an interesting bit of information, an arresting line or image that I’ve found, triggers the desire for a deeper kind of poetic engagement and I find some entry point, some latitude to invent and explore its complexities further.

One thing I’ve learned about Luisa is that she’s not terribly good at numbers. Neither am I. But who can resist their manas? Thus we mark Luisa’s 100th post… and her 108th Morning Porch poem overall (a few posts combine several poems). I copied and pasted the text of all 108 poems into a document for the sole purpose of gleaning some additional statistics. MS Word counts 13,639 words altogether, or 75,747 characters counting spaces — the equivalent of 542 tweets. Had they in fact been posted to Twitter, they probably would’ve required between 575 and 600 tweets to avoid breaks in the middle of words and lines. This is of interest as a basis of comparison with the tweet-length Morning Porch entries. It means that Luisa’s poems are on average close to six times longer than the posts that spark them, which sounds about right.

I pasted the document into WordCounter.com and asked for a list of the 100 most frequently used words (excluding a, the, to, etc., and counting different forms of the same verb as one). Here’s that list, with the number of uses in parentheses.

water (42) day (40) tree (38) know (37) how (37) one (36) through (31) snow (30) want (28) come (28) open (27) dark (26) over (26) little (25) wind (25) say (24) might (24) still (24) new (22) air (22) window (22) night (22) can’t (21) down (21) long (21) just (21) light (21) blue (20) back (20) against (20) leave (19) make (19) world (19) way (18) away (18) under (18) small (18) green (17) white (17) go (17) sometime (17) sky (17) though (17) time (17) above (17) today (16) every (16) cold (16) rain (16) hand (16) i’ve (16) once (16) see (16) thing (16) dear (15) woman (15) sun (15) walk (15) morning (15) cloud (15) ear (14) old (14) it’s (14) heart (14) find (14) shadow (14) last (14) branch (14) body (14) tell (14) thin (14) gather (13) off (13) look (13) again (13) color (13) think (12) hair (12) turn (12) three (12) bird (12) did (12) glass (12) ring (12) wing (12) read (12) closer (12) head (12) around (12) wood (11) never (11) face (11) love (11) fall (11) two (11) voice (11) much (11) part (11) paper (11) ground (11)

Letter to Self, Somewhere Other than Here

Dear doppelganger, where in the world
have you been traveling? When I am
cleaning house, sometimes I come
upon bits and pieces of your wardrobe:
crystal teardrop earrings, those pumps
of sumptuous leather, that airy, off-
the-shoulder frock. And in the back
of the closet, what are those old
letters tied with ribbon, from Diego
and Hans, and Frank? Here, today,
there’s heavy frost, bare dirt in
the garden— though I hope one of us
might have remembered sometime ago
to put bulbs in the soil. Motes of snow
revolve like lazy angels, backlit by
the sun. I make wishes, missing your
carefree laughter, your joie de vivre,
the way you entered any department
store and charmed the discounts off
the hapless young clerks who wouldn’t
know what just hit them. Come back
soon— I have a Mozart cake with three
layers of Bavarian cream, and I promise
not to work on weekends (unless there’s
a real emergency). I dream of water-
colors, the stippled backs of fish in bright
green water, myself a little raft sailing away.

 

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

Miniatures

The dog is scratching at the door
to be let out. The window sash
begs to be lifted, the walls want to toss

their shadowed murals out into the yard.
The water wants to drain away
from the yellowed tub. Do you hear

the high-pitched whistle of waxwings
passing overhead, the lower registers of air
wound through a labyrinth of trees? The child

creases the paper once and once again—
There are mountains and valleys, somewhere
a sea; chalk-white sails that one can hardly tell

apart from the crested foam of waves.

Luisa A. Igloria
03 24 2011

In response to today’s Morning Porch entry.

Landscape, with Cave and Lovers

And once, in a book we read together, we paused:
not when the nurse reads to him or his ghost from a book
on permanent things in a room in a ruined villa, not

when his plane goes down in flames in the middle
of the desert—  Not even when, finally, he carries
the woman in his arms and leaves her on a smooth

rock ledge in a cave, whispering he will go for help
and return very soon, my darling
— but there after she
has already died, in the middle of the cold and dark,

at the part where in his grief he is moved to enter
her once more— does he not?— and there is only this
place left in the world to which he’s been sentenced,

this fastness far from anything but rain
and the last words she spoke, drifting into
the perfect darkness like smoke or ink—

Luisa A. Igloria
03 23 2011

In response to today’s Morning Porch entry.

Letter to Implacable Things

Can’t I change my mind, can’t I raise
my eyebrow, can’t I wriggle out of this
one by being charming or cute or contrite?
But really, can’t you change the way you’ve
apparently mapped the rest of the script, all
cuts and white-outs, implacable as a sky
hung like canvas backdrop (so fake, so
obviously without verisimilitude, don’t
you know)? Can’t I go on vacation, can’t I
stay for as long as I want, can’t I sleep in
then decide I’m no longer returning
to you? Can’t I say fuck to structure
and schedules and pearls, can’t I fill
my pockets with stones? Can’t I tell you
it’s you, can’t I take you with me? Can’t I
choose this over that and not burn
for the blame? Can’t I husband and wed
and verb but only belong to myself?

Luisa A. Igloria
03 22 2011

In response to today’s Morning Porch entry.