Tag: Luisa A. Igloria

Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

Miniatures

This entry is part 5 of 92 in the series Morning Porch Poems: Spring 2011

 

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.

Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

Landscape, with Cave and Lovers

This entry is part 4 of 92 in the series Morning Porch Poems: Spring 2011

 

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.

Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

Letter to Implacable Things

This entry is part 3 of 92 in the series Morning Porch Poems: Spring 2011

 

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.

Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

Landscape with Sudden Rain, Wet Blooms, and a Van Eyck Painting

This entry is part 2 of 92 in the series Morning Porch Poems: Spring 2011

 

Cream and magenta on asphalt, the blooms that ripened
early on the dogwood now loosened by sudden rain—

Do you know why the couple touch hands in the Van Eyck
painting? Their decorum holds the house pillars up,

plumps the cushions, velvets the drapes for commerce,
theirs and the world’s. See how the mirror repeats

and reflects them back to each other, though crowned
by a rondel of suffering. In her green robe with its

multitude of gathers, she casts a faint shadow on the bed.
And the fruit on the window sill might be peach,

might be pear, might be apple– something with glimmering
skin, like the lover and the scar he wore like a badge

to the side of his throat. Fickle nature, cold and grainy
as the day that spills its seed above the fields, indiscriminate,

so things grow despite themselves. And there was the one
who said never, but turned from you to rinse his hands.

Who else loves his own decorum as I do? The names
of trees are lovely in latinate. I can’t recite those,

can only name their changing colors: flush
and canary, stripped and rose; or moan like the voice

of a cello in the leaves, imitating human speech.

—Luisa A. Igloria
03 21 2011

In response to today’s Morning Porch entry.

Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

Always a Story

This entry is part 1 of 92 in the series Morning Porch Poems: Spring 2011

 

Always a story
         beneath the cold and quiet—

Always a nest being refurbished
         under the springhouse eaves—

Always the smell of mud at the edges,
         the window finally come unstuck—

Always a gnarl in the fabric
         where the fibers knotted—

Always a smooth new trail
         tracked around the village of scars

—Luisa A. Igloria
03 20 2011

In response to today’s Morning Porch entry.

Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

Señas

This entry is part 95 of 95 in the series Morning Porch Poems: Winter 2010-11

 

“…When you lose something,
it’s so you can learn how to search.”
—Dean Young

No sign of the spoon— and the fork and the knife
on a string— that he lost as a child

No sign of the furry brown bear— with the real
glass eyes— that I took to bed at night

No sign of the phoebes— they came to dip
for water— that were here yesterday

No sign of the robin— it rang and rang— that embroidered
its banner with song then fell strangely silent

No sign of the little stone buddha— and his necklace
of rosy children— that cracked on the pavement
when it fell from my pocket

No sign— but blue scales on the kitchen floor—
of the fish that jumped from the bowl by the open
window, startled by the barking of the dog next door

No sign of the moon— though I know it’s about to poke
over the horizon— big like a woman with child

No sign of the cordillera— though I glimpsed mountain-
and-valley pleats tattooed under the poet’s collar

No sign of the fog and its blue signature— I cannot see
my own breath— curled beneath noon’s yellow shawl

—Luisa A. Igloria
03 19 2011

In response to today’s Morning Porch entry.

Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

Willow

This entry is part 92 of 95 in the series Morning Porch Poems: Winter 2010-11

 

My parents owned an inexpensive set of china
showing a world glazed in blue and white: a few
three-tiered pagodas, thumbnails of gardens
planted to peach or willow trees. Villagers
crossed footbridges presumably to the next
town beyond the rim of the dinner plate,
and fishermen dipped their nets in placid
water. A woman sat at an upstairs window
reading a book, or doing sums, or writing
in a journal. A man cooled his bare feet in
the shallows, not doing anything much.
It was always dawn or dusk, and small birds
flew toward a miniature sun above the trees.
They could not have gone too far
from the periphery, nor pierced the convex
glass of the dome that rested on the plate—
so then what is that smudge on the sill,
what has become of the woman who once
sat there with her inks and scrolls?

—Luisa A. Igloria
03 17 2011

In response to today’s Morning Porch entry.

Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

Spindle

This entry is part 93 of 95 in the series Morning Porch Poems: Winter 2010-11

 

Today a poet read these words transcribed
from a different language: “Mi destino intermitente”
—and a door opened into a garden where the weather
was overcast and damp, but things were growing:
for instance, new leaves of lamb’s-ears looking delicately
furred, alive, alert. We passed through and touched
the dark veins of flowers pulsing on the vine, caught
our spindle-shaped reflections— fusiforme—
in puddles of water. Sometimes the world bends to
your position. The wasp returns to its nest and
finds it in tatters. Sometimes it is enough to live
in the complicated arc between losing and finding,
enough to gather what sweetness remains.

—Luisa A. Igloria
03 16 2011

In response to today’s Morning Porch entry.

Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

After

This entry is part 91 of 95 in the series Morning Porch Poems: Winter 2010-11

 

Evening of the first day, the man who owned a truck yard
next door laid out plywood sheets on hard ground and said

Come— And all the neighbors came, bringing blankets,
sheets, canvas tarp, burlap— The very young and the trembling

old slept in vehicles, windows cracked open for air—
And the night air was notched with metallic smells but also

something almost sweet, like flowers— I did not want
to think what kind– And the following day it rained,

and then again the next, so between aftershocks we collected
water in pails and tin drums— Someone had a kerosene stove

and lit it in the shadow of the broken shed where the honeysuckle
vines were a vivid green interspersed with orange— And still

we refused to go indoors, though gradually we crept
back to those parts of our homes still standing— Porches

were good for sleeping— When the sun glimmered
through thin clouds we heard news of a few places

where we could walk to line up for bread, rice,
canned goods— And someone had busted a water pipe

near the park (just a little they said) and people went
with cans and plastic tubs for water— And the men

came back weeping, having dug out bodies from collapsed
buildings, from vehicles overtaken by landslides

on the mountain road— And strangers offered
rides, and helicopters hovered in the sky— And we heard

lamentations and questions on the lips of everyone— Faces
streaked often and easily, eyes filling with tears and blinking

not from the sunlight but from what they could barely endure—

—Luisa A. Igloria
03 15 2011

In response to today’s Morning Porch entry.

Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

Landscape with Red Boots and Branch of Dead Cherry

This entry is part 90 of 95 in the series Morning Porch Poems: Winter 2010-11

 

In a photograph, a woman sits on her haunches
amid a sea of debris. Her feet are bare. A pair of red
rain boots caked with mud perches neatly at her side,
the way they might rest in a parlor. The sky is the color
of rain, the color of heaving things: water a wall
surging over highways, toppling cars and beams
and lorries. The past tense is already active here—
fields have lost their stenciled borders; there’s little left
to read in maps. Above the burning cities, snowflakes
scatter, wandering back and forth like spirits. I watch
one explode against the branch of a dead cherry.
Croak of a raven making the shape of a thousand names.

—Luisa A. Igloria
03 14 2011

In response to today’s Morning Porch entry.