Tag: Luisa A. Igloria

By rote meant 
the drills you did
every day: times 

tables, verb forms, 
capitals of nations--
as if each repetition

might bring the goal
of some kind of 
perfection 

that much closer.  
Remembering as you
were expected 

to, you came to 
the end of the set;
and just when you 

thought you were done,
a door leading else-
where opened; and

it turns out you
weren't dressed for 
the weather there.  

 




 

"...I just go forward like water, flowing 
around obstacles and second thoughts..."
~ Tony Hoagland, "Distant Regard"

Isn't it true though, how everything in life
      is a terrible cliché, how we only think

everything that happens to us is original,
      that no one has ever felt like us 

the same pangs of joy or sorrow or sex, 
      the calculus of pain, erosions of jealousy. 

And you too must learn to live inside  
      that room called solitude, where furniture  

is sparse and there's no TV, no distractions;  
      where you'll work with the mind's reluctance

to sit still in one place until it stops
      fighting the urge to rummage through drawers,

flip switches, wipe all surfaces with disinfectant.
      Then one day it just happens: that knot 

in the center of your gut doesn't feel so tight
      anymore; you look at the silver growth

scattering through your wife's hair, the fine
      stippling of age spots across your cheeks, 

the dwindling figures in your pocketbook. You hold
      them up against the impending future or 

the coming end of the world. Perhaps it doesn't    
      seem so terrible either way: to wind the key 
 
around to the beginning again, or to watch as the fire,
      like a good pet, eats the scraps you feed it.  
      


 

If you die in Amsterdam with no next of kin, 
and no friends or family to prepare [a] funeral 
or mourn over the body, a poet will write 
a poem for you and recite it at your funeral. 
~ The Fact Site 

I don't know what to think of Daddy
Longlegs now that I've learned they

have penises; or what it can mean 
that a man made a world record from 

breaking 46 wooden toilet seats with 
his head. I can't count how many times 

my husband has said "Idiot" for each 
driver that's done something stupid 

on the road. And I'm unsure of what
I might say on meeting an iguana,

now that I've learned they have
a third eye atop their heads

and might be some kind of clair-
voyant. Far away, in search of mad 

honey, the Gurung fashion rope ladders 
to climb the high cliffs above their village 

in Nepal— as if to illustrate a universal 
truth: only sweetness which might leave us 

reeling on the roadside or kill us 
is the only one worth going after. 
 
 

Do you think of Pomp and
     Circumstance, of the dozen

or so steps first generation
      college students take to ascend

the stage and receive a roll of paper
      standing for their diploma, as all

their relatives on the sidelines cheer? Who
      thinks of Wagner’s Lohengrin, the trumpet

chorus before the newlyweds enter the bridal
      chamber? In the 1915 Armenian genocide,

thousands of women and children were forced
      to march across the Syrian desert, and in 1945

more than a hundred thousand prisoners
      led to Stutthof and Auschwitz. Just three

years before, my father as a young man joined
      thousands in the Bataan Death March; I don’t know

how or where on the road to San Fernando he lost
     the nail on his pinky finger, but he bore

that scar until the end of his days. And I was still
     in diapers when more than two hundred thousand

joined Martin Luther King at the Lincoln Memorial
     where he spoke of our dream. When I think of an exodus

of people fleeing bombs and wars and burning villages,
     I don’t want to think of the helicopter scene in Miss

Saigon, or of phalanxes of solders goose-stepping
     in front of a little man who wants a dress parade

complete with stiff salutes to make him feel he is
     adored instead of reviled. After the three

wise men paid Herod a visit, he carried out the Massacre
     of the Innocents. Then as now, we grieve for the weakest

and smallest sacrificed: the ones who walk until they
     can walk no more, who die of trauma and starvation.

with myself in these last stretches,

pushing a load of dirt in a wheelbarrow..
Almost winter: the ground hard and cold.

There is growth, though it’s that shade
of evergreen— of what persists from sheer,

hard-knuckled will. After rain, I know
I’ll rake the dry needles, countless

fallen asterisks of brown and pomegranate
from the Japanese maple. I don’t love

labor that seems to offer itself
only as proof of reward we can’t see,

as ticket to some afterlife. And yet I do it
anyway. Who will make toast in the morning,

put on coffee to boil, take a sleeve
of meat from ice to thaw upon the counter,

slice tomatoes into rings? I don’t know
if love is slower than time, or if happiness

comes finally after the greatest,
longest sorrow. When you gather leaves

into lawn bags, if you press down, there is
still always a little room for more.

so it must be a relief not to crib
from notes, not to worry the eyes’

furtive trajectory between screen
and scribbled page, not to back

away from naked encounter of the gaze.
From one to another, the fatal precision

of a kiss or a letter that mentions
the word love more than once; thinly

veiled digression from protocol
or job description. But evening

is full of the business of rain,
which is to say it softens again

the desire to inquire more closely
into the history of the bruise

on the neck, the laceration across
the forehead, the ways in which they

show what they are despite the cover
patted carefully into place around them.

Light breaks to herald the theme of always
starting over. It’s easy to lose count

of the stitch slipped from front to back,
of how far the shuttle has to travel before

it can return. Sometimes the hands only
want to occupy themselves with movement

because it’s more frightening to consider
all the tenderness that resides in the body.

It is years since my father’s
come back to eat from a dish
of sweets laid on the counter,
to drink water out of a blue
plastic shot glass and wipe
his mouth on a paper napkin.

He used to drowse in the arm-
chair with the faded brown
upholstery, the pages of Time
or Life magazine fallen from
his hand. I’d wake to see him
seated at the foot of my bed,

trying to trim with scissors
the fingernail he lost in the war.
This could be a poem about ghosts,
or about what we keep wanting
to remember. I couldn’t tell you
the color of his clothes but I

still fix on the way all his
bottom teeth overlapped, like steps
to a ruined shrine at the top
of a hill. Or the color of his eyes,
ice-grey and cool like the air at dusk,
tinged with the smell of pine.

the sentence given to the white
supremacist who plowed his car

into a mass of bodies, killing
Heather Heyer in a narrow, over-
crowded street of the university

town where my daughter and son-in-law
and new baby used to live. We were
on our way to visit that day,

when crowds of counter protesters
held up hand-lettered signs that said
Love or Solidarity or No Hate to the far

right and neo-fascist groups carrying
Confederate flags and Nazi flags
and semiautomatic weapons. Slow

motion in a video of those moments
shown to the jury: shoes popping off feet,
kneecaps breaking, the contents

of a water bottle scattering an arc
as bodies fell, as the man used his car
to mow them down… From the Analects,

this question: If a man has no
humaneness, what can his propriety
be like? From grief, try to hold

the word life in your mind the way
it should be held: like a mirror, a
singularity. A duty. The future.

A woman stands on a stage
giving a talk about the pivotal
moment in life that gives us
our central narrative—

For one person, it is at six,
when his parents lock him in a closet
for having misbehaved. For another,
it is the time an uncle sticks

his hand under her waistband
then says she cannot ever tell.
And what were they thinking,
the parents that sent away

the still unformed child
through the hunter, the woodsman,
the maid? The future at times shows
its frightening face; and something

in human nature wants to think
a destiny can be pushed away,
averted, exchanged, unmade.
Didn’t Oedipus himself go

away yet wind up running blind
into the arms of his fate? Perhaps
he should have gone to a Ted Talk
instead. Perhaps he should have

learned how to nip in the bud
that simmering wick: one end saying
I can do anything, and the other
saying there is nothing I can do.

~ after Paula Rego, “The Dance” (1988)

So late in the season, so blue
on this beach pearled by the moon—

and still it seems I haven’t learned
how not to be so stiff, or what it takes

to be taken into these circles that move
with apparent easy regard— how everyone’s

hand slips so easily into another’s, how
each seems to know perfectly the role

they should play. The woman’s gold-sheathed
hip pleats into the man’s, and then a child

flowers in that space between them. Soon the child
herself grows into mother, into crone. Above them all,

only the ramparts of the old fortress seem un-
changed. But the one that holds herself apart lifts

one edge of her dress as if testing its weight:
she can still choose, can’t she? She can twirl

in silence, observe how the silks of her dress
open and float like a parachute in the wind.