Tag: Luisa A. Igloria

Who’ll remember to speak of history
as the woman running away in the night
with only an umbrella and a child
wrapped around her neck under a rain-
coat? And who writes of the way
every window in the avenue closed
like an eye covered with a bandage,
or how whole herds of water buffalo
offered the music of their ribs
to the drought? There are women who,
long into their dotage, cannot bear
to hear certain songs played on the radio
because they’re brought back to the night
bombs started falling and every tip
nicked with moonlight in the garden
looked like bayonets adorned
with the limbs of children. Neighbors tell
of the man who jumped out of bed and through
the window and the next day soldiers
were wearing his clothes. The barbers
shut their doors and turned off the red
and blue swirling lights, hiding their good
blades. Fishermen gathered up their nets
and hid them under the rocks.
Grandmothers choked down tiny
gold earrings. So many stories
lined with fire and drowning at sea.
In every field, find the glint
and jagged teeth of broken zippers:
some of them still open, despite
the blood and rust of years.

A dream of the green gate:
the garden grown derelict, hulls
of boats rotting on the porch.

*

Evidence of half-eaten fruit:
what makes the sudden movement
when you peer into the branches?

*

Tell me how something other
than sorrow repeats in three
tongues: Tapat. Natalek. Faithful.

*

How does a memory that’s gone
walking in borrowed coats
return to its owner?

*

After the downpour, a clearing.
But the rain is never enough now
to dispel the heat or haze.

 

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

“The year is full of warnings of its shortness, as is life.” ~ Thoreau

Of the now gone family home, what I remember
is how it was before it became a slightly more

expanded idea, the way some tables are smaller
before the extra leaves unfold to make room

for guests joining the holiday meal. Three small
dark rooms and an apron-sized kitchen, one closet

into which everything was stashed: brooms and dust
pans, tools, the bag of good rice. Pulling on window

sashes, you’d wish the perpetual rain didn’t so surely
seek out all the open seams. Thinking ahead to a time

when the plain wooden door we barred at night
with a beam could finally be replaced, you bought

a pair of ornate Chinese urns scrolled in brass
to flank the entrance. I can’t remember where

they are now, though I remember the year a staircase
was finally built to lead to the hope of an attic

extension— soft pinewood turned on a lathe, curves
that polished to a honey-colored gold under stress

though the steps led to nothing more than rafters
where stray birds nested and the wind blew in

breaths stippled by dust. For that was how we tried
to pin the future’s vague shape to the present:

by trial and error, by moving slowly from one rung
to the next, trying not to look back or down.

 

In response to Via Negativa: Tailor or sailor?.

~ after Hugo Simberg, “Dance on the Quay (Tanssi Sillalla),” 1899

On Saturday nights, in some little town,
someone with a guitar and pick or an accordion

player is there, tapping his foot at the edge
of the quay— And in summertime, when the light

in late afternoon is the color of new butter,
when the weight of the week has not yet dissolved:

who wouldn’t be tempted to step into the arms
of a partner who can twirl and lift you into the air

though his cheeks are hollow and his frame gaunt
as bone? It’s a new feeling to give yourself

so trustingly to a music you’ve never heard this close
or this clearly before. Others too are quietly waiting

their turn to step across the threshold, give
their hand to the one waiting to lead them across.

 

In response to Via Negativa: Ship burial.

There are certain flowers and leaves
that turn slippery as soap when bruised—

swished into a plastic flask of water
with a few granules of detergent,

they made the largest, most glorious
bubbles which we blew with makeshift

spools of bent clothes hangers—
The same type of wire that girls

who’d been foolish would use to try
and empty themselves, scour that room

before a cell, another body, could grow
into a larger shape to take up residence

in their own. This is how I took one
of my cousin’s friends to the ER:

doubled over in pain, until the orderlies
drew the privacy curtains then whisked

her off to the operating room. That
was the last time I saw her, until

she popped up recently on Facebook:
with a lover, a grown daughter; smiling,

slipped away from who knows what cowl
might have dropped around her shoulders.

How many words can you speak
into a phone? A pair of goats,

bleating from thin cords
that tether them to the base

of a guava tree. Where they traced
circles in the dust, they shat small

hard pellets. Who owns this land?
Is there a deed, a title, a lien

holder? The plumbing is old and rusty.
Water from the tank leaks in rivulets

before it can climb into the house.
So many questions and too many holes

in the walls. Who stole the light
bulbs out of their sockets, dis-

connected the refrigerator?
The mailman bangs on the gate

with a rock. No one hears
or no one answers.

In the corners, under and through
the floorboards. In the kitchen
cupboards. Under the sink, wherever
traces of human debris have piled up
with empty bottles, plastic food
wrappers, dirty silverware. One
drowned in the bathroom, grey
and slowly spinning under yellow
light. Where is the Piper
to lead them to wider water:
over the falls, away from the town,
away from the widows curled under
thin sheets in the cold? Lead them
into the homes of the merciless.
There, let them feast unrestrained.

“Traté de ahogar mis penas… pero las condenadas aprendieron a nadar.”
[“I tried to drown my sorrows… but those I’d condemned learned to swim.”] ~ Frida Kahlo

At night do you hear a fiddle sleep,
a wheelchair creak? The body works

until it doesn’t. The body limps
to the end of the road until it can’t

wait for the bus anymore. And closure
is hard to come by, even when it might

signify an end: perhaps to suffering,
to pain, uncertainty, ordinary tedium.

And what happens to pleasure, to ease,
the consonance of one limb working

as well as the other; the wondrous
machine giving off such poignant sounds

only when surfaces are scratched
by a needle? What now, in the pause

between one impasse and another, except
the admission of what can’t be known?

 

In response to Via Negativa: Nearer my god.

I am sitting on the deck in the heat
that hasn’t dissolved yet though it is evening,
because I want to be in the open, away
from the smells of oil & frying in the kitchen
though this makes me fair game for Asian tiger
mosquitoes circling my ankles & arms
& the sides of my neck. I feel the grief
that comes not only from histories I could recite
even in my sleep, but also from the wreckage
of the future, whose foghorn sounds closer
& closer each night. I am reading a poem
by Alice Notley, which she ends by saying
I have nothing to show for my time but poems/
what do you have… The pot of mint that survived
this brutal weather sends up its faint
sweet-pungent trail of breath & I don’t know
if it’s this which undoes me or if it’s those words.
& I don’t care anymore if this is cliché but my heart
is breaking & I wish the curtain of cicada trills
were thick enough for me to drown in. How sure
they seem of their purpose & how to accomplish it—
Wait years & years, spend it all on one thing,
then quit this earth— If I had their certainty
would I give up all I had too without
questioning? Now it gets close to the end
but my inventory is small; & it isn’t the kind
that could provide what others desperately
need or want. I am only one piece in a story
I don’t know the end or beginning of; I’m in a state
of perpetual second-guessing & if there’s anyone
who might know the answers, they’re long gone
from this world or maybe they were never here,
yet they’re always the first to pass judgment.

Who uses those thin
aérogrammes anymore, onion-

skin paper edged with bars
of red and blue? I dream,

fitfully, of that alley bent
like an elbow at the bottom;

the cats that roamed, roaches
flying like miniature bats

through rooms swathed with
mosquito netting. In each one,

all the people left behind:
their whispers, the drone

of prayers repeated bead
by bead. Don’t write

about dreams, I’ve been told.
But what if they’re the only

kinds of letters I can send
and receive these days? The wind

opens its mouth. Its breath,
unsweetened, kills any nostalgia.

Time clicks itself into place,
one scalloped shell at a time.