Tag: Luisa A. Igloria

Insects clustered around
the porch light— the usual soft
brown bodies; those sharply

checkered Mondrians, ailanthus
wormwood moths. Yellow and red
Yayoi Kusama beetles.

Parachutes of heat billow over
the entire house, the stunned
and always thirsty garden.

Yes, I’ve begun to give
away little trinkets— a lizard
pin, a beaded necklace bought 20

years ago from a man in a tie-dyed
shirt in Berkeley. Soft printed cotton
scarves from India, embroidery

as jewelry. I loved them like one
can love a beautiful thing supposedly
without any real value. That is,

on sight, immediately. The way
the self can feel obliterated in two
seconds by a perfect stitch. Imagine that.

How did we come to learn desire
should mean first, endure? To want

so much that the hunger to appease
must yet be strung as far and taut

as it can go: the way
a mother will demur, pretend

she’s eaten, so the child should have
no need to feel remorse for her own

uncontainable hungers?
And for the father to carry

a child on his back, say
it’s okay, the soles of his shoes

are thicker and more used
to the hard cobble of roads?

They sleep, then open
their eyes. Day after day

the thrift of open palms which
can mean grace given, or withheld.

Dear Gabriel, Little Mayor, Little
Angel of the short clipped wings,

the Saturday afternoon buzz
cut and men’s manicure: now I am

at least ten years past the age
when you took your marriage vows,

defying your mother who couldn’t
stand your bride’s seamstress hands,

the smell of rice husk, snails, corn
fields in her hair. Closer than ever

to my own hibernal, still I don’t see
the lines unblur in our genealogy.

In front of the produce bin, I try
to read between lines of graffiti

sketched on the deep plum slate
of eggplants, recall the names

of various peppers you taught me:
Cubanelles, Habaneros, Thai bird

chillies. Who are you, really; and where
are you from, though I know you’re half

of who made me? Summers, we took a jeep
to the beach, where I helped to bury you

up to your neck in sand for your annual
cure. You fell asleep, face shielded

by a hat; then hours later, broke through
that flimsy tomb and, laughing, ran into

the foam. Damp haunches, I’m still here:
pondering the shape you left in the loam.

 

In response to Via Negativa: Spell.

Say goodbye
to the fiddlehead
fern and the common
rose, to the seas
beginning to boil
like cauldrons set
on stoves. The sky
heaves, hot metal
sheet buckling
at the edges.
No waterfalls
of ice can cool
the flames, and yet
the orcas will take
turns ferrying
their dead. No one
has seen anything
like it: Remarkable,
they say. Why is that
the word they use?
How can a parent not
grieve for a child
taken before its time?

“And God is more beautiful than the road to God. But those who travel don’t return from a wandering… to be lost in another wandering.” ~ Mahmoud Darwish

Even as it sputters, it’s hard to still
the mind’s overworked engine— to nudge it
inside a cove or clearing where brush fires
aren’t also raging. Inside a little room,
who is holding vigil and praying
their loved one won’t pass away yet
or after all on their watch? At the bottom
of the hill, a few old signposts
creak in a slight wind— one bearing
the rubbed-out letters for “bar,” the other
for “apothecary.” When you get to the center
of town, there isn’t any flying buttress
or vaulted ceiling, no chapel on one side,
draped in hush and flickering with a hundred
votives in red shot glasses. No one yet
has thought to make a sign for the in-between,
to gather up stamped tinfoil shapes others
have left in the dust: four-chambered heart,
scalpel, pie plate, ring. In the distance, a dog
barks; and a paving truck rolls over and over
the same spot on the road. Beside a green
trash bin, a fledgling trembles in damp grass,
his new dark coat stippled with faint
stockinettes of dusty gold. He’s brave enough
to return your gaze, and you try not to break
the spell. You tell yourself fear isn’t really
fear until it becomes aware of itself;
and who knows why any of us are here?

There’s a town in McLean county, IL—
not to be confused with the neighborhood
of Normaltown in Athens, GA, the latter

immortalized by the new wave band called
The B-52’s in their song “Deadbeat Club,”
with lyrics about teenagers having nothing

better to do than loaf around in little
cafes. How incredulous to see how normal
was supposed to be the families we watched

when finally (last house on the street)
we got black & white TV— father & mother
& five or six children living in small

towns, working on the farm or at
the lumberyard, running in at the sound
of the dinner bell; saying grace, saying

goodnight before one by one the lights
in the upstairs windows went out. Normal
was supposed to be young newlyweds

giving up their honeymoon money
to help keep a local bank solvent during
the Depression, & a second class

angel in a crumpled linen smock
dispatched to save an upstanding family
man from falling into despair. What

could we call what happened almost every
day in our home when I was growing up?
For the longest time, I thought

what we had was normal— waking up to see
breakfast dishes hurled to the floor,
the percolator raised like a lamp

in grandmother’s hand, mother cowering
by the door. Wild sobbing an orchestral
accompaniment to blows rained on a wall.

We heard about the elderly aunt
of a friend who after sudden illness
fell into a coma— They took

her home and tended to
her body, turning her first one
way and then the other to keep

bedsores from developing; a nurse
came regularly to check on feeding
tubes and catheters, to note

down vitals in a log. Her hair
grew, and needed to be washed.
And so did fingernails, which

had to be clipped. Season
after season she slept, oblivious
to the ceremonies of the daily, to

holidays and weather and elections.
There was the earthquake in ’90, when
everyone ran out into the streets

in panic and forgot about her.
Miraculously, she survived that too.
And then, one day, five or six

years later, we were told she simply
sat up in bed, blinked, and asked for
a drink of water— which goes to show

how little we understand of the body’s
systems. What bird or worm thrashes
in the dense thickets of the ear

before bursting free? what comes to life,
pushing through blocked pathways, courier
trying to make a guaranteed delivery?

“Perhaps creating something is nothing but an act of profound remembrance.”
~ Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters on Life

Tonight, my husband is on a plane
making his way to Chicago; he and his

siblings have been called and will be
gathering at the bedside of their mother

who’s been in the hospital’s intensive
care unit for several days. Two weeks

ago, we were planning details for a reunion
in a cottage up by Lake Geneva: who’d get

which room, who’d be responsible
for grocery runs, for rides, for side

excursions to Niagara Falls and closer
towns. When she came to consciousness after

the pacemaker implant, she asked the doctor
if she’d be able to travel, and was told

yes. I wondered then: so soon after surgery,
would it be safe for her to don a blue

rain slicker and board a boat with the rest
of us, to feel the thundering spray from

a horseshoe-shaped curtain of water
crashing over the rocks? Growing up,

I’d hear my elders say The spirit is
willing, but the flesh is weak. You might

think this well applies to her situation, except
that no one knows for sure. No one wants to talk

about what it might mean yet: if she’s come
to the end or if the body might still rally

and surpass all hopes, sprinting back from the edge,
from teetering and then slipping away in the mist.

 

In response to Via Negativa: Asymmetry.

that summer, on elegies and the poetry
of death. Perhaps it shouldn’t have come
as a surprise, yet I found I was surprised
—long-dead neighbors arrived and smilingly
took their places among others at the table.
They shuffled papers from folders, set out
their pens neatly on one side; some
began clearing their throats in a way
that sounded like they might not have
done that in a while. On the right,
Mr. Eduardo, who once was city engineer,
smoothed the lapels of his olive coat
and the silk square tucked neatly into
a breast pocket. And there were Nana
Doring and Tata Berting, who lived
in a brown house in the street directly
below ours. Her grey hair was like it always
was— slightly unruly but with a nice curl,
giving her an elfin look; his black-rimmed
glasses were as usual perched high on his nose,
which made him look a little like a solemn
owl. I could sense they were eager to read
poems to each other. It wasn’t cold or gloomy
at all in there: windows framed the brightness
of the season, and winding vines of orange
hummingbird trumpet flowers crept along
the ledge. I was both suddenly shy and quite
excited; then stricken with the anxiety
they would think I was such a fraud—
what did I know about death, after all?
I wanted to ask them what they thought
about all these metaphors; I wanted
to suggest a free write. At the end
of the session they came up to give hugs,
saying they enjoyed their brief time here.