Tag: Luisa A. Igloria

In Chicago, my mother-in-law is transferred
to a hospital room, waiting for updates

from doctors after two surgeries just days
apart— the first, an incision in the neck

to open the artery then clean out material
in the region of its narrowing; the second,

to thread a wire into a vein beneath
the collarbone then tether a pacemaker

to her heart. Where we are in the southeast,
I listen to news relayed by text and phone

as my husband and his siblings confer
in measured language on details of post-

surgical recovery. He’s told, not out
of the woods completely: how her speech

turns syllables on themselves, emerging
from under the veil of anesthesia; or how

one side of her face doesn’t seem to have
caught up with the other. When he relays

this information at the dinner table,
he doesn’t seem to notice the agitated

flutter begin in his right knee, and how
his foot drums a rapid, nervous rhythm

on the floor. He checks through the day
for additional information; and I, too,

wait for its trickle in my direction.
Of course I am thinking of her, but also,

I can’t help thinking of my own mother
on the other side of the world (who’s the same

age): how these days there’s little I know
about her daily situation, since relatives

she lives with have either changed
their phones or for whatever reason,

have been purposefully blocking my attempts
to reach her. When I was a child, she was always

saying things like What will be, will be;
or Life is short, someday we’ll have to return

it. The last time I saw her, the smallest things
often moved her to tears: Now I am old, now I live

mostly by myself; this is now my life. I wish
I could take both their hands in my own, say

something that would make sense. Then maybe we
might either cook, or go out to look at shoes.

How much time now have you spent
waiting: for someone to respond

to the urgent letter; for the missing
heirloom to turn up wrapped in a piece
of clothing. For someone to finally

mend the sagging fence, for the phone
to ring. It’s difficult to study or nap

or eat a healthy salad or even get
distracted by TV or books— You go
to the grocery store and stand

in the middle of islands of summer
fruit and vegetables, but your thoughts

are elsewhere. In the yard, some insect
has started to chew on a leaf that’s barely
pushed its green out of the soil. You

want to say Who are you and why
don’t you give the poor thing a chance?
You’re tempted to sit by the terra cotta pot

and wait for the culprit to rear its slimy head.
But the mornings are always a room across which

the sun’s shadow is so rapidly passing
to remind you of time. You don’t know when
to begin unfastening your heart from the hours,

you don’t know how to gather its trembling
flowers to put in a vase at the bedside

of the one in pain— the one waking up
from being cut open by a scalpel; or the one
far away in a country of terrible, unceasing rain.

Prize the fruit whose flesh
makes the mouth pucker,

whose skins are scored
by cords or scales

that guard small, networked
palaces miserly of sugar.

Give them to children to peel,
to work on a slice until

the sour-drenched tongue
touches down on the seed:

wan cottonfruit, green mango
heaped with a ferment of tiny

shrimp; carambola, tamarind
rattling in its pod: each lesson

generously salted to make a book
of meagre days seem bearable.

 

In response to Via Negativa: Potter's field.

I don’t know which part of the tale I like
best: the one where a beggar comes every day

to offer a piece of fruit to the king
as he sits in his private quarters,

which then he lobs without thinking
into his treasure house; or the part

where a monkey bites into one of these
daily offerings to reveal the surprising

jewel at its center. I wonder about
the room into which these gifts have been

so carelessly thrown— and why no one has come
to clean and bag the garbage these many months.

So now, amid sour-sweet clouds of ammonia
from rotting fruit: a pile of precious stones.

The story doesn’t say what one should do
with them: only that they’re mere preamble

to more difficult tests. For instance,
at the height of summer, how is it not

possible to pick up a peach or fig or plum
and hold its ripe intoxication, at least,

under your nose? How long will it take
before you set down the dead weight

you’ve carried so long, before it
exhausts and destroys you? I imagine

the monkey coming at twilight, drawn back
by the musk of mango, the yeasty headiness

of durian; and a man so absorbed in his
own overripe sorrows he can’t lift his head,

cut an orange into sections, lay a cool
wheel of melon on his fevered tongue.

“…What use is a door if
you can’t exit? A door that can’t
be opened is called a wall. My
father is on the other side of
the wall.”
~ Victoria Chang, “Obit”

In the beginning a bird
raised its voice and bugled

from the hedge, and soon
the wood filled with answers.

But none of them could tell
why some of us look at a world

made of things neatly indexed:
sandbar, turning wheel, lever

to stop and start the swell;
while others dip fingers

into a cool marble basin,
then sign their foreheads,

chests, shoulders and lips
with water called blest

before it vapors into air.
In the beginning it felt

like love, or that a promise
was stronger than the hard edge

of a question. Or perhaps it forgot,
just as a weight lifted, soundless,

away from the branch— how only
a small tremble could tell

there once was something
fragile that rested there.

“There is another world, and it is in this one.” ~ Paul Eluard

Someone is always saying things
like Look at that splotchy blue-

green marble spinning in space—
What if we’re only a simulation

on someone else’s screen? There, today,
is your double sitting in a folding chair

on the sand flats, reading a book or taking
a nap in the sun? When the sand magically

reassembles into an office building, who
walks purposefully into the elevator,

lightly touching a folder of announcements
she’ll make from the head of the table

in the meeting room on the top floor?
At the end of the day, when a tremor

begins from somewhere deep in the planet’s
core, the people at bus and train stations

break into a run. Others rush out
of the corner grocery store carrying

trays of eggs, rotisserie chickens,
forgetting to pay. Whose phone is loudly

ringing in a coat pocket with urgent
news about someone who’s just gone into

labor, someone who jumped off a bridge;
someone who stopped breathing, just

like that? It could be you or it could be
your double, hunched over a figure

prone on the floor: pumping with two
hands, praying and breathing into a mouth.

When they teach us of our history,
they always begin with dates: never
before 1521, which is when the Portuguese
sailor reaches our shores, takes one look,
and freaks. Out come the flags and christening
oils, the cross with which to subdue the natives
showing too much inked skin, optic weaves,
dark elements, ores. Little does he know
he’ll be dead in under a month and a half:
spear finding quick the flaw in the armor.
Months later, Tenochtitlan falls and Cuauhtémoc
surrenders, also to the Spanish. Even then,
there are prophets predicting apocalypse:
the end of days is always coming soon
to a theatre near you. War, marauding,
hand to hand combat. Going rogue, biding
time in the forests: all of which
our forebears were always good at.

 

In response to Via Negativa: Civics.

old fashioned words unapologetic for the crispness of close consonants

and the first click in the finger joint after the needle’s steroid deposit

the slow breaths you coax as counterpoint to anxious thoughts at night

and the spinning echo of clothes tumbling in the dryer

the woody smell of rosemary next to sparse fringes of lavender

and felted caterwauling calls of barred owls

the pale clean stump where a camellia bush used to stand

and the underpattern of roots beneath the grass

a letter that wounds whenever it’s read

and a ransom that won’t ever be paid

the feeling you get looking up into fruiting branches

and the electric hum from cicadas’ tymbals as their torsos contort

peaches that drowned a brown sugar taste in the beer

and your fear of the season’s first slow-moving storms

the fat on the back of a slab of brisket

and the jar of bird chillies in a drawer

the clock on the mantel that never keeps the time

and the piles of small change you keep finding through the house

~ after “Flower Woman with Soft Piano,” Salvador Dali (1969)

If I could roll up my soul, bolt
of blue cloth under an arm; fallen

drape that crumples up then ends
in music— perhaps finally I’d

understand what it means to say
And time stood still. I can’t

remember when last my head erupted
in flowers, when a dream of ice

descended from the skies in foliate
shapes before melting and warming

into streams. Every day, it’s work
to try and widen the ledge on which

I stand. Every day, it’s work
to couple one hook to its eye, one

car to another, then send it off
in the right direction. I would like

to be unshackled from here, to lope
like a thing with young, supple legs

into a field without grids, even
without the accompaniment of music.

It’s long afterward, but still
you want what doesn’t exist anymore—

and so you light a votive, set it
on a leaf to float across the lake’s

dirty surface. Every crack in the pavement
is part of a letter penned in script,

its fissures just wide enough to admit
a trail of insects walking toward the ghosts

of bodies trapped in a cavern below.
They drink from a trickle of rainwater

falling into the basin. They save
a thimbleful of pee for that time no one

speaks of— Please, don’t tell them it’s
over. When you shred a dandelion’s slight

corona in your hand, don’t mention the sound
of buildings collapsing. Don’t tell them

the morgue has run out of sheets, the funeral
parlors have run out of candles and coffins.

 

In response to Via Negativa: Childhood memory.