Weekends, on the second floor of an old building at the end of the girls’ high school, the art teacher set wooden eggs and cylinders on a table by the window. Outside, spicy smells of wood-smoke: moldering leaves and dead twigs the gardeners raked into piles under the guava trees and burned. Think of light as a thin finger of ochre you halo around a shape, he said. Think of the angle as it hits the roof. Camouflaged in the trees, the shadow of a bird that looks upon the scene and sees the worm’s dark squiggle vanish into the dirt. And there are always ruins— the remnants of a bell tower in the foreground, the dark sweep of a volcano’s skirts steepling away in the distance; or something Grecian, cool skins of marble chipped in the places where they might have spoken or gestured or sung of flight— veined lip, suspended arm, knobs beneath the shoulder blades where wings were broken off. And always, stones strewn like jewels in the grass.
—Luisa A. Igloria
10 17 2011
In response to an entry from The Morning Porch.