“What is it that really matters? For the poppy, that the poppy disclose its red: for the cabbage, that it run up into weakly fiery flower.”
—D.H. Lawrence
The kid wearing nothing but a hoodie and jeans
swoops across the boulevard on his skateboard.
The light changes. No snow, but it’s freezing.
Cars are distant specks, always moving closer.
Early enough in the day, or in between.
The wind has scoured the branches clean,
but stone dogs and lions (stubbornly paired,
flanking doorways) still wear their coats
of snow. Beneath the scratchy layers of wool
and viscose, I want to rub my hands together
to make a little flame; to steeple my fingers
then spring the gates open to a frenzy of wings,
nestled bodies— all those jeweled dreams
tumbling from the rafters and onto my lap.
—Luisa A. Igloria
01.13.2011
In response to today’s Morning Porch entry.
OTHER POSTS IN THE SERIES
- Stay
- “Findings”: the missing Morning Porch poems
- Two more Morning Porch poems from Luisa Igloria and a comment on free culture
- What Leaf
- With winter’s gift of unimpeded sight,
- Aubade, with Feathers
- Scherenschnitte
- Solstice
- Heart and Shadow
- “The sudden spasm of wings”
- “Before sight, sound—“
- Four Morning Porch poems
- “Up and down the street, the neighbors…”
- Memento Mori
- “The streets are lined with garbage bins…”
- “Soon the old year must join…”
- Speaking of __
- Postcard
- Wake
- Despedida de Soltera
- Filament
- “Paired or unpaired, all in the world…”
- Vertices
- Graupel
- Auguries
- Closer
- Menage
- Instructions
- Consonance
- Rosary
- Forager
- Photogram
- [poem temporarily hidden by author]
- Landscape, With Darkness and Hare
- Ghazal of the Dark Water
- Landscape, with Cardinal and Earring
- Intention
- Preludium
- One Day, That Room
- Landscape, with Small Flakes and Far-off Bandoneón
- Sentence
- Spun
- Intercession
- Recurrence
- Landscape, with an End and a Beginning
- Waking
- Thaw
- Spell
- Dim Sun, Dim Sum
- Vanishing Point
- Monday Landscape, with Clocks Borrowed from Dali
- “Last night’s wet snow…”
- Ephemera
- Landscape, with Water Fountain, Small Clouds and Endless Lyric
- What She Wants
- Landscape, with Mockingbird and Ripe Figs
- Letter to Arrythmia
- Love Poem with Skull and Candy Valentines
- Letter to Affliction
- Letter to Levity
- Thaw
- Letter to Rubbermaid and Tupperware
- Letter to Spam
- Ellipsis
- Nave
- Little Waking Song
- Imminence
- Letter to Water
- Letter to Green
- Meditation on a Seam
- No Two
- Ghazal of Burgeoning Things
- Deseo
- Petition for Something Other than White
- Letter to the Hungry Ghosts
Beautiful.
Were you thinking at all of that very old-fashioned children’s words-and-hands game, “Here is the church, here is the steeple, etc.”? Because I remember that one from early childhood–the steeple, the fingers as people–and definitely brought those images and that sense of childhood to my reading.
Yes I definitely was, Marly… Though the image came to me in the process of composing. Nothing was premeditated and so it is way cool that it got there and that you got it!
Like the stubbornly paired part as well!