you are the last lingering tomato plant that never
flowered through the dry summer, only pushed
yellow-green stems up through the cone trellis,
pretending its goal was succulence—
you are a broody sky the color of the cast
iron pot in my childhood home, in which
we boiled rice and only rice; beneath its lid,
an army of uniformly spaced beads of moisture—
you are the rusted orange marks against the sides
of the old garage, which tell how high the waters
rose in the flood of ___; and sheets of heavy
plastic someone couldn’t bear to throw away—
you are the night heron we’ve sighted in the shade
of the garbage bin, beside the neighbor’s wall
trailing ivy and white asterisks of jasmine;
where is it you go, when we don’t see you?
In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.
OTHER POSTS IN THE SERIES
- Listening to Piazzolla’s Tango Etudes
- Eating Dried Fish With Our Hands
- Encore
- Dear nostalgia,
- What We Look For
- Without Translation
- Heart Weighted With Cares
- Fables
- Tableaux Vivants
- Listening to Chopin’s Prelude in D-flat Major, Op. 28, No. 15
- Fountains
- Dear solitude,
- Nocturne
- Frontispiece
- Landscape, with Notes of Red
- Blue Stone Blues
- Landscape, with a Glimpse of the Soul as it Leaves the Body
- How I Came to Writing
- When does the hunger abate;
- Dear errant winds at dusk,
- Aerogramme
- Dear scarlet-flushed, hydraulic,
- Monday’s News
- Counterpoints
- Landscape, with Traces of Prior Events
- On the Nature of Things
- Spell Against Grey
- Landscape, with Castoffs on the Sidewalk
- Sleepless Ghazal
- Last Call
- Delivery Confirmation
- Landscape, with Early Frost and a Dream Interior
- Campus Elegy
- Petrichor
- Ghazal: Chimerae
- Maguindanao Ghazal
- Insurgent Song
- Paper Ghazal
- Ghazal of the Transcendental
- Hot Lyric
- On the sense of danger or foreboding, the prickling
- Postcard from the Labyrinth
- Hunger
- Debris
- Letter to One Seeking Flight
- Unbelievable Ends
- In the chapel of perpetual adoration,
- Night Rain
- Conversation that Ends with a Dream of Accounting
- Lyric on the Edge of Winter
- Paper Cut #2
- Herald
- Walking
- And once again,
- Prayer Among the Stones
- Call and Response
- Recover
- Dark Prayer
- Song of Snow
- Santa Milagrita
- Song without Strings
- Morning Song
Luisa, I read your poems every day, though I’ve never commented. There have been so many times when I think a poem of yours can’t fill my heart any fuller, and then along comes another one…like this one. Thank you.
Thank you so much, Beth. xo
Beth, I’m glad you’re enjoying Luisa’s poems so much (they’re great, aren’t they? I feel so lucky to have her posting here). But I hope you’ll consider sharing more of your own writing online again too, sometime. I do miss your great nature observations and essays at The Pine Meadow Pond Journal. (No pressure or anything. :)