The light around the body, said the poet, a field of energy that tethers it somehow to a world full of rushing sounds: a field of noise and bodies— as when you first walked by yourself to market in that little town so long ago, and nearly swooned from the smells of brine and fish guts, long pearled strips of sausage blotchy pink in their casings and courted by flies; and on the ground, the women clasping their knees and tending baskets of wilted greens; a world in actuality only the size of a teacup nestled between the hills, the man-made lake in the park a marvel with its pleasure boats and one-tiered fountain (the same your husband looked at in a postcard years later and said was the size of a duck pond); a world you thought impossibly unbounded, somehow without end, though you saw how sharply the silhouettes of cypress and pine clung to your field of vision as a trick of night before it descended over the scrim of rusted roofs; how odd to find that light even here on the sidewalk, in this park where they have trapped the golden koi in a shallow basin fringed with cattails; and even closer, in the cheap bronze of a cerveza negra bottle someone drank from, before carelessly throwing it away.
—Luisa A. Igloria
10 25 2011
In response to an entry from The Morning Porch.