Month: June 2012

Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

Preces

This entry is part 2 of 47 in the series Morning Porch Poems: Summer 2012

 

How do you do it, I want to ask the mothers gathered at the table, nearly identical in silk hose, cool, marbled jewels at their throats— but I would probably be accused of being over-earnest, of making too much out of nothing. The secret’s in the shortening, someone offers. Don’t overwork it, says another; have some more pie, the blueberries are especially sweet this season. Who notices the butterfly that seems to keep changing sizes, that turns out to be two butterflies among the ivy? Someone is delighted. Someone says How lovely, how sort of like a tortoise-shell hair ornament! I need a miracle, or something close to one; if this is a sign, that one wing falling away to unmask the other, I’m willing to grasp at it. I’ll bow my head, stand very still and wait for the slightest dusting of pollen on my lashes. I’ll keep wakeful watch through the night, whisper shreds of prayers I can still remember. You may not hear them, but I want to believe they’re there: imperceptible currents traced by a banded wing, orange and red against a field of dark black.

 

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Night Shirt

Two crickets call
nearly in unison.
Fireflies rise blinking
from the grass.
It’s the new moon
& the summer solstice:
a dark night, but short.
Heat lightning
on the horizon.
The humid air like silk,
like an unwound cocoon:
will we be cool enough
to sleep? Already
I hear the beginning
of a low growl.

Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

Ciphers

This entry is part 1 of 47 in the series Morning Porch Poems: Summer 2012

 

“The spleen is 1″ by 3″ by 5″, weighs approximately 7 oz, and lies between the 9th and 11th ribs on the left hand side.” ~ Wikipedia

*

“Falsely, the mortal part we blame
Or our depressed, and pond’rous frame…”
~ Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea, “The Spleen” (1709)

 

Should I hollow out one more secret
space beneath the swarm of organs

pumping out their rhythms, should I
carve a door under the floating disks

of threaded bone that ladder up
the spine— What if I should find,

after all, that the liver’s field
of indigo blooms with asterisks

on the machine? And what if the spleen’s
lopsided house is sown with husks

that tumbled, crumbling from the eaves
above? And what if the kidneys

spread their wings like butterflies
and wrote a silver question mark?

Fireflies glint like signals along a street
lined with magnolias— dusky but for their

faint edge of white, their creamy perfumes
heavy in the heat of this first summer night.

 

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Correspondence


Watch on Vimeo

[text]
How did they do it, those long-
distance lovers of old, waiting
months for a letter to make
its way by sea?
And when it did, oh the slow
parsing of its every word!
Onion-skin paper
like a bed of salt.
Cursive writing
like Jonah’s gourd vine,
the work of a single night.

*

I shot the footage of a question mark butterfly on my right hand left-handed (obviously) while preparing to post to The Morning Porch. The “Caravan” mash-up is by electro-swing maestro Mick Kelly, AKA Ecklecticmick, on Soundcloud (Creative Commons Attribution licence).

Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

Yield

This entry is part 53 of 55 in the series Morning Porch Poems: Spring 2012

 

“…turning course of a river that goes curving,
advances and retreats, goes roundabout,
arriving forever:”

~ Octavio Paz, “Sun Stone”

 

Tear at the wood of the dead cherry
all you want, my little frenzied ones.
Tear at the bark of linden too,
reduce to rot the peeling wood
in the neighbor’s gazebo; flay the ivy
to pieces, sunder the jasmine from
its vine. More things than these
are inexorable, more hungers sharpen
their tongues than the points
of those fledgling spears. What is it
that you want? What are you looking for?
The wind loves all surfaces, not just mine.
But we take down the deck chairs anyway,
we fold the beach umbrellas, we board up
the windows against the coming storm.
How did it come to be that resistance
is in such gestures, and not in the willow
bending its crystal leaflets to the water,
not in the bird that petrifies the forest
with its singing? The wind, yes, the wind:
it is the song in a burning building, the sidle
of a sigh along the throat because I held
the sound of your name too long under
a skim of water. I give it up to the air
again now, I turn my palms upwards as I
should have done. What else is there to do?

~ & with thanks to Lila Shahani for the Octavio Paz reminder

 

 

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

Unseen

There used to be a man: he sat there a few moments on the edge of the deck in a faded brown jacket, taking in the sun.

There used to be a woman: she came in to look over her daughter’s shoulder the day we came to sign the lease.

There used to be plants we called Bandera Española, all along the right side of the fence: ridged stalks almost dark purple, broad leaves, flowers streaked yellow and magenta.

There used to be a girl-not-yet-a-girl, delivered from the airport in a taxi at sundown, the cool, slim points of her fingers emerging as the window rolled quietly down.

There used to be someone peering out of her bedroom door through the gauze of curtains.

There used to be a house for quarantine built on the anchorage between two buoys, a path marked by bleached stones and shells from the beach.

There used to be a man police had beaten up: one eye bashed in its socket, weeks of streets and storefronts burning. Then today, his dark body found at the bottom of the pool.

There used to be a time when I could take it all in, take it quickly, ride the animal of necessity.

There used to be a time when the window didn’t stick, when the screen filtered shadows that came and went among the faded myrtle blossoms.

 

In response to Undone.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Un/done

Undone: a fallen limb I thought I’d hauled off, half-buried in myrtle & wild garlic.

Done: any undone task delayed past all undoing.

Undone: the faded myrtle blossoms, the once-tight spring of a garlic top.

Done: a sinker made of lead, dull & toxic. We are all perpetually undone.

Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

Trophic Cascade

    “Scarecrows grow scarce
    since we no longer till fields.”

    – John Montague

    If I stopped feeding you the regular diet you expect from me, told you once and for all Shop’s closed, take your business elsewhere, would you finally go away, leave me alone, find some 24-hour diner down the road, turn your taste buds to something else more worthy: sushi rolled in gold leaf nori perhaps, or trending donkey stew; fish maw soup, smoked venison, pasta in squid ink— washed down with vats of Veuve Clicquot or better yet, that 1787 Chateau Lafite Bordeaux ($160,000, Thomas Jefferson’s initials etched on the bottle)? Tell me you too have grown weary of the taste of my home-cooked platters of regret, my overboiled tureens of sorrow, that poor excuse of a pastry case holding every dried, crumbled madeleine from the past. Those creams taste curdled; even the spoons cringe from being dipped into them. Yesterday, I breakfasted on tofu, wanting a cleaner palate, to rinse the acrid aftertaste of salt from my mouth. You must be tired as well, tearing through sinew, chewing through gristle, sucking the difficult marrow out of these bones. Here’s a concept to consider: the complex food web, multiple levels where surely, you’ll find something suitable to your palate— like a food court devoted to global cuisines! I’ll find you a deal, even some Groupons. In time, you won’t even remember the taste of me.

     

    In response to Speech alone.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Speech alone


Watch on Vimeo

One of my favorite Jean Follain poems, with the W.S. Merwin translation in the subtitles. The reading is by Nic S., from her audiopoetry site pizzicati of hosanna.

I captured the footage of a half-grown bunny this evening, right outside my house. The eastern cottontail rabbits seem to be at a peak of population these days, which, somewhat counter-intuitively, may be due to the proliferation of predators such as coyotes, fishers and owls, which we think is the reason why there are no more feral housecats around. The cats predate heavily on baby bunnies. If true, this would be an example of what ecologists call a trophic cascade. Anyway, some of these bunnies are so accustomed to me now, I can walk right by them. It’s a cuteness overload almost every time I step outside the door.