Author: Luisa A. Igloria

Pool of melted tallow in the pewter dish.
Bar of laundry soap scraped across the palms
of the woman washing clothes on the stoop.
An old man walks out of his house at the same
time each day and up the road, dazzling
in his white suit and panama hat. Where
does he go? Drawn blinds with their slightly
sticky film of dust: behind them, a glass-topped
table and two wrought iron chairs. If this
is a Gabriel Garcia Marquez novel, the screech
of a parrot from the patio follows
the pattern of light splayed across the stones.
Sheer curtains carry the smell of almond skins.
There are children hidden from view on the balcony.
The cook fingers the leaves fluttering like pages
in a book of tripe. Plump ends of chick peas,
upturned like the white flame of a deer’s tail.
Long afternoons. The smell of cotton everywhere.

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

“…Who shall give a lover any law?”
~ Chaucer, “The Knight’s Tale” (Canterbury Tales)

The squeals up in a tree are of a squirrel
fighting off a suitor; perhaps a paramour?

The usage of this word, Middle English,
the 1800s, is for the sake of love, par amour.

I like the entry in Webster’s 1913 Dictionary:
lit, by or with love, from the Fr. par amour.

Such beautiful words: when did they turn
illicit, derogatory? Stripped of armor,

title, role, various defenses— beneath the flesh
is the heart’s taut muscle, matched to any matador.

Songs of courtly love all aim at the impossible:
the beloved out of reach, the hapless troubadour.

In Spanish, querida means dearest one. When did it come
to signify poor fallen dove, secret paramour?

Wong Kar-wai’s film has neighbors thinking the lonely journalist
and the secretary from the shipping company are paramours.

The screen’s painted in tones of broody red, shades of jazz
in the background. The message: love story with no guarantor.

The man whispered the secret that he could not share
in a hollow in a tree, and covered it with mud: nevermore.

Is it my voice you hear in your head, when you first rise?
I loved her first ere thou, wrote Chaucer, for par amour.

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

In this creased picture, I am one of a half dozen
school girls in navy blue skirts and white blouses
with Peter Pan collars, whose mothers sang us to sleep
with Que sera, sera. Skin thinner than papyrus,
blotchy with hives and more restless than the others,
I pressed my forehead against the cool of windows
lashed with rain, the steady run of water from the roof,
as they coaxed bright floss through the eye of a needle
and eased squares of cloth over embroidery hoops.
Who knew how many children would pass through our
narrow hips and where they might be headed? No sign
swung from the ceiling of the sky, and when the eye-
shaped gap eased shut in the clouds, only the wind,
unstitched, came to shadow our heels at bedtime.

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

And just as the fog burns off and lifts,
there is a white bird wading in the shallows
gathering its silhouette tightly to itself
as we cross over the bridge.

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

Hard to say now where a seam in the soil
marked the place where a row of villagers

with their arms tied behind their backs
slumped to the ground after the order

to fire. Someone has engraved a plaque
to show where something was raised

from rubble— But dark wounds petal
every patch of earth under stone

and gravel. Someone has pledged
a troth or signed his name in blood

at the base of a monument. Bird wing
or flag flutter? It’s hard to tell

when shadows lengthen and currents
darken: so many faces in the river.

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

We buy the rice called Milagrosa
that comes in sacks imprinted with
a red elephant or a pair of fish.
Poured into plastic bins, it makes
the sound of steady rain, not
the soughing of wind in branches
laden with armfuls of snow.

*

Neighbors think they’ve heard a red
fox at dusk, its piteous screams carrying
from the rocks by the edge of the water.
Washing up in the kitchen, I look out
into the garden where night has fallen.
My fingers trace the oily film on a dish,
and somehow the air has eaten sorrow.

*

On shelves in the craft supply store,
alpaca yarns in watercolor hues. I know
a knitter in Vermont who dyes his threads
in bowls of Kool-Aid. I want the Arctic
Green Apple, or Aguas Frescas
in Tamarindo and Guayaba— colors
of shoots pushing up through murky water.

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

What softens the light-
fingered distances?

Colors of citron and honey,
bare floorboards.

Quiver of windchimes
set off by light rain.

Surprising how so much swims up
through this crack in the cold morning—

koi trapped in golden resin,
lifelike, like breathing.

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

Zigzagging up the mountain road, wonder why
you see only sparse cover of pine— dry
xylem of plants that knew more succulence
when waterfalls cleft rocks and veiled our
vision briefly as buses veered close in their
upward climb. Difficult to fall asleep on
the six to seven hour trip, the driver’s
stash of Betamax tapes playing musicals or
Ronnie Poe and Joseph Estrada action films.
Quiet chatter and endless snacking,
punctuated by the occasional query
on how far away the rest stop is.
Next town’s not it, so another hour
maybe, before they let us file out,
list toward the bathrooms. Had I
known, thirty years ago, that meant
just a slab of concrete on chilled ground,
I might have been better prepared to squat,
half on tiptoes while on my haunches, pee
guttering in a channel from a row of women
fixing their eyes on the horizon. Au naturel.
Evening quickly masks the scene. There’s a pump
damp with running water where we wash. The driver
cuts up meat and drinks a cup of coffee. We eat.
Before getting back on the bus, someone sneezes:
a fifteen minute wait, as superstition dictates.

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

“L’amour est un oiseau rebelle.” ~ Bizet

Aragonaise (the simplified arrangement for piano),
by Bizet, from “Carmen”— I remember a well-thumbed music book
covered with pinched pencil lettering, the weeks it took to learn.
Did the nuns who taught us, drill frozen arpeggios from our wrists?
Every girl one girl in a blue and white uniform with a straight face.
From deep in the lilac, the warble of a tree sparrow rose,
grew a little warmer, coloring like a flame
hovering just on the edge of what little we knew.
It’s possible some of us could imagine Carmen in
jail, possessive lovers; seduction, jealousy, dark rage
kindling in the breast and nearby in the meadow, bulls
lifting their feet, snorting, ready for the charge.
My own instinct is never to give anything away:
not a hint of what I’m feeling inside, though
often enough it’s worry or confusion costumed
poorly by bravura. Ruffles, a rose, a skirt
quilted in deepest red. At the sweetest passage,
read the notes, play them like they’re violets about to be
surrendered under the hooves of the heaving animal.
There’s no way to learn that simply by rote,
understanding how things measure out. Years later,
veer toward this music again as it drifts,
wayward thread unhooked from memory.
Exactly how do you know when the song has reached
you, claimed you? When its naked feet stamp out the flame,
zero in on what it loves, dagger aimed at the heart.

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.