Author: Luisa A. Igloria

Luisa is writing responses to my Morning Porch tweets faster than I can post them, so to clear the backlog and bring us up to the present, I thought I’d better publish four together. With each of these, her date of compostion is the same as mine, so to simplify things I’ve kept only the former and hotlinked it to the Morning Porchism that prompted it. Click through to see how she has built upon my original words and images. The latter two are 80 or 90 percent Igloria (we haven’t gotten any appreciable snowfall so far today, for example). —Dave

*

White with rime,
the cattails’ broken blades—

Under the springhouse eaves,
an empty phoebe nest—

Two juncos come, wings
fluttering like prayer flags—

As if to let us know the world
has not forsaken us completely—

12.19.2010

*

There’s one cold note in the air
and its blues have found me again—

Too late to pull up the remaining stalks
of summer’s last tomato plants, tamped

hard into the ground. Now thistles
shrivel in a brittle wreath,

and the rose is ravished by the wind;
it spreads a shroud over the porch

and litters it with cryptic asterisks,
with carets, with upended tarots.

What shall I do with you,
yellowed gingko leaf;

with these tickets of faded red,
torn from the geranium?

12.20.2010

*

Season of red and gold,
season of evergreen and silver.

Season of honey and clove,
season of lit tapers.

Throw more wood on the fire
that it might burn more fiercely.

The wheel is still turning, my love;
but know that it returns.

A few flakes float through the air.
A gray squirrel wanders through the lilac branches.

12.25.2010

*

How easy to lose oneself to silence in this
sifting of white upon white that’s fallen
all night long. The wind soughs,

and all the branches nod their white-
capped heads. The neighbor swings open
his gate to take the dog for a walk—

Away now, at the end the street, the yellow
of his parka and the flash of golden fur
make an orb of jaunty noise against the snow.

High overhead, the half moon bends its big right ear.

12.26.2010

—Luisa A. Igloria

How do we know the brown creeper fishing
in the dark valleys of the walnut tree’s bark
could not tell this landscape

from the moon’s? Past midnight, we craned
our necks toward the heavens’ gathered dark
and saw the shadow-play of bodies

entering each other’s path: the brief
interruption and embrace of light
by dark and dark by light, the face

of one passing over the other when
they’re perfectly aligned. Then
without rancor, without remorse

the plumb line lifts— and it seems
the world is as it was before, though all
that has transpired has changed

even the color of the morning sky.

—Luisa A. Igloria
12.21.2010

In response to today’s Morning Porch entry.

On otherwise lifeless
tansy stalks, a green sprig
and a single yolk-

colored bloom. Snowflakes
drift past: far-flung voyagers,
their exile brief, their nostalgia

cut and crystalled with salt.
Harbor me in cold earth,
my winter lover. I long

for home most of all
when small birds come
to forage for seed

and light sieves
through cracks
in stones.

—Luisa A. Igloria
12.18.2010

Borrowing lines from the Morning Porch entry for December 4.

I watch crows circle a dark carcass
a hundred yards off through the woods.
Only this white backdrop could make
bearable, the way the elements
have chosen whatever’s returned
as offering to the wheel. In spring
or summer we’ll come across its bones
under new growth of grass, bleached
white as stars that filter light
all this way through nets of trees.

—Luisa Igloria
12.16.2010

Borrowing lines from the Morning Porch entry for December 13.