Series: Morning Porch Poems: Winter 2010-11

Midpoint of noon, in the quiet for a moment
the day coheres. Worry is a beached
white whale that’s come to rest
awhile on the outer lip of afternoon.
In Spanish, the word for rest
is Descanso— when the shutters
are turned for siesta against
the searing light, when the little birds
fold into the leaves of the naranja tree.
Slow down, I whisper to the bell
of my own constantly fluttering heart.

—Luisa A. Igloria
03 05 2011

In response to today’s Morning Porch entry.

Dear unseen, constantly unsated ones,
I’ve fed you on your feast days, remembered
to bring you water or wine in clear shot
glasses. For you the first pared slices of fruit,
the first hot mounds of rice scooped into doll-
sized bowls before the steam even hit
our faces. Sizzling oil and fat, sugar, sage,
citrus. Cake and cream, batter and bread,
even the crust at the bottom of the pan.
Should I have offered you sweetbreads:
say, my own liver, my lungs, my heart?
I’d pictured the afterlife as a kind of zen
garden: a long corridor lined with suites
in a 24/7 spa where souls washed clean
and free from grasping desire now
wander in a state of fragrant, aimless bliss.
So why have I heard you snarling in the dark,
hatching ruinous plots and making mine-
fields of our backyards? There are new
holes there today that can’t have been made
by the lone squirrel disinterring its breakfast,
cleaning off the dirt with its teeth.

—Luisa A. Igloria
03 09 2011

In response to today’s Morning Porch entry.

“Mira: you will never see faces like this again” —C.D. Wright
And so therefore yes, every [expletive] poem is a love poem.

Sunrise: from a thousand feet up, the cry of a lost shorebird, circling the long brown waves of hills. Picturesque, no? Almost like a Breugel. Do not ask what it is grieving for, but why. And Obi-wan Kenobi sensed the destruction of Alderaan: “I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror, and were suddenly silenced.” See if in another part of the frame there is a figure falling, fallen, drowning, drowned; if just beyond those hills, that smudge is the smoke of cities burning even as they churn into open water, the land a cracked template that will no longer hold. What are those bodies doing on the rooftops of buildings? For whom do they open their mouths and cry? Prayers and lamentations, oaths, pleading. Who has not lost anything? I would be the dog that wants to embrace its doggy life, would want to suck on the gristle right down to the bone; I don’t know about you, but that’s what I know of immanence. I would be the horse that wants to scratch its behind on the tree as long as it still could. The children want to skate in a pond at the edge of the wood because there, the trees light up like fire; and the cold that stings their faces and the thin patches of ice make the blood beat hard in their chests. What do you love? What do you love? Everything that can be given, everything that can be taken away.

—Luisa A. Igloria
03 12 2011

In response to today’s Morning Porch entry.

In a photograph, a woman sits on her haunches
amid a sea of debris. Her feet are bare. A pair of red
rain boots caked with mud perches neatly at her side,
the way they might rest in a parlor. The sky is the color
of rain, the color of heaving things: water a wall
surging over highways, toppling cars and beams
and lorries. The past tense is already active here—
fields have lost their stenciled borders; there’s little left
to read in maps. Above the burning cities, snowflakes
scatter, wandering back and forth like spirits. I watch
one explode against the branch of a dead cherry.
Croak of a raven making the shape of a thousand names.

—Luisa A. Igloria
03 14 2011

In response to today’s Morning Porch entry.

Evening of the first day, the man who owned a truck yard
next door laid out plywood sheets on hard ground and said

Come— And all the neighbors came, bringing blankets,
sheets, canvas tarp, burlap— The very young and the trembling

old slept in vehicles, windows cracked open for air—
And the night air was notched with metallic smells but also

something almost sweet, like flowers— I did not want
to think what kind– And the following day it rained,

and then again the next, so between aftershocks we collected
water in pails and tin drums— Someone had a kerosene stove

and lit it in the shadow of the broken shed where the honeysuckle
vines were a vivid green interspersed with orange— And still

we refused to go indoors, though gradually we crept
back to those parts of our homes still standing— Porches

were good for sleeping— When the sun glimmered
through thin clouds we heard news of a few places

where we could walk to line up for bread, rice,
canned goods— And someone had busted a water pipe

near the park (just a little they said) and people went
with cans and plastic tubs for water— And the men

came back weeping, having dug out bodies from collapsed
buildings, from vehicles overtaken by landslides

on the mountain road— And strangers offered
rides, and helicopters hovered in the sky— And we heard

lamentations and questions on the lips of everyone— Faces
streaked often and easily, eyes filling with tears and blinking

not from the sunlight but from what they could barely endure—

—Luisa A. Igloria
03 15 2011

In response to today’s Morning Porch entry.