Ode to the Heart Smaller than a Pencil Eraser: 17 (Swenson Poetry Award) - Hardcover

Igloria, Luisa A.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0874219523 ISBN 13: 9780874219524

Verlag: Utah State University Press, 2014

Inhaltsangabe

“When Luisa Igloria cites Epictetus—‘as soon as a thing has been seen, it is carried away, and another comes in its place’—she introduces the crowded and contradictory world her poems portray: a realm of transience, yes, where the vulnerable come to harm and everything disappears, but also a scene of tremendous, unpredictable bounty, the gloriously hued density this poet loves to detail. ‘I was raised / to believe not only the beautiful can live on / Parnassus,’ she tells us, and she makes it true, by including in the cyclonic swirl of her poems practically everything: a gorgeous, troubling over-brimming universe."
—Mark Doty, judge for the 2014 Swenson Award

The May Swenson Poetry Award, an annual competition named for May Swenson, honors her as one of America's most provocative and vital writers. During her long career, Swenson was loved and praised by writers from virtually every school of American poetry. She left a legacy of fifty years of writing when she died in 1989. She is buried in Logan, Utah, her hometown.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Luisa A. Igloria is professor of creative writing and English and director of the MFA Creative Writing Program at Old Dominion University. Beyond the ten books she has previously published, her work has appeared or been accepted in numerous anthologies and journals, including Poetry, Crab Orchard Review, The Missouri Review, Indiana Review, Poetry East, Umbrella, Sweet, qarrtsiluni, poemeleon, Smartish Pace, Rattle, The North American Review, Bellingham Review, Shearsman (UK), PRISM International (Canada), Poetry Salzburg Review (Austria), The Asian Pacific American Journal, and TriQuarterly. Originally from Baguio City in the Philippines, Igloria has four daughters and now makes her home in Virginia with most of her family.

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Ode to the Heart Smaller than a Pencil Eraser

By Luisa A. Igloria

University Press of Colorado

Copyright © 2014 Luisa A. Igloria
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-87421-952-4

Contents

Foreword by Mark Doty, 
I, 
Wanderer, 
Derecho Ghazal, 
My Love, I Want to Tell You of Today, 
Dear Epictetus, This is to You Attributed, 
How to Flinch, 
Landscape, with an End and a Beginning, 
Campus Elegy, 
Landscape, with Red Boots and a Branch of Dead Cherry, 
Boy, 
Why Appropriation Is Not Necessarily the Same as Mastery, 
Certified, 
With Feeling, 
Persistent Triolet, 
What You Don't Always See, 
Appetite, 
Letter to Myself, Reading a Letter, 
Intercession, 
Closer, 
Wake, 
II, 
Mondo Inteirinho, 
Anniversary, 
A Single Falling Note Above, 
Grenadilla, 
Saturday Afternoon at the Y, 
On the Nature of Things, 
Unbelievable Ends, 
In a Hotel Lobby, Near Midnight, 
Landscape, with Cardinal and Earring, 
Empty Ghazal, 
Letter to Providence, 
Letter to Arrhythmia, 
Letter to Levity, 
Interior, with Roman Shades and Lovers, 
Recursive, 
Taxonomies, 
Lover to Lover, Air, 
Imperfect Ode, 
Villanelle of the Red Maple, 
Love Poem with Skull and Candy Valentines, 
Landscape, with Remnants of a Tale, 
Landscape, with Darkness and Hare, 
Not Yet There, 
III, 
Hum, 
Dumbwaiter, 
Spangled, 
Ghazal: Chimerae, 
I Write Letters to Some Other Sea, 
Improvisations, 
Fata Morgana, 
Aubade, 
Letter to Love, 
Landscape, with Mockingbird and Ripe Figs, 
Mobius, 
What Cannot Eat, 
Landscape, with Sudden Rain, Wet Blooms, and a Van Eyck Painting, 
Ode to the Heart Smaller than a Pencil Eraser, 
Unending Lyric, 
Ghazal of the Transcendental, 
Night Heron, Ascending, 
The Wren in the Lilac Cycles through Its Songs at Breakneck Speed, 
Reprieve, 
Hallucinatorio, 
Acknowledgments, 
About the Author, 
The May Swenson Poetry Award, 

CHAPTER 1

Wanderer

      O long-awaited, are you nearly here?
      Is that your shadow I see from the window,
      beginning to cross the field?

      Everywhere I look, there are emblems
      from years of laboring: nettles
      that stung my hands, fronds of palm

      braided close to patch the holes
      in the roof. Here are shirts
      with sleeves of linen to throw

      on the shapes of the banished
      as they fly under cover of night,
      so they too might break free

      of their long enchantment. Here
      are grains spilled on muddy ground,
      where they still shine like pearls

      in moonlight: each one now,
      accounted for. I read tonight
      that certain moths drink the tears

      of sleeping birds, turning sorrow
      into sustenance. O long awaited,
      I have never left, I am still here.


Derecho Ghazal

      And the high winds bore down, and the sky
      built up that grey wall: derecho.

      The taverns by the sea closed their shutters,
      and the stands selling battered fries, derecho.

      On the boardwalk, pieces of salt-water taffy, half-
      eaten funnel cakes oozing grease and cream: derecho.

      And the people on every highway, panicked, sought
      a clear route for their exodus: derecho.

      What's in your emergency backpack? Beef jerky, mineral
      water, flashlight, solar cells? Snap in the sound of derecho.

      Yesterday, white and blue sails pretty on the water;
      sharp glint of skyscraper glass. Then this derecho.

My Love, I Want to Tell You of Today:

so ordinary, but so full of portents and disclosures —> Please, do not roll your eyes or sigh, do not accuse me

of having grown soft as evidenced by this surfeit of emotion, as if hardness were the only worthy standard of anything these days. I tell you this without unnecessary embellishment,

without premeditation. For once, sit still and let me tell you without having to think too much about the words — Do you remember the poet

who said that morning, Why not pluck the ripe fig, why not take the orange, why not swivel the fleshy globe of the persimmon loose, just because it was the brightest

or most immediate thing you saw, the branch bending low over the neighbor's fence and into your hands? Why not give in to rapture without comment or accusation, without apology,

resisting the urge to camouflage? And it is the same for every instance in which a body immolates itself, goes up in a protest of flame and smoke before falling

off the roof: as in house number 11, Huangshi Village, China, in April, as a line of excavators stands at the ready to tear the walls of wood and plaster down, making way for new

grids of steel. The day dims then spills over into rain; a current in the earth crumbles the belfry of an ancient church and the hills bury children sleeping in their beds —

So it is easy enough to heft moments marked with nothing more than our ticking silences against such sorrows, and deem them unworthy. But something moves again across the field, or passes

the threshold: the smallest movement or disturbance — The mother soothing the fretful child, the man bending to pick up a creased bill from the floor.

The one who didn't even know what he had lost, stopped in the spill of light just before making his way out the door.

Dear Epictetus, this is to you attributed:

      Thou art a little soul bearing about a corpse.
      And even then you were talking to all of us, weren't you:
      ghostly presences in a future we now inhabit, tumbling
      swiftly from one gate to another.

      Last week, moments before the train departed the Jackson
      Street station for O'Hare and a flight I had no idea would be
      canceled three times before I could board: a woman got on,
      breathless, asking passengers near the doors —

      Chinatown? Chinatown? She had on a thin cloth coat,
      and her short bob of greying hair was plastered
      to her forehead. No one blinked. Perhaps they couldn't hear
      from whatever was playing on their earphones, or maybe

      they were tourists. Before the doors swung shut
      I caught her eye and shook my head, yelled Red line,
      red line, and she darted off. I don't know if she ever
      made it to her destination. Time is like a river

      made up of the events which happen, and a violent stream:
      for as soon as a thing has been seen, it is carried away,
      and another comes in its place ... Therefore, all that afternoon
      into evening, as thin snow began to fall again

      on the tarmac, streaking the windows,
      chilling the glass, seats filled and emptied,
      emptied and filled as though the blue light
      flickering near the ceiling of the concourse

      were that same river's garment. Anxious passengers
      watched as TV monitors showed footage of town after town
      hit by a single tornado — New Pekin, Henryville, Marysville,
      Chelsea — before it crossed the Ohio River

      into Kentucky. The hours stretched, and in their fluid arms
      there might have been the call of the mourning dove,
      there might have been a sparrow slight as the child borne
      aloft before the dark column of air set her down in the field.


How to Flinch

      It's emblematic of our societal discomfort with poetry that
so many blurbs for poetry books use the word 'unflinching.'

          — Lia Purpura

      Yes, I have eaten ants' eggs. Faintly sweet clusters whose honey
      clicked a little between the teeth. Sometimes, parts of bodies
      still clinging fiercely by a thread.

      The tech on duty explained about the suction created in the vein
      when pulling back against the plunger of the syringe. Let me try
      again, he said, gently swabbing with alcohol.

      Old wives' remedies for warts: drops of muriatic
      acid. Frog piss. A razor blade cutting
      clean and across from the base.

      Swarms of winged ants — thin waists, bent antennae —
      after days of heavy rain. Gleam from basins of water on the porch:
      I cried to see the drowned ones sheathed in their gossamer.

      Dear Fyodor, how old will I be when old grief passes gradually
      into quiet tender joy? For hives, sometimes I'm tempted to pass
      the back of a heated spoon on raised, feverish skin.


Landscape, with an End and a Beginning

      In those days, we too looked to the sky
      for omens — away from the burning effigies,
      the barricades, the soldiers whose phalanxes
      we broke with prayers and sandwiches made
      by mothers, teachers and nuns passing rosaries
      and flasks of water from hand to hand.
      The city was a giant ear, listening for news
      of the dictator. (Sound travels swift through
      a mass of suffering bodies.) Snipers perched
      like birds on the peripheries of buildings.
      Thickening contrails striped the sky.
      Two ravens flew side-by-side over the abandoned
      palace, trading hoarse commentary. When night came,
      the people scaled the gates. What did they see?
      Papers of state whirling in the fireplace. Masses
      of ball gowns choking the closet, shoes lined with satin
      and pearls; gilt-edged murals above the staircase.
      Days and nights of upheaval, their new history
      alive; the old one writhing on the floor
      with a blur around its mouth like hoarfrost.


Campus Elegy

      If I cried out
      who would hear me up there
      among the angelic orders?

          — Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies

      We heard the news, we saw on video how
      they sat in rows, arms linked, no chorus
      sounding anguish from among their ranks.
      Or pain, or anger — not that the formality
      of silence cannot mean something seethes
      beneath the bludgeoned front. Attack the head,
      the ribs; pour acids down the throat and
      scald the eyes. What civil liberties we take.
      A student writes, They're human too, they hurt
      from all this fear. Long days ahead of vigil;
      flushed nights spiked with sudden chill. All's over-
      cast. Phalanx of blue: faces that look, as they
      close in, like neighbors', brothers', uncles' —
      What you see, before the bodies fall to blows.


Landscape, with Red Boots and Branch of Dead Cherry

      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. Sky 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.


Boy

      Flickering in the light of the neighbor's
      surveillance camera, you see this boy

      pulling the trash bin away from the curb. He is
      thirteen, it is ten in the morning, he is a boy

      at home with his mother and brother in a blue
      house with a porch and a screen door. This boy

      doesn't say anything I can hear, because I am looking
      at the last moments of his life on tape: this boy,

      from this distance — from beyond frame after frame and from
      beyond his life because now he is dead. Around this boy,

      what was the quality of the light that morning? Was it
      warm or musky like the silk of corn, was it milky? This boy,

      and this other boy who walked to the corner convenience store
      for a can of soda and a bag of sweets: under his hood, this boy —

      And the boy that, surely, once in his life, the white
      man brandishing the gun must have been? Only a boy,

      each of them. Black face, sepia-tinted body stepping from
      shadow into light: how does he become less than a boy?

      On camera, two frantic dogs run circles around the man
      and the boy; you might hear the voice of the boy

      who pleads for his life. Play it again, and still it is the same:
      see the man lunge forward, raise his arm, take aim at the boy.

Why Appropriation is Not Necessarily the Same as Mastery

The child wants to know the names of all the herbs and spices on the shelf: those roots floating in a jar like a stunted man treading water, those dried leaves twisted carelessly with twine and left in the kitchen drawer.

Sounds made in a different tongue are often so enchanting — at the start, they are like rain falling, plinking over looped chains in the garden.

Remember that things have names. It is important to know that one thing will not always substitute for another. The beautiful berry leaves a dark stain on the tongue, a body lifeless in its bed.

Remember that a syllable can be slighter than an eyelash. The way it flicks up or down can mean a question, or your chin.

The violinist recounts a fairy tale of a boy kept years with others like him in captivity. They buff the witch's floors to the sheen of glass, gather the fine amber dust in the air to bake into bread, the dewdrops in the hearts of roses to feed her unslakeable thirst.

Later, trying to remember, the one bewitched says phrases over and over. But there is no one there to catch his mistakes, to help him put the pieces back together.

And you, you've been such a good student of that epistemology, of thinking-into- being: don't you know that spells are made of words?

Remember too: not all saying is true.

I have heard another story: how the Pont de l'Archevêché groans with the weight of hundreds of padlocks, etched with promises made to eternity. What happens when the language of the promise is wrong, when the word for "expensive" is used instead of "love?"

Do you glimpse my original shape beneath this overlay of form? The rain falls and falls over the village. The tailor sews in his shop, the fiddler plays a tune by the fire.

Arrival is recognition, which brings a catch in the throat. We weep when words break through a surface. We weep when we have seen ourselves.

Certified

      Here is my passport, my bill of lading, my one-
      way ticket, my nowhere fare, my stub you've stamped

      to certify. All night I clean the lint
      from rusted laundromat machines. All night

      I mop and polish schoolroom floors. All summer
      while you go off to Florida or France, I tend

      your mother's bones, empty her bedpan, feed her baby
      food as she babbles in the granny bin. My fingers

      have pulled bodies of bitter melon from the vine
      and splayed them open on the chopping board.

      Come sit and eat with me sometime — I'll make
      a meal from seeds and pith, a sustenance of green

      and verve plucked raw from my own nerve. I steel
      myself, passing through each turnstile, bending

      through each furrow, threading the factory needle back
      and back into a hundred collars and sleeves — Eyes

      that sweepingly appraise the education in my hands,
      the dusky sheen of my corn, the perfume of my salt

      and pickled shrimp, the bile I drop
      into the soup to make me strong.

With Feeling

So what if the beautiful ones always sit in the first row, where the lights strike their hair and jewels the brightest? So what if their fathers have paid for the places they occupy, with little regard for how much it costs others? They post Selfies with captions like "Thing is, I don't give a shit." The potted trees in the atrium are equally beautiful for having no memory of origins. They breathe in the temperature-controlled air but do not bend their branches. A little boy pees in the terra cotta basin, unable to keep it in any longer. Outside, a storm begins its orchestral arrangements: tympani and brass; winds. But night's darkest tuxedo is the mother of all corporations. I want to tell the guard who ushers out the errant boy and his crestfallen parent, You are mistaken. It is holy to feel the visceral coursing through you, unstoppable like wind or water. If you ever opened your mouth to the rain, perhaps you might understand how a string stretched as if near breaking gives off that depth of sound. Think of it like stars rushing through the roof. Think of the solitude of the lonely, the destitute, the ailing. Then try to play it again: the kind of music that trembles the skin, escapes the strictures of syntax.

Persistent Triolet

      We love the things we love for what they are —
      the knot's tight fist which fingers coax to feather out,

      chipped tooth, false gold, hesitant smile faint beacon from afar;

      and yet we love the things we love, difficult for what they are.

      Imperfect shape perennially arising from the bath, embarrassed for its scars:

      surrender to the ardor that persists, one way or other undeterred by doubt.

      This is the way we come to love the things we love for what they are

      — the knot's tight fist which fingers coax to feather out.


What You Don't Always See

      Now faith is the substance of things hoped for,
      the evidence of things not seen.

          — Hebrews 11:1

      I am the sheen of the egg after it drops its sun
      into the heated pan. I am the cool underlining the day.
      I am the dry, cracked bodhi leaf that falls from the tree

      under which the sage closed his eyes and made a perfect
      circle with his finger and thumb, and now lies in a frame
      bought at the temple gift shop. I am the trill of a cricket

      craning its body toward autumn in the heat.
      I am the hunger that swerves like a bus on a switchback
      trail, so the hens and goats being taken to market

      break out of their makeshift cages,
      scrambling to safety in the bushes. I am
      the tremble in the arc of the pendulum weight

      as it hums from the tension of the silver wire.
      I am the dream that flickers beneath the eyelids
      of the child who wakes then names events

      yet to unfold. I am the filament that lodges
      in the throat, tasting of salt and bone. And I,
      I am the clock that stops just short of despair,

      the zipper's train whistling to the end of the track
      and back; the shirt that fastens all the way to the top
      so fingers can loosen the tiny buttons a little, or a lot.


Appetite

Mexican Free-tailed Bat (Tadarida brasiliensis)

      When the Mexican free-tailed bats fly out
      from underneath the Congress Avenue Bridge
      in Texas, do they hum the chant of I want,
      I want as they cut a swath above the capitol,
      above the Gaps and Victoria's Secrets
      now shut for the night at the open air
      malls? Exiting the Bracken Caves
      in search of migrating cotton
      bollworm moths and mosquitoes,
      they'll eat two hundred times their weight
      in insects before returning to their roosts.
      If only I could feed my hungers in the way
      they do, and starve my leathered sorrows
      clustering in their caves. So grey and woolly,
      they unfurl like a knitted scarf at dusk,
      their million eyes like rhinestones
      glittering against the cross-hatched sky.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Ode to the Heart Smaller than a Pencil Eraser by Luisa A. Igloria. Copyright © 2014 Luisa A. Igloria. Excerpted by permission of University Press of Colorado.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Utah State University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2014
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0874219523
• ISBN 13: 9780874219524
• Einband: Tapa dura
• Anzahl der Seiten: 70
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar