Luisa A. Igloria

February 23, 2019

“Circle of Cranes” by Luisa A. IgloriaPosted by

Luisa A. Igloria

CIRCLE OF CRANES

I will stand like the flame in the flame…
I will stand very still in your absence…
—David St. John

They have stepped out of one
rectangular sheet, the six
that now touch wingtip
to wingtip and, wordless,
hum the white notes of the song
hollowed out of paper—anthem
of a kind of reverse creation:
folded from substance,
a well of apparently
nothing

But even so the empty
space shimmers: a disc
echoing still with the swift
crosswise slash of scissors
the careful pruning of neck
from neck and wing
from wing

Newly sprung, each
genuflects stiffly to the empty
circle, remembering how
the grasp of the world
came coursing through
the limbs; and what
it felt like to lift entire,
like dying, from
the blade

—from Rattle #27, Summer 2007

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Luisa Igloria: “I’d never been in a creative writing workshop until I was thirty and in the first year of the doctoral program at University of Illinois at Chicago. Before that I pretty much worked on my own, sharing and reading work with a handful of friends who also wrote, and reading as much poetry as I could get my hands on. Now I make my permanent residence in America, and facilitate poetry workshops (I’m on the faculty of the Creative Writing Program at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia). What I want to tell my students is that poetry is the line we need to keep open because it connects us to what’s not yet completely broken in or domesticated. I like how it keeps a restlessness alive in me.” (website)

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May 7, 2018

“Dear Federico,” by Luisa A. IgloriaPosted by

Luisa A. Igloria

DEAR FEDERICO,

Where did I read about how everything that counts
happens in that space between laughing and crying?

Federico, the dead in my country must be
like your dead; maybe even more dead.

In the mostly dull, often helpless ordinariness
of our lives, don’t we already resemble the dead?

So many of us live in street after street packed
with poor, thin houses—the merest rain and boiling

flood collapses them conveniently into coffins.
When we trudge to work, we join other living

corpses jostling for space on dilapidated buses,
trams, and jeepneys; or in dimly lit trains

that crawl through the city’s clogged arteries.
Sometimes there are plastic ovals that hang

from the ceiling above the seats, filled with
crystals of cheap air freshener meant to evoke

the fragrance of violets. Instead they give off
a nauseating aura: a cross between vomit and wilted

flowers. So many of the already dead, exchanging coins
and bills for breaded gristle at fast-food counters;

then, taking the orange plastic trays to seats
flanking a wall with openings made to resemble

windows. From the other side, a view of ghostly ones
who rap on the glass and signal with outstretched hands—

Waifs walk around in rags, carrying little
ghosts astride one hip. The eyes of the dead

are some of the most beautiful ever recorded.
I was trying to say, Federico, that I know you meant

the dead are a deep source of mystery because they
have crossed over to that realm over which, finally,

we have no claim. In some ways of course this is true.
We don’t know anything but the grief that loss

and passing carve in the center of the gut.
We don’t know anything but the terrible uncertainty

that dogs our days and nights. Those who hunt
our children and loved ones in broad daylight

as if they were animals, are most faceless and elusive.
But what is the most heartrending of all? In every

death after their death, we come to learn their names.
Gripped by the specter of our common extinction, how

can we not fill the husks of their brief lives
with the oil of our flickering remembrances?

 

In Spain, the dead are more alive than the dead of any other country in the world.
—Federico García Lorca, “The Duende”

—from Rattle #59, Spring 2018
Tribute to Immigrant Poets

[download audio]

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Luisa A. Igloria: “In 1992, I left Baguio, my home city in the Philippines, to come to the United States; I spent the next four years in my Ph.D. program at the University of Illinois in Chicago. That period was also the first time I had to learn how to deal with racism and microaggressions, encountered on a fairly frequent basis. For instance, being told things like ‘You’re from the Philippines? Thanks to your volcano (Mt. Pinatubo had just erupted in 1991) we’re going to have the crummiest winter we’ve ever had in decades,’ or ‘The language you use in your paper seems very expressive but I confess I don’t really understand what you’re saying; oh! it must be because English is not your first language.’ My very first poetry book, Cartography, was on Baguio City’s creation as a hill station for the American colonial government in the Philippines (in the early 1900s) and the ways by which American influence is felt in daily life even before the fact of physical migration. So while I’ve always written about history, heritage, culture, gender, and place, being an immigrant and diasporic person in North America gives these subjects an additional layer of immediacy for me.” (web)

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