3/12/2011

Sunrise: a bluebird warbles. From a thousand feet up, the cry of a killdeer, that lost shorebird, circling the long brown waves of hills.

7 Comments


  1. Killdeer

    Species of North American ring-plover,
    the name imitative of its cry

    a lost shorebird circling the waves of the hills

    in the Outer Hebrides, a rare visitor

    what I hear in the dark
    when the stroke of the umze fades


  2. Look

    *”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


  3. I don’t remember, Louis Sullivan to Frank Lloyd Wright? Or the other way around? A beautiful building that one of them got a prize for. The other said, “finally, something they can’t take away from you.” & the first reflected later, “I wonder what made him say that? They can take anything away from anybody.”



  4. the nudity of light
    still floating off lost seashores
    uncircling alighting waves


  5. Garuda

    From thousands of feet up, circling the brown waves of hills
    he scans pinheads of mountain peaks searching for his father;
    feathers bleached a deep indigo with sunrise, the large bird
    like a flying firmament squints into the caving sockets of hills.

    The air gets pressed as Garuda plunges close to the earth,
    Kashyapa in deep meditation opens his eyes as flaps of wings stir breeze,
    sees his glorious son for the first time. Hardly hatched, but brimming
    with purpose that even as seed Kashyapa laid in Vinata’s womb:

    tapas of sixty thousand hermits mixed like rich cream
    as he took her that night and she cried with pleasure.
    She waited five hundred years for the egg to hatch
    as the thousand serpents hissed and tormented her.

    The shell cracked and the tender down of the eaglet shone,
    his mother looked with sadness. Wind on the high mountain moaned,
    coils of serpents that sunned on the cold rock welcomed Garuda:
    his cousins that he will kill as prey for holding his mother in bondage.


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