3/14/2011

5

Scattered snowflakes wander back and forth like lost souls. I watch one explode against a branch of the dead cherry. The croak of a raven.

5 Comments


  1. 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. 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


    1. Luisa, very poignant images that continue to stay with me.



  3. Speaking of lost souls, one sat on the drumstick tree
    near my window pelting stones, rode on jasmines
    that like fragrant snowflakes flew across my terrace,
    and as the town drowsed heard her rustle
    in the hollow of the coconut tree sticks of my broom
    a crow carried on trips back and forth to build a nest.


  4. I remember a lyric where the author seemed to have dozens of lines that all ended in the same rhyme. I think even the whole song, every line, had a different last word that rhymed with ‘bag’ and I felt like, “Surely that was the last possible rhyme” and then the next line would just extend it.

    Like that song, I keep waiting for you to exhaust the possibilities of observation and paradoxically, like the rate of cosmic expansion, you are if anything, accelerating in things to observe.

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