3/23/2011

5

Cold and dawn-dark at 8:30. The ridge disappears into cloud, allowing me to imagine real mountains—a fastness far from anything but rain.

5 Comments


  1. Mt Hood, DST

    Cold and dawn-dark
    (they’ve been messing with the clock again
    who knows what time it is?)

    The ridge disappears into cloud,
    cloud into mountain, mountain into sky:
    here at the raw crude

    edge of the world
    we need no pretending.
    A fastness? No, a slowness.

    Turn the wheel and the sunline,
    taut and glimmering,
    God’s garotte,

    pivots on Hood’s shoulder
    as slow as an impalement stake,
    and the mountain,

    a scabied ragged hungry eagle,
    turns its tufted head.


  2. Landscape, with Cave and Lovers

    And once, in a book we read together, we paused:
    not when the nurse reads to him or his ghost from a book
    on permanent things in a room in a ruined villa, not

    when his plane goes down in flames in the middle
    of the desert— Not even when, finally, he carries
    the woman in his arms and leaves her on a smooth

    rock ledge in a cave, whispering he will go for help
    and return very soon, my darling    — but there after she
    has already died, in the middle of the cold and dark,

    at the part where in his grief he is moved to enter
    her once more— does he not?— and there is only this
    place left in the world to which he’s been sentenced,

    this fastness far from anything but rain
    and the last words she spoke, drifting into
    the perfect darkness like smoke or ink—

    ~ Luisa A. Igloria
    03 23 2011


    1. This is gorgeous.


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