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  1. Recurrence

    “That stick in your hand is tracing mansions
    in which we shall always be together.”
    – Anna Akhmatova

    In the dream I am always on a raft, always
    floating downstream, the river a voice just
    beneath my ear, the heat and haze a coppery
    taste on my tongue. The sky is a scroll
    unwinding above, blue film cut through
    occasionally by green fronds, vivid drapery
    on rock walls. Do you know what it means?
    I don’t. I am alone, of course. I have left you
    behind, or you have left me. But today is another
    morning. Where bodies have lain, the bed
    is still warm. Outside, it’s snowing again.
    I know why the blue jay keeps returning
    to the same high limb to eat snow, as if it can’t
    find that exact flavor anywhere else.

    ~ Luisa A. Igloria
    01 29 2011


  2. Omni, soli, semper (all alone always). It is not who we leave behind, nor who bereave us that keep hurts recurrent. Paraphrasing Frost, “I have it in me, so much nearer home, to scare myself with my own desert places.” That’s why the raft keeps on moving downstream. That’s why it is snowing again.

    Contra mundum, we return to the “same high limb” to know it again like we did the first time. Will the warmth remain? Indeed, it is another morning.

    Lovely.

    Barrett-Browning had it in her sonnet: “I love you with the tears, smiles, of all my life…but if God choose, I shall but love you better after death.” Ultimate reccurrence that.


    1. Thanks for contextualizing Luisa’s poem for us, Albert. I envy your familiarity with the canon.


  3. In my last paragraph, I dropped the “thees” of Browning. “I love thee…I shall but love thee better… (My apologies to her estate.)

    But, of course, I was thinking of the time I stole her lines to woo my love goddess of 48 years. (:) Freudian.


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