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  1. Letter to Green

    Weathered mountain laurel, green bush
    under the trees. No tube of verdigris or beryl
    could wash you drab. Nile green, emerald
    and olive, scale of a fin disappearing in bottle-
    blue water. Thumbnail of lime, salted kale,
    rough my heart up in the pines. Bronzed
    and bladed, apple-green, Prussian-sheened
    and prismed, sometimes you hurt my eyes
    but I can’t look away: set us all on fire.

    ~ Luisa A. Igloria
    03 01 2011



  3. RETURN MAIL: (After Letter to Green)

    Verde que te quiero verde.
    —Federico Garcia Lorca

    It must have been in Andalucia
    (or was it Bilbao?) when I got
    your last note raving about blue
    skies, verdant bluffs, laurel bushes
    turning to green fire under trees
    singe by fierce sun rays cutting
    through a fandango of branches
    swaying with winds roiling the sea
    beneath the cliffs where you swore
    we will be when you come this way
    again—I wore my green panuelo
    then; and running your fingers
    through the stray hair mottling it,
    were you not recondite, mi amor,
    when you said: Yo te quiero Verde?
    Or coy perchance, when the green
    you were declaring ardour for
    was not the shawl on my shoulders
    nor my short lime-sequined vestido
    but my eagerly trembling haunches,
    wondering how green the grass
    would remain under our bodies
    while we stared at the cerulean magic
    of the patch of sky seen through leaves
    of the tree trunk where you carved:
    Verde, yo te quiero, Verde.
    a covenant made when you last said
    you will be back to engrave my name.
    I can only see pale shadows there now,
    and on the murky ground a patch of snow.

    —Albert B. Casuga
    Mississauga, Ont. 03-01-11


  4. Dave,
    The epigraph should read: Verde, que te quiero verde. Thanks for pointing it out. Please fix?
    But those in the body are poetic licence spin offs for the inamorata: “Verde, yo te quiero, Verde.” (Green, I love you, Green.) Will let them be as carved on the tree.
    Sounds like a Green Earth ad, does it not? (-:)


  5. Yo te quiero verde,

    said Lorca to the moon,
    staggering down the boulevard
    inflamed by vino verde, by absinthe,
    by the neon in the blood coursing all
    different ways to make birds beat
    their wings upon the roof of the brain
    until the light, co-conspirator with
    dark, unfurls under a canopy
    and lounges like an empress
    on a palanquin– she sighs, Yo
    te quiero, te quiero verde, so love me
    until the lost temples of your poems
    are overgrown with green.

    – Luisa A. Igloria
    03 01 2011
    Sent via my Blackberry


  6. If my Spanish needs a fix let me know, though I was taking poetic license and not interested in quoting Lorca verbatim…

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