By two poets I love: Luisa A. Igloria, from her collection TRILL & MORDENT (WordTech Editions); and D. A. Powell, from his collection COCKTAILS (Graywolf Press)
“Argument and Consolation”
— Luisa A. Igloria
The poet asks am I leading
the life that my soul wants to lead,
am I desiring to be someplace else
other than where I am and thus being a thorn
in the side of the god who loves me and suffers
because there’s something he sees and I don’t —
presumably the lives ensuing from all the other
choices I haven’t but could have made at some
indeterminate moment in the past; the possibility
I might look better, be wealthier and more at ease
with my station in life : instead of a bank teller,
a lawyer; instead of a lawyer, a judge; instead of a scientist,
a CEO. This poet lists the usual examples, things
that have apprently little to do with a life of passion
or the imagination: jobs like selling real estate, jobs
that my colleague and former neighbor Tim refers to as
jobby jobs in a poem published recently by New Letters. Then
there’s the issue of who I’m with versus who I’ll find, after all,
I’m destined for. And what about those who’ve loved
more than once but, other than for this shortcoming,
have vented no more rancor on this life than the occasional
resistance at cleaning the bathroom or taking out the trash,
because they didn’t get a full night’s sleep and suffer
a kind of benign neglect at the hands of others?
Take for instance my generous friend, the salt of the earth to all
who know her: she confides there’s a man in England
she’s loved and who’s loved her all these years but isn’t the father
of her children. Given what could have led to that
Nietzschean second
chance, in her case a meeting between flights, she felt
the nervous pulse in her chest as she scanned airport crowds,
wondering if she would recognize him. How plainly she said it —
I knew him right away; I saw he did, too. Yet, knowing
what they did,
the most they shared was a look, hands held for less than an hour.
So much commotion pressed into the avenues of thought and feeling,
though to passersby they were only another silver-haired couple standing quiet by the railing. In the end, the poet I am reading
postulates that the god who loves me and suffers from his
omniscience and my ignorance, is really no wiser than I;
the life I’ve lived and witnessed is the only place I can claim
with some authority. He has no answer either when astrophysicists
ask about our material origins, the true nature of that primordial
cosmic fuck they call the Big Bang; years and years and years after,
we’re still bathed in the wake of invisible ripples, waves of gravity
that gave birth to us. How do you measure the wagging of a finger
from a distance of ten thousand light years? If the air we breathe
pulses with the energy of unseen atoms surviving from
a previous time, who knows for sure if what we’d thought of
all along as a chance encounter, is really a conclusion now
falling into place? Laborious solution, long-hand script
of an equation
written on the darkness of a slate, eons before it arrived;
an emanation
caused by objects colliding in space, producing a trillion
trillion trillion
watts of radiation, so bright it briefly outshines an entire galaxy.
hope you like this new doctor: rachel says in hopeful tones
— D. A. Powell
hope you like this new doctor: rachel says in hopeful tones
and I: too early to tell. though hope does hover in my chest
certainly i’ve abandoned miss america-sized wishes:
world peace? an end to hunger? not while we consume, consume
I make hope the size of a bar of soap: hope-on-a-rope
like “hope there’s not a spider in the shower this morning”
“hope some broadway producer brings back starlight express”
“maybe figs will be available fresh for a longer season
(without the global warming, i should add, in case god listens)”
and “maybe sheila e. will release a disc as good as the glamorous life”
my pulse drums too: a scant crew of leukocytes raise their tiny oars
these few who have not mutinied. I want to lift their spirits
as we’re crossing the equator: showered with a fine warm mist
I sing them a dusty springfield song. soon the cabin’s steamy
and we’re wishin’ and hopin’ like there’s no tomorrow. but there is
already dawn: the passage safe: the mermaids beckon from the cape
— for Rachel Zucker