Redder than a Berry or a Bird of Spring

Drizzly today. Sky the color of a clean aluminum sheet. But over the neighbors' fence, these berries amid the foliage.

* * *

Sharing a poem from my most recent book, Juan Luna's Revolver (University of Notre Dame Press, 2009).

I hope you will consider the gift of poetry for friends and loved ones this holiday season and in the coming year/s.



Worth
Luisa A. Igloria

What is to be worthy or un-
worthy of another? If there
is fever, there is also work,
a woman wrote in a book
I read. She recollected
a story and the gift
of an apple to a famous painter:
he set it down on a tabletop
and looked at it for days,
the way its red burned
wilder than a berry or the feathers
on a bird of spring.
Against the window or yet again
arranged beside a yellow handful
of lemons, and still he would not touch
nor eat. Is this then a parable
about virtue, how at the end of suffering
there is the consolation of art?
Cixous says she prefers another method--
to bite into the fruit and open her mouth
to its compact cache of sweetness--
by which I am made to understand desire
inherits more desire, this work
of building memory of apple back by seed,
flower, spiral, when not even its core
remains. How could one forget?
The eye cleaves harder to any picture
shaded with the ink of loss.

*