I will water the plants

“…drinking it all in but
never filling, never filled…”

“This,” Luisa Igloria

I will water the plants when I get home, the nasturtiums’ quivering nonsensical tendrils, the fragrant thyme and globe basil, I will water them when I get home. I will care for these littlest things like I used to tend the altars, cutting wicks and wiping dust with absurd meticulous faithful care. I will water the plants. I will attend to them and drink meaning from my attentions like drinking life from the sun. I will put away the laundry which I washed and dried and folded with the unshakeable conviction that doing so made this day a better day. I will water the plants and put away the laundry and clear the paperwork from the kitchen table. I will do all this. I will slip into the not-cool-enough sheets under my grandmother’s quilt and I will not think about the hour–one or two or three–when sleep might crack like a fragile ornament. I will lay down full with the small tasks of the day counted up like marbles in a sack hanging heavy in my pocket. I will not think about watering the plants again tomorrow, I will only think about their undaunted yearning growth and I will draw a parallel from that and fill with it. I will water the plants when I get home.

“This” is in Luisa Igloria’s latest chapbook, Night Willow, published by Phoenicia.

the quiet

“…you become the sound.” ~Luisa Igloria, “Liminal”

I strip the bed, put on the summer blanket and quilt; the overwrought, anxious-to-please smell of household cleaner still rises from the corners. The sink is empty and the drying rack full, the desks cleared, the herbs watered. It is night and I am alone, pictures gazing down or averting faces from this solitary industry. How quiet a pair of rooms becomes in the puddling afternoon, how much quieter following night’s seeping tide when houses curl upon themselves like mollusks. I hold this two-bedroom-plus-kitchen-and-bath to my ear and hear the rushing of my blood, rushing like the traffic on Massachusetts Avenue, rushing like thoughts in the estuaries of minutes. I could do laundry all night or scrub the bathtub or unpack the last boxes, but nothing can hold back the salty, pungent fingerlets of quiet. You will press me against the sheets, flutter the curtains, give me back dreams speaking in voices made strange by distance. I will wake in the morning–will my breath remember me, will my spirit be returned back from the rooms’ shell, caverns echoing and empty? Will I remember the outbound journey on the ruffled waters, the sly unmooring of self the quiet night accomplished? Or will I forget, as I sometimes want to, and become something simple and untinged by loss, or loneliness, or the ordinary greatness required to live on the shores of this unborn and unrelenting sea?