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The Missouri Review 27.1 (2004) 15-17



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Mandorla

          How quickly a gilded edge
shades into charcoal, how city streets and tree-lined
borders, tensile wires across a bridge, can darken without
warning, as though a wrist had merely guided the flat
side of a coloring stick across watermarked
linen to change day into night. And the retinal
shutters adjust, the irises open wider like plants
coming out of water. A woman descends
to the trains in subterranean corridors, smoothing her bell-
shaped skirt the color of plums, of Bordeaux,
of things that have lain a while in the clarifying
dark. People walking in the park glance up at a sound—
only a plane crossing the night sky: not
in itself remarkable, only part of the age
we inhabit. Even now a nameless future
rears its rump at the end of the boulevard,
displaying indifference. Arcs of copper neon open like fans;
in shop windows lettered signs advertise White
Nights, Golden Girls. Our guide points out
this neighborhood, describing a wide
circle with his arm—a continuum of taverns in Dostoyevsky's time,
any of them the very one into which Raskolnikov
might have slipped to wheedle a drink. I don't need
to close my eyes to see the emerald from an absinthe glass [End Page 15]
drain into the hollow of a throat, feel
the places behind sockets of bones where liquid
comes to rest as heat that rends and loosens. If
in the end what swallows all is the very darkness the mouth
fears, what it spurns at the end of the cup—the trembling hand
begging for one, one drink more—what would we do with perpetual
light? Unsettling sun at midnight, shimmer of candy-striped,
mosaiced cathedrals that until recently warehoused grain
and timber and brick. I want to know more than—
to see—how a body recognizes what it loves even before it's poured

into form.
          The way I dropped down on my haunches,
combing through green beside a path with both
hands one summer in a different city by water—
because a tendril of scent unspooled itself
out of the tightening dusk. Volatile white, it was
the odor of jasmine I rooted for among the vivid
campanula in the garden, a halo of scent that flickered
as if to match the ripples drawn by goldfish on a silken
pond. To witness beyond ruin, beyond the wound—
the reason for our constant return to places of elusive
thought, furtive form. Two bodies sliding apart in a room
above the river after a kiss. A sliver of the beautiful, light
as an almond wafer on the tongue. Sometimes one glance unlocks
the portals, revealing that nimbus where heaven and earth
are joined as one. There is a story of a child running
from broken towers in Manhattan, transfixed by [End Page 16]
the sight of common birds, their burning—
as if a flock of phoenixes beat the air
with wings of chalcedony, tourmaline, jasper,
onyx; with the gold of icons' haloes, of consuming fire.
Luisa Igloria is a poet, fiction writer and essayist who has published five books under the name Maria Luisa Aguilar Cariño. She is the editor of the new anthology Not Home, but Here: Writing from the Filipino Diaspora (Anvil, 2003). Luisa's work has appeared in numerous national and international journals.


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