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      November 11, 2009Horizon NoteLuisa Igloria

      Out of the quarrel with others we make rhetoric;

      out of the quarrel with ourselves we make poetry.
      —W.B. Yeats

      In a magazine review I learn that horizon note
      is the name of the hum that drones through some
      types of Indian music like a very large bee
      or the engine of a car idling in the driveway,
      a faint line in the distance that suggests
      some destination for lost and wayward notes
      when they are tired of cycling from one
      variation to another. Today,
      the syllable om vibrates a few octaves
      lower, so it blurs into the blue
      rubber band a boy on his bike pulls back
      between the v of a broken-off branch
      to aim at something in the trees.
      When the stone meets its target,
      the feathered body only a little larger than
      a tamarind pod plummets out of the leaves
      to land on the ground, where its short life
      will begin to decompose in the heat and rain.
      The moment could be almost cinematic
      except there is no epiphany: just a boy
      turning the small casualty over
      with his shoe before pedaling away
      into the ennui of his own life.
      Perhaps I am mistaken and the boy
      has feelings, so this act of indiscriminate
      animal cruelty is nothing but youthful folly,
      nothing he brooded on darkly for days. Perhaps
      I am merely feeling unkind and full of remorse,
      remembering another time years ago
      when I turned at the garden gate to face
      the man bent on marrying me. I was
      sixteen. The sun, nearly gone
      at the horizon, marked everything
      with copper. I could almost believe I was
      meant for something greater than this.
      Two years later, I married him.

      from #24 - Winter 2005

      Luisa Igloria

      “I’d never been in a creative writing workshop until I was thirty and in the first year of the doctoral program at University of Illinois at Chicago. Before that I pretty much worked on my own, sharing and reading work with a handful of friends who also wrote, and reading as much poetry as I could get my hands on. Now I make my permanent residence in America, and facilitate poetry workshops (I’m on the faculty of the Creative Writing Program at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia). What I want to tell my students is that poetry is the line we need to keep open because it connects us to what’s not yet completely broken in or domesticated. I like how it keeps a restlessness alive in me.”

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