Temple Rubbing

"Penny wise, pound foolish," my father liked to say.
I don't know how he came by this expression and its

mixed currencies.

It was the sixties:  buddhist monks set themselves
aflame with petrol, while Twiggy posed on the pages of Time
and Newsweek in miniskirts easier to copy than the way
other people lived.  We were six hours from the capital.
America and England, farther away--like snow in storybooks
where people dressed their skins in fur and skated on foolish ice,
buffed to the consistency of glass.  A heart could twirl
so effortlessly on its surface, hold hands with another,
as though the thinnest spot could know no breaking.
I knew he meant be careful, don't take unnecessary risks,
the reason my mother planned months and months
how she might wheedle for a row of sewing
machines against a wall, bolts of cloth her genre,
knotted frog closures and silk rosettes
her signatures.  Admiring bias cut or drape, her clients
thought Hong Kong or Manila, she glowed with pride.
She trained my eye to color and design, my tongue
to lexicon of ruffle and flounce, chiffon, raw
linen, the way a simple seam described the willful
piecing of parts so they could be what they were,
and also beautiful.  When the loan officer arrived
with papers saying here sign and countersign,
my father changed his mind, withdrew
collateral.  Since then she's returned to that moment
of risk, regretting how it wasn't all hers to take.
Years later I see I've taken after her, after all--
papering my walls with books though friends remind me
there are public libraries, hunting the poem's elusive
thread while everyone else sleeps.  I dream of what it's like
to skydive even once, of the view from a two-seater plane.
When it rains I hunt the grocery aisles for sunflowers.
Do you understand?  Extravagance and desire, not
necessarily the same.  One look, one touch can make
all the difference, the bow traveling an extra measure
across the throat of the violin to sing the notes that the wood
housed, before the instrument was made.  I think of an Indian
temple rubbing, the wealth of coppery detail the crayon transfers
from stone and the paper's heavy grain into your hand:
distance collapsed in the image of the woman opening
herself and bending at the hip to receive the radiance
of the god, his many arms, his dancing.  The mouth
that moves upon another mouth in silence, as if a torch
were being passed through darkness, as if
it were the only thing that mattered.

(c)Luisa Igloria       2005

from Trill & Mordent

Wordtech Editions, Cincinnati, OH