Monthly Archives: November 2011

Dear heart, before the sun can overthrow all the sturm und drang caused by restlessness in the sheets, too much caffeine, and that over-decorated danseuse named guilt waltzing in your ballrooms especially when nights are longer, look close at the beds in the garden— There are tiny spires beneath summer’s leftover foliage, cities of frost spangled with brittle diadems. Look at the miniature hanging bridges on the outskirts, the lined streets leading to the plaza devoid of movement. Spires, casements shut: who’s sleeping there? who’ll ring the bells in the bell-tower? In a few hours, it’ll be warm enough to melt them all: not even a sigh left behind. Meanwhile, in the Cinema Paradiso that plays all the time in my head, the music in the opening scene is always indistinguishable from the breeze that parts the curtains, draws the eye in toward the complicated interiors. There’s the linen cloth, the table where lemons lie on a ceramic plate. Maybe I’m making parts of this up. Maybe the plate is tin, or maybe it’s a bowl. But there is no mistaking the wistful light that brushes them, so that even in black and white or sepia, a spray of citrus, a stroke of rosemary, perforates the air.

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

The box you sent came in the mail today,
the three jam jars intact— I did not know
the local orchards now have kumquat, enough
to turn into a thriving industry. We love
the bagful of pastillas, each bite just
as we remember, toasted milk-sweet in fluted
pastry shells, each wrapped in colored
cellophane. I didn’t recognize the vendors’
tags on any of the shirts, but the girls
think they are cute, especially embellished
with rhinestones. I smelled a whiff of travel
as I undid the plastic and lifted wads of
crumpled newsprint, padding, from inside: just
for a moment, that other place and its crowded
streets, old houses leaning at the curb or
limned with tungsten light— mingled scents
of tobacco, wilted greens, old linen somehow
sharper and more crisp, because of evanescence.

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

Last week on Facebook, Luisa mentioned that November 18 would mark the completion of her first year of writing daily poems in response to The Morning Porch. I questioned the “daily” part: after that first poem on November 18, 2010, I saw (and posted) two more at the end of the month, and then one on December 15 before we started posting them every day on December 18, a full month later. Luisa replied that she had been writing poems; she just hadn’t been sharing them with me. After considerable digging around, she found them all, and we present them here as a special treat and thank-you to all of Luisa’s readers on Via Negativa. —Dave

November 21, 2010
Based on TMP Nov 21 2009

Findings

What we rake out of the undersides
of things, all gray and bedraggled
like drier lint scraped from the mesh—
Who knew there was a piece of gum
stuck to the zipper plate, six or seven
odd dollars now laundered clean,
caught in the back pocket of
your favorite jeans? This is how
I found a letter explaining my
origins— cleaning out the back
of my father’s closets, sorting
through stacks of yellowed journals,
faded correspondence from his
years of lawyering. The niece
who wrote it (handwritten date
six or seven months after my birth)
inquired about our new home up
north, asked how the baby (me)
and mother (not my mother, but
her younger sister) were doing,
and ended with the wish my parents
would be blessed with their own
child someday. I remember I sat
down in the middle of cleaning
to digest that bit of news, to read
over the careful handwriting once
again, bits of dust and rolls of
newsprint, old issues of Time
and Life from years and years
ago, there gathered at my feet.

Continue reading →

Yesterday, you asked how long
till seven o’clock and now the hour
has not only arrived but is past,

the way all things crest their apex
and turn away, gradually or of
a sudden— the way summer’s

languid gold has darkened
to sepia and all the little birds
with wingtips shaped like knives

have thrown themselves against
the sky’s steel vault. Nothing
to do when bitter cold

plucks you raw from sleep
at dawn, but fumble for a cup
of coffee, the first sip

searing as the kiss you
did not want to give
but that I demanded:

and soon, all that
cold sugar falling
through the air—

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

If coffee has no effect, neither has milk or tea.
Dense fog curls outside the window, mimicking sleep.

In childhood, recurring dreams of flight across
billowing sheets of white, harbors of sleep.

In the early hours, your footfalls down
the hall rouse me from watchful sleep.

My bed is lumpy with hidden vegetables,
the mattress striped with wires: elusive sleep.

Wild silences of deep solitude, trapdoors
amid the roots: for tumbling headlong into sleep.

I once had a rusted key to a garden where
arms carved me makeshift rooms for sleep.

The tremor starts along the foot, a fright
like falling into the sudden depth preceding sleep.

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

Across the street, the neighbor pokes
through piles of furniture left on
the sidewalk, hoping to rescue

a vintage lamp, a serviceable side
table, a stool whose rungs might be
replaced. It’s early yet in the day,

the truck from Samaritan House
not yet there for pickup; expected
rain still a couple of hours away.

At church, in the Commons; at the down-
town thrift shop; or behind the high
school, a row of oversized bins

where we bring castoffs from time
to time, for donation or recycling;
winter coats the children have

outgrown, small kitchen appliances
and tchotchkes taking up too
much room— so many times I’ve felt

the urge to evict such senseless
excess from my life. Things multiply
in the dark; enjoy it now, you can’t

take it with you; or, out with the old
before in with the new— home-grown
platitudes for making room and yet more

room for stuff. I think of Basho on
the road with his notebook and traveling
cloak, of ascetics spending their days

in meditation under a tree. Oh habit
and earthly desire, what purchase we
still hold on this worldly life—

Stubborn to the end, enamored by
the promise of the beautiful, we cling
to every surface assuring love that lasts.

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.