Via Negativa

Mark Doty
And then, when they were done, I turned my head and saw, on a video screen, my own heart. It was golden, and pulsing, and resembled a cross between a Georgia O’Keefe flower and a jellyfish.
—-

Dick Jones’ Patteran Pages
The painter washes his hands on the flannel of the sky
Everything is in gouts of colour
And the hats of the passing women are comets
across the evening’s fire.
—-

Parmanu
But Hopper didn’t paint any snowy landscapes, did he? I wonder why. The loneliness and solitude of people in his cityscapes would, it seems to me, be accentuated in a street filled with snow. I can almost imagine the effect of streetlamp light bouncing off the snow, and the resulting shadows on nearby objects.
—-

Mutating the Signature
Don’t bring your tires
stripped of hot rims, or used
condoms, syringes or jumbo sized
needles. Leave the headless
doll in the truck, along with wrappers,
giddy snack vestiges and Keystone
cans.
—-

the cassandra pages
Her features rubbed with a wooden spoon,
Fadwa’s Damascene face emerges
beneath my hands black with printing ink…
—-

Clive Hicks-Jenkins’ Artlog
I may yet soften the massed patterning of leaves and branches, but it nevertheless has to be present, carefully arranged to suggest a foliate barricade made by a careful gardener to create a safe oasis from the wilderness beyond. Perhaps I’ll put some sheep on the distant hills rising to the upper edge of the painting. And some low mounds of rock plants. The painting evolves and becomes dense with shapes and patterning, shadow and highlight, colour and tone.
—-

everything feeds process
In stories like Alice in Wonderland, Wizard of Oz or The Little Mermaid, the main character has to make sense of a world that is not her own. In my mind, this is an excellent metaphor for living as a grown-up in modern times.
—-

slow reads
This cold has eyes, not menacing or even intent ones, but the limpid eyes of the cold dead, the kind of eyes that feel every nape’s tooth marks. This cold moves as slowly as black water, silently as the far side of fish: unpied, canopied — the crosshatch of hawks.
—-

Coyote Mercury
Somewhere along those dusty Philippine roads my fascination with war turned to recoiling as I realized it was one thing to reenact battles with my friends, but quite another to walk endless miles along a trail of brutality, hopelessness and murder. I think it was then that the idea of war began to move from fantasy to nightmare as we walked through Bataan imagining the sheer horror of the reality our reenactment was meant to remember.
—-

The Middlewesterner
Even the crow
knows nothing

except that hope
is a kind of

uselessness.
—-

Heraclitean Fire
And while zebra finches aren’t exactly imbued with an enormous amount of dignity at the best of times, there was something slightly off-putting about seeing these little birds with their own aims and desires in life being cajoled into being art.
—-

Timothy Green
As soon as we start to revere the writer over the writing, literature becomes a cult of personality. We crown these gods and pretend there could be no other. And I think that’s the real problem with literary publishing.
—-

Musings from Aotearoa
Aw shit, if you don’t get it you don’t get it. If these places and just the knowledge of them being there does not move you, then nothing here will. I can’t come up with any clever arguments to change minds and sway people over from the Cement Jungle. It seems too entrenched, too set, and the disconnection from anything wild too complete. If we have already compromised 87% of our land and now need to attack the remaining 13% to get at its “real” value it would seem to suggest that something is inherently wrong with the system. Yet the machine grinds on.
—-

Velveteen Rabbi
the sap already rising
will feed a million tiny banners
unfurling across the hills

and this small blue pill
will banish anxiety, restore to me
the woman I only dimly remember
—-

loopy
Feed me words.

Let me gnaw on their dissonance, make my heart race with percussive cacophony, smooth sweetly slipping sibilance over my skin, fondle with fricative fingers, surprise with spice of assonance, lick me with your luscious liquid labials.
—-

Round Robin: The Cornell Blog of Ornithology
The best way to describe the call is to imagine a group of thousands of birds with kazoos taped to their bills. It is quite comical and I spent a good part of my first night laughing to myself in my tent. [Click through to listen.]
—-

Up!
Deep breath.
The blood runs hot into the bucket.
I can feel my heart beating.
—-

thinkBuddha.org
If change is seen as the background against which we must make sense of temporary stability, rather than stasis the background against which we must make sense of change, then the world begins to look rather different. The question becomes not how can we change things?, as if things themselves needed a bit of a shove for them to change at all, but how can we respond to and participate in the changeability of things?
—-

mole
And yet — and yet — despite all my wriggling, despite all my concessions, despite having made comfort the ruling priority of my life — somehow, even so, I just can’t get quite comfortable. Neither can you.
—-

Coyote Crossing
Are we really so bereft of wisdom that we see this beleaguered but beautiful stretch of ancient desert as nothing more than a blank spot on a map? Are we really so callous that we can consider the improbably old creosote, Mojave yucca and barrel cacti on the Ivanpah site less valuable than leaving our closet lights on when the door is closed? Many of the plants growing there are older than this nation. Some may pre-date European presence on the continent. We may as well raze the Parthenon to build a strip mall, knock down Stonehenge for use as highway berms.
—-

Dr. Bouville’s Existential Kitchen
For cooking to even exist, no matter what point of the temporal horizon it inhabits (leftovers, the meal-in-itself, the cookbook), there must be or must have been shopping, an appropriative act in which the awful and vertiginous existential freedom of the for-itself is primordially manifest.
—-

Vicious or Virtuous
All is flat, blithely unaware, granted stay,
save the cricket in the eaves, insomniac
twitch of limbs – unyielding, cardiac.
—-

Fragments from Floyd
And dear Built-in Navigational Robot Voice Lady, please reference travel to our destination with appropriate rural context and language like “turn right in one quarter mile at large maple tree; exit hardtop to gravel lane and cross three creeks. Continue on for a little piece after you think for sure you must be lost.” Finally the voice tells the traveler “You have reached your destination. Honk three times and wait for signal giving permission to exit your vehicle.”
—-

teacup (W.F. Roby)
I’m sorry. But eventually
the sun’s going to burn out
and all the fish will be blind
and all the clothespins pressed to cinders
by the fists of something awful
so just for right now
let’s write a poem together. Here, I’ll start —
—-

Coyote Mercury
Does the hummingbird know
the vastness of the Gulf of Mexico
when land is lost from sight?

Oil rigs and shrimping boats—
fast-blurred memories, random ghosts afloat
where sky and sea seem one.
—-