Via Negativa

Soon, you hope— emergence of spring's  
             first blooms. Not having to put on 
a coat just to take out the trash. Thermostats
             no longer clicking on and off. Green 
restored bit by bit above drab avenues: 
             merciful masking of where branches
were pruned and threaded with power   
             lines. How to revive the stem bent
at the nape, desultory in its old brown
             wrapper? You want to slip your arms
into sleeves of seagreen foam, your feet 
             into a basin pearled and cooling 
after light rain; your teeth into the tart-sweet 
            interval of fruit on the way to ripening. 

"I draw the line at pain."
                        ~ Hiromi Ito


Past my sixth decade, and I still don't know
how others do it— take cruises and splendid

annual vacations, lavish their offspring with sleek
investment accounts; talk about how they retired 

and now spend their days wine-tasting and living 
their best life.  For class, I had my students read

a life thinly disguised as novel: autofiction, 
critics call it—in which the narrator flies back 

and forth between her home in California and her home
in Japan. On one hand, there's an aging, cantankerous 

husband and on the other, parents in serious decline. 
In between, pilgrimages to figure out her own unhappiness, 

her children's unhappiness. Their dog is hit by a car; it 
survives, but now it's lame—In this way, perhaps it took on 

its owners' suffering by offering itself as substitute. 
Can you believe such a thing? But I know the ache of both

wringing my hands in helplessness, and wanting to help. 
The wind gusts. And yes, the trees stay unchanged.

Along the circuits of the body, trains run 
carrying their load of minerals and waste,

constant electricity, surpluses of sugar,
salt and bile.  As the body wears down,

they run on schedules that won't always 
stay consistent—they'll need repair, 

replacement, a slick of oil, a suturing.
You feed the body oranges, bread 

barely streaked with butter; beans, onions,
and soup. But sometimes in the night,

you remember those stops open 24 hours
selling beer and ham sandwiches, wheels

of cheese, slices of cake drenched in cream—
everything gleaming in cool refrigerator light.

There's nearly an entire month you can't account for, when (you were told)
you were confined in the hospital. First or second grade, scabby-kneed, hard 
to feed, breaking out in hives and blisters; nose bleeds almost every day. 
Confine—a word that only brings up images of a high bed with a metal
frame; a drafty room, the old-building smell (like yellow piss, like peeling
paint and antiseptic. Nurses came at intervals to check your temperature or 
bring a glass of water to your lips, bitter liquid in little dosage cups. In the hallways, 
the sound of wheels rolling across tile. Years later this is the same hospital where 
you give birth to your third child— every single time the resident pushed her thick
fingers in to check the progress of dilation, she'd say 2 cm. Unreal. It's the same
hospital where your father passed away on a makeshift pallet, the walls having 
collapsed in the aftermath of earthquake. You can't remember how many days 
and nights there was no running water, no power, no gas, no telephone service. 
A drama of tents sprang up in parks. There was rain and mud, and makeshift 
stoves into which you pushed torn newspapers. Box of matches,  black-
bottomed pot from the ruined kitchen; tins of sardines, can opener.  
Grocers handing out bread through a hole in the wall.

Flies led rescue teams to bodies.
The dead got their coffins. For such
things, there are actually records.

Beneath the tree  whose branches 
are garlanded with bits of paper 

covered with now indecipherable 
handwriting, we gather to string 

letters, wishes, poems. Its name in Sanskrit
means wood of the gods. The sky, azure 

after a cloudy morning, peeps through 
a latticework of branches. It must be

indeed patient and forbearing: letting us
transfer our supplications to its arms.