Putting on my web admin hat for a second to bring you this important announcement (clears throat): Henceforth, Via Negativa subscriptions will be served by WordPress.com rather than Mailchimp, which doesn’t work too consistently anymore. That’s because we have too many subscribers for Mailchimp to handle on their free plan—a quality problem, I suppose—and I didn’t feel like hitting y’all up to cover the cost of a paid plan ($27/month! Yikes). I’ve swapped in the new form in the sidebar, and a checkbox will appear below the comment form at the bottom of every post.
Continue reading “Housekeeping note: change of email subscription service”Allowance
(5) Our pockets full, we've been blessed with mystery and unseen presences. We should learn what it means to become the ancestor, but we are still so enamored with the million and one ways time is organized in this life of constant endings. The ice cream place closes at 10. and sushi restaurants make Sundays and Mondays their staff weekends. Trash collection in this neighborhood is Thursday, and recycling is picked up on alternating weeks. More than coincidence, serendipity is finding a doctor who speaks your language, a human who sees in you not history as baggage, who still opens to the possibility of surprise.
Dirt merchant
All day at home to make an end of our dirty work of the plasterers, and indeed my kitchen is now so handsome that I did not repent of all the trouble that I have been put to, to have it done.
This day or yesterday, I hear, Prince Rupert is come to Court; but welcome to nobody.
to make dirt last
my hands met
all that I have done
is welcome to nobody
Erasure poem derived from The Diary of Samuel Pepys, Saturday 29 September 1660.
Allowance
(4) You salt a magic circle on the ground, leave offerings of food and drink on the counter. Allow the porch light to keep burning but nearby, lay a water-filled basin—decoy and reflective surface. You want them near but not so near that they forget they're on an otherworldly journey; you want them not to lose their way, but imagine one more visitation. In the morning when the pewter bowl is filled with wings of little silver bodies, your sadness swells like the first time. Why is it so hard for us to leave sorrow alone, slip its many medallions into their cases? And yet our pockets are full, we have been blessed.
Employment
(Office day). This morning Sir W. Batten and Col. Slingsby went with Col. Birch and Sir Wm. Doyly to Chatham to pay off a ship there. So only Sir W. Pen and I left here in town.
All the afternoon among my workmen till 10 or 11 at night, and did give them drink and very merry with them, it being my luck to meet with a sort of drolling workmen on all occasions. To bed.
office is a birch
and I am the only pen
I work in luck
a sort of rolling occasion
Erasure poem derived from The Diary of Samuel Pepys, Friday 28 September 1660.
Allowance
(3) The call of owls at night, always interrogating. A fear of hairy tree demons crouched in the branches, smoking cigars. We went to school but left an opening, for in case any of that was true. Returning from funerals, we washed our hands by the door, in case the souls of the departed had followed our scent home. Under a froth of mosquito netting, an island from which to push off toward sleep. You tucked every fold carefully around the mattress, leaving no space. In the ceiling or in the floor, some houses held a secret door—one rusted handle coupled with an iron slide lock. Before the grownups retired for the night, sometimes they walked around the house perimeter, checking windows or scattering salt.
Tohubohu
To my Lord at Mr. Crew’s, and there took order about some business of his, and from thence home to my workmen all the afternoon. In the evening to my Lord’s, and there did read over with him and Dr. Walker my lord’s new commission for sea, and advised thereupon how to have it drawn. So home and to bed.
sand out of sand
the Lord’s lord
is sea
is the raw bed
Erasure poem derived from The Diary of Samuel Pepys, Thursday 27 September 1660.
The Turn
it starts with a zipper in the rain
that soft syllable
an oak leaning into
its impending death
you can shelter under it
as open as a book
it starts red and wrong
as an oak apple
old sapsucker holes bleeding
pale sap down a spruce
rain collecting in a hollow
atop an exposed birch root
so the tree can mainline it
like an autumn addict
mushrooms glory
in their fruiting bodies
as black drupes swell on maple-
leafed viburnum
and beechdrops’ self-fertilized flowers
hide under a twiggy bouquet
it’s a kind of spring
buried in the heart of autumn
just before antlers turn
from trees into weapons
and every leaf in the forest
goes off-script
Allowance
(2) Roses in pots; stubby, uneven grass we believed would grow into luxuriant green. We tried to make that garden as pleasing as others'. I remember mint growing on one side of the porch, bougainvillea quickly taking over the wall. No birdbath or statuary of cherubs, but Saturday afternoons we drank soda on the steps, fingered dog-paged komiks borrowed from the corner store. Angela puckered her lips and boasted that she'd filched her sister's tube of coral lipstick. Unless the grownups were around, no one really batted an eye, not even when she asked if we wanted to see the lace edge of her new panty. On the downwind, the heavy musk of magnolias. The call of owls at night, always interrogating.
Broken home (2)
Office day. That done to the church, where we did consult about our gallery. So home to dinner, where I found Mrs. Hunt, who brought me a letter for me to get my Lord to sign for her husband, which I shall do for her.
At home with the workmen all the afternoon, our house being in a most sad pickle.
In the evening to the office, where I fell a-reading of Speed’s Geography for a while.
So home thinking to have found Will at home, but he not being come home but gone somewhere else I was very angry, and when he came did give him a very great check for it, and so I went to bed.
a home brought me
all the house
a sad geography
thinking to have found a home
but being gone
somewhere else
as angry
Erasure poem derived from The Diary of Samuel Pepys, Wednesday 26 September 1660, a revision of my 2013 erasure.
Allowance
(1) My mother stands in the garden, dressed in stirrup pants and a print top cropped at the hip. I am five, according to the date she writes in blue ballpoint pen ink directly on the photograph: April 1966. I stand right next to her with a ribbon in my hair, wearing an outfit she must have sewn—a close-necked dress which looks like a tunic, because she was always leaving some allowance for growth. Behind us is a row of hollyhocks, most taller than me. The photograph is sepia, but I remember the flowers were pink and white. I can't see her eyes shaded by cat-eye sunglasses; can't tell if she was happy in the middle of that garden: roses in pots, stubby, uneven grass.