Via Negativa

(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.

(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.

(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.

(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.

(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.