Via Negativa

                        "Love surprises us.
                         It ends."
                                            ~ Eliza Griswold


Accompany, as in provide musical support. Also walk with,
        be with; hand to hold. Your designated person in rooms

claustrophobic with accusation, or  just plain overwhelm. Not
       dependency, more like mutualism. Woolly bats and pitcher plants,

endosymbiotic algae;  pistol shrimp and goby, fig wasp and 
       fig. We scratched out "obey," exchanging vows. Instead,

gave our word: through sickness, health, mortgages, and sometimes
       helium balloons, cake. Then and now, hard to think about that afterlife

in which none of us remain, or only one of us survives the other.
       Jumpy times. You're reminded: sink then shoot up from the bottom;

knife through the surface, blubbering for air, though the world's
       long arm gathers everything back in after reeling you out. 

Maybe it's easy to forget, because there are magical things like flying
       noodles in the world; finger limes that burst open with citrus caviar,

octopodes dreaming in multicolor within the depths. Life laps and ebbs,  
       punctuated at intervals with the effort of striving then stopping,

quieting to a low-key but ever present ripple in the leaves. Do the gods  
       respond? You're careful to make your meaning clear— Not begging for 

special favor, just a decent chance to make good with what you got, time to
       tick off a few more boxes. You're a small speck in the universe. Still, to be

useful in some ways, but not begrudged a go, before the end, at those 
       vaults of sweetness where everyone else is tossing beach balls,  

wading in the kiddy pool, drinking herbal infusions out of mason jars. 
       Xysts lined with eucalyptus and pine, no surveillance drones, where
 
you could walk together. Not coming or going, just tracing 
      zigzag threads as if nothing could be more essential, because it is.

The afternoon before your surgery I sit 
in this quiet house, ignoring the laundry basket
and the checkerboard of ingrained dirt on kitchen
tile to slice fruit from the bag I brought home 
from the store. What is it about fruit with amulets 
for hearts—nectarines, plums, apricots, peaches—
with a pit in the center of their planetary bodies and
the squish as your teeth cut through their flesh? 
From Asia Minor, migrating birds helped scatter seeds 
of cherry and other trees. In Taoist mythology, even 
just the fragrance of a ripe peach of immortality 
extended your life by 360 years. You know everyone 
could use a little sweetness in their mouths, a legend  
about drifting upriver into a village where time has stopped.

~ with lines from Rebecca Solnit and Ross Gay


Zeitgeist, that defining spirit of a particular time in history—
       a mood that seeps into the smallest particle of the everyday.
You don't understand why everyone is always surly, or why there are 
       bans on books that show life's real complexity (beauty & horror, hurt & hope).
Xenophobia comes riding back into the streets in full view, spitting & swinging its fists.
       Climate these days is more than weather. The oceans are bleached & acidic,
warming at an alarming rate. Fires raze the hills in summer, floods drench the plains.
       Do you have recurring migraines from doomscrolling as much as dehydration,
vasoconstriction, a caffeine addiction? You're not alone. Roughly 301 million have anxiety,
       externalization of historical & personal trauma, paralyzing fear...  So much cortisol
unsettling the system, leaked from tricorn hats that sit atop the kidneys. What,
       foreseeably, is there to look forward to? Solnit says it's Not Too Late. Ross Gay says
The trees & the mushrooms have shown me this—joy is the mostly invisible, the under-
       ground union between us... Lose heart, take heart, lose heart, take heart again.
Some days you just want to survive. Some days you want to die, swiftly if possible.
       Helplessness or frank despair. Then there are days you say Damn it, I'm tired of always
reconsidering before you give in to the smallest pleasure; or even the right to express
       indignation & outrage at the apparent daily loss of collective conscience, at highly
questionable distortions of the law. How did the world become funhouse, Comic-Con for
      jingoists wielding flags & battering rams? Beneath the soil, networks of glowing fungi
perform the sustaining interconnectedness we desire. The largest organism on earth at 8.9
      kilometers or 2,200 acres in Oregon is the honey fungus—it's been around, defying
oblivion even after almost 9,000 years. To persist past prophecies of eternal
     loneliness, perpetual hand-wringing, complete extinction—wouldn't that be something?
Not naive but active hope: What if we joined our sorrows... What if that is joy?
     May we look deeply at our sorrows, then; may we see them in each other.

The house of my childhood was always
packed with noisy guests in summer—
vacationing aunts who played mahjong 
all night, cousins who chased each other 
around and under the dining table. The rest 
of the year, we had boarders—college 
students from Thailand. They wore 
miniskirts and T-strap sandals, and 
taught me how to play Chopsticks 
and Blue Moon on the piano, by ear,
plus improvised variations. My father said 
playing music by ear, intuitively, without 
benefit of notation,  is called oido—
only, he pronounced it wee-do, and so 
for the longest time I thought it was spelled 
w-i-d-o-w. Was this the reason the lonely
singer crooned Blue moon, you saw me standing 
alone/ Without a dream in my heart/ Without 
a love of my own? Drawn into its wistful
longing, I made up a narrative that perhaps 
she'd lost her love to death, but now was praying 
no longer to be alone. Oido, wee-do, how else 
could I explain the ability, in the absence of notes, 
to make music in one's head? It tries to embody 
a whole world of things which are separate and 
distinct from us, until we find a language 
to bring them almost close enough to touch,
almost close enough to pull into our arms.