Via Negativa

—always, about the past. Always,
about histories which follow us
like wraiths out of the mist;
neediest, like ghosts and old
lovers, when the cold sets in
and strips the landscape
to the bone.

When you look at statues
in the shade, obelisks or plaques
overlaid with fleur-de-lis; or a marker
saying on such and such a date
arrived so many men— strange, wild,
picturesque— you see with your winter eye
their color like that bronze into which
a small proportion of gold is worked
by the molder—

how they tested the winds
pulling through the galleon’s rigging
by holding up their fingers before they
jumped ashore, shedding chains as they went.
Lacrustine, wrote Lafcadio Hearn of their village
on stilts in 1883, listing in the current:
a secret guarded by reeds and waste—

vicious crabs, alligators
slinking through mud, their jaws
unhinged. Chickens with one leg,
limping along.  Not even the post
ventured here, where clouds
of mosquitoes reigned and made
a sound like the boiling of
innumerable caldrons. 

Rumors persist about the deep
green of their eyes, the way
they danced with the shrimp,
their bodies supple as fresh-water
eels. I didn’t come by boat or ship,
and the only card game I know
is matching pairs—

but when I read that on stormy
evenings the card-dealer called out
22 as Dos paticos en laguna, I can see
the poetry in his eye: the way I learned
to describe the world. That’s
how all migrants and seafarers

must think: not knowing
the words in a foreign tongue—
for gale, for ice, for snow— they’ll look
for ideograms in the bodies of
whelk and birds and fish; they’ll talk
with their eyes, with their hands.

  

 

In response to Via Negativa: Blizzard.

(A holyday). Lay long; then up, and to the office, where vexed to meet with people come from the fleete at the Nore, where so many ships are laid up and few going abroad, and yet Sir Thomas Allen hath sent up some Lieutenants with warrants to presse men for a few ships to go out this winter, while every day thousands appear here, to our great trouble and affright, before our office and the ticket office, and no Captains able to command one-man aboard.
Thence by water to Westminster, and there at the Swan find Sarah is married to a shoemaker yesterday, so I could not see her, but I believe I shall hereafter at good leisure. Thence by coach to my Lady Peterborough, and there spoke with my Lady, who had sent to speak with me. She makes mighty moan of the badness of the times, and her family as to money. My Lord’s passionateness for want thereof, and his want of coming in of rents, and no wages from the Duke of York. No money to be had there for wages nor disbursements, and therefore prays my assistance about his pension. I was moved with her story, which she largely and handsomely told me, and promised I would try what I could do in a few days, and so took leave, being willing to keep her Lord fair with me, both for his respect to my Lord Sandwich and for my owne sake hereafter, when I come to pass my accounts.
Thence to my Lord Crew’s, and there dined, and mightily made of, having not, to my shame, been there in 8 months before. Here my Lord and Sir Thomas Crew, Mr. John, and Dr. Crew, and two strangers. The best family in the world for goodness and sobriety. Here beyond my expectation I met my Lord Hinchingbroke, who is come to towne two days since from Hinchingbroke, and brought his sister and brother Carteret with him, who are at Sir G. Carteret’s. After dinner I and Sir Thomas Crew went aside to discourse of public matters, and do find by him that all the country gentlemen are publickly jealous of the courtiers in the Parliament, and that they do doubt every thing that they propose; and that the true reason why the country gentlemen are for a land-tax and against a general excise, is, because they are fearful that if the latter be granted they shall never get it down again; whereas the land-tax will be but for so much; and when the war ceases, there will be no ground got by the Court to keep it up. He do much cry out upon our accounts, and that all that they have had from the King hath been but estimates both from my Lord Treasurer and us, and from all people else, so that the Parliament is weary of it. He says the House would be very glad to get something against Sir G. Carteret, and will not let their inquiries die till they have got something.
He do, from what he hath heard at the Committee for examining the burning of the City, conclude it as a thing certain that it was done by plots; it being proved by many witnesses that endeavours were made in several places to encrease the fire, and that both in City and country it was bragged by several Papists that upon such a day or in such a time we should find the hottest weather that ever was in England, and words of plainer sense. But my Lord Crew was discoursing at table how the judges have determined in the case whether the landlords or the tenants (who are, in their leases, all of them generally tied to maintain and uphold their houses) shall bear the losse of the fire; and they say that tenants should against all casualties of fire beginning either in their owne or in their neighbour’s; but, where it is done by an enemy, they are not to do it. And this was by an enemy, there having been one convicted and hanged upon this very score. This is an excellent salvo for the tenants, and for which I am glad, because of my father’s house.
After dinner and this discourse I took coach, and at the same time find my Lord Hinchingbroke and Mr. John Crew and the Doctor going out to see the ruins of the City; so I took the Doctor into my hackney coach (and he is a very fine sober gentleman), and so through the City. But, Lord! what pretty and sober observations he made of the City and its desolation; till anon we come to my house, and there I took them upon Tower Hill to shew them what houses were pulled down there since the fire; and then to my house, where I treated them with good wine of several sorts, and they took it mighty respectfully, and a fine company of gentlemen they are; but above all I was glad to see my Lord Hinchingbroke drink no wine at all. Here I got them to appoint Wednesday come se’nnight to dine here at my house, and so we broke up and all took coach again, and I carried the Doctor to Chancery Lane, and thence I to White Hall, where I staid walking up and down till night, and then got almost into the play house, having much mind to go and see the play at Court this night; but fearing how I should get home, because of the bonefires and the lateness of the night to get a coach, I did not stay; but having this evening seen my Lady Jemimah, who is come to towne, and looks very well and fat, and heard how Mr. John Pickering is to be married this week, and to a fortune with 5000l., and seen a rich necklace of pearle and two pendants of dyamonds, which Sir G. Carteret hath presented her with since her coming to towne, I home by coach, but met not one bonefire through the whole town in going round by the wall, which is strange, and speaks the melancholy disposition of the City at present, while never more was said of, and feared of, and done against the Papists than just at this time. Home, and there find my wife and her people at cards, and I to my chamber, and there late, and so to supper and to bed.

it is winter
and we speak
with passionate hands

in the world beyond
there will be no ground
that is not white

I go bone by bone
through the whole
strange city

Erasure poem derived from The Diary of Samuel Pepys, Monday 5 November 1666.

If we traveled 
on the speed of our desire, 
where would we be by now? 

The moon's milky glaze on the road 
leads to the sea: and every window's
antlered with light— 

but if you knocked on the doors 
to ask for lodgings, they might 
or might not open. 

Evening falls in the countryside.   
A donkey brays and farmhands 
round up the sheep. 

We all come back
in the night to gnaw 
at something.

In the middle of the field 
lies the heart of a saint, 
or the bones buried by the dog. 

There's a name for the kind 
of hunger that can't stop eating
only because the mouth is lonely.

 

[an erasure poem]

mysterious          
silver-splashed 
hoofed
ungulate

lost
for nearly
30 years

shy
fangs
silver-backed

two-toned
flanks

stolen
species
forest
traps

always have best choice, first choice, 
and they're allowed to change their minds 
but we can't ever be fickle— we're mere 
mortals after all, and fools to invoke 
some sort of urgency like the heart, 
so if winter has been here forever, 
how much do you think spring 
will cost because from experience, 
the cleaners always make a killing 
once they're corporatized, though I 
would so like to be a woman of more 
than domestic and womanly service 
and sacrifice of parts because I know 
in the end, Death redeems nothing; and 
still the gods always have the best 
choice, a choice in weapons for war 
and for marketable words; in women, 
in wives, in boys they also take 
pleasure in as well as animals 
in the forests and fields like dogs 
or oxen or pheasants or swans, 
anything with a neck that can both 
bend and snap; and the waterways 
are littered with the afterhusks 
of all the choices they made 
before they changed their minds 
before a previous set of choices 
so now we have to talk about 
resilience and climate change 
and ocean rise while they keep 
harping on their days of glory 
when people and things knew 
their place and the parties, 
the parties, weren't they wild 
and fabulous— though it's not 
clear anymore if there was a true 
before and after, because we also 
got confused: and didn't Yoda say 
Always two there are, no more 
no less: a master and an apprentice 
and we know he was talking about a Sith, 
so what's up with how the gods always 
have at least two sets of names, one 
supposedly for use in those kingdoms 
overshadowed by whitewashed palaces 
against skies and seas of tourist blue, 
one for that kingdom from which our 
notions of legislation and law 
and the virtues of the middle way 
were supposedly drawn— but who 
actually knows why Hercules was 
Heracles, Artemis was Diana, 
Mercury was Hermes, who's also
associated with Prometheus... or 
am I mixing them up and being 
an unreliable witness, and I say 
witness for haven't they also come 
interfering in my own affairs, some 
cop on beat peering lewdly through 
the open car window to ask if everything 
was alright as I sat, right breast exposed 
and feeding an infant on my lap; then 
there'll be those making impossible demands 
like which half of your child or dog or cat 
or house or some other form of beloved 
would you most wish to keep after it 
has been severed in half or kidnapped 
by some tyrant of darkness, but if 
your hand so much as flew up to cover 
your mouth in fear or alarm or made 
a fist as if to strike out or protest 
then god help you, they'll say, god 
help you, which you know is code 
for you are so so very on your own. 

Veined, my limbs long for the dream of undulation as jellyfish, for a latticework of mangroves in which to play at hiding and being found. They crave the dusk that settles beneath closed lids, respite from the moon’s floodlight parading like a noisy wheel, a carousel on repeat, a steel drum. Cool lengthening in moist earth, pearl tooth of a radish manufacturing roots. Once, after a storm, I reached behind the cauterized stump of a tree and found a cascade of brown scalloped fins. They were beautiful as all fruiting bodies are that grow from lightning: a burst of cells, a frantic multiplying as answer to the threat of their obliteration.

What is silence? Something of the sky in us.
A rift that opens, so two not speaking

can step through to find a street 
still blunted by rain, part 

of a fence leaning against another 
part that isn't broken. There's no need

to point out what needs to be done.
Once, on a mountain road wide enough
 
for only one vehicle, two
met in the middle, unable

to proceed. I don't know how each
made its way to its destination:

if passengers got down from the bus,
shouldered their belongings and made

the trek to town on foot. It's not
so easy to return to the beginning

when something keeps nudging you 
forward. A stone thrown over the edge 

falls for a long time, and you strain 
your ears to hear the sound it makes.