Via Negativa

It ticks, the iris underneath: the heavy-lidded
eye in its leathered sac blinks open, mercurial,
at the slightest touch. So falls the sky in fable:

as a leaf, as a flutter of feathers, as an acorn
pinging across a table of rock. Fear is the room
where it all echoes; or love. A galaxy is only

a dark umbrella someone opens so rain can streak
the grass. When all the water’s gone, the ribs shine
dull silver. In the spaces far between are stars.

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

is iridescent: sheen of no particular color or shape, but sheen nonetheless— volatile and contractual, dependent on the grace of granite or the voluptuous ooze of oils, the scaled and crusty matter they say is proof that shells shed tears. No matter where it goes, light leaves a trace, some hint of a refrain, slight as a tendril rising from depths no one has neared. No matter how late I rise, or early, there it is in the particulars ringing your face: faint bronze-tipped hairs, the halo of a sigh receding into the pillow; each finger a pilgrim seeking the road, still guided by heat, the last electric body it touched.

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

At church on Sundays, I tend to forget
the right sequence of words in the Nicene
Creed. My ten year old squeezes my elbow

—she thinks I’m skipping words, going too
fast (just like the way I drive), merely
impatient to be done with it and get to

our destination. I’ve tried to explain
that my ability to remember the standard
version was ruined, ever since Father Jean-

Marie Chang of Lourdes Church on Kisad
Road in Baguio had an epiphany many years ago,
and created a thirty-minute “fast-track” mass.

It started at noon and ended in enough time
so folks could make it to the all-you-can-eat
buffet at the Country Club, or back home

a few streets away before the chicken stew
even had a chance to cool. Tucking, trimming,
and compressing, he also delivered homilies no more

than five minutes long. I’m sure the bishops fumed,
but no one could deny his flock soon outnumbered
those at other churches. His busy, practical

parishioners soon learned to cut through
repetitious language, the God from Gods
and Light from Lights, the true God from

true Gods. He’d even thought to streamline
salvation for us (no longer for us men— all this
predating gender-speak). There are times though,

when I make a more conscious effort to slow down,
to remember those parts of the sonorous old language
that make me think of cool vaults and flying

buttresses; and beneath them the molten yellow
of candle flame. And at the altar, sacristans
swinging censers filled with burning incense,

tendrils of smoke stalled somewhere between
fluttering and soaring, just like the hundred
and more petitions of the faithful on their knees.

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

I am thinking of questions to ask the poet
who writes lately of horoscopes and of death,
at least two things that have in common

the letter e, which might stand for the
eternal dilemma at their core: how much we
want to know what’s coming for us in a future

which no one can really see. It’s not quite the same
as the meteorologist forecasting days of rain,
tracking by radar the course of a hurricane

battering its way up the coast and across
the mountains, before dumping twelve to eighteen
inches of rain on the ground. Days and days later,

as the sky clears and the woods slowly begin
to dry, the families who fled low-lying regions
return to their homes after the evacuation

orders are lifted. We know some of them
will return to find everything as they
left it, except perhaps they might have

to throw all the food gone bad in the fridge
when the power went out. But at least some
of them will stop short in a muddy driveway

that once looked familiar, stare at a now empty
house lot strewn with fallen limbs and debris.
The next-door neighbor who decided to stay

through the worst of it, might come and
tell them what happened: how the waters rose
too quickly, how before nightfall, the river

currents pushed the house like a paper
boat under a bridge and out of sight.
And they will hug each other tearfully,

give thanks for their lives even while
bemoaning their losses, perhaps sinking
on their haunches or shaking their heads

in disbelief— While somewhere higher up
or inland, the rain will continue in its
own time, to make its way to the ground.

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

How your cares write themselves
on the chalkboard of your brow—
litany of looped hurts and

disappointments you wish
the mottle-winged moth would
brush away as it sweeps, haltingly,

across the surface of the floor.
Is it necessarily one or another
effect of age that you can’t fathom

why your son would rather live in sin
with his pregnant girlfriend, than go
before a justice of the peace and do

the right thing? or that you
want to chuck nearly thirty years
at the same job because you woke up

near dawn with the epiphany that, all
these years, you were really meant to be
a cabinet-maker in a village with one

main street? A mosquito lands on curls
of wood shavings the soft, creamy
color of skin. And we too tremble

at the same instinct: sweet blood, some
joy we’ve long postponed— And the years
click like beads of an abacus in the veins.

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.