Via Negativa

Because I admired a glazed plate veined with
obsidian and blue-green, my friend took me
to visit a potter in his studio. He worked
the local clay, prodded the wet mass on the wheel
into a wide-lipped vessel from which to pour
the milk or wine, mugs from which to drink,
dishes to hold warm slabs of meat or beautiful
smoked fish as if they merely leaped from the cold
arms of the river entire, as if their iridescent,
speckled bodies did not thrash when the air
left their lungs… I read of how long
the Buddha sat in the canopy as leaves
of the bodhi tree fell on his plain robes,
fell in the dust at his feet, or swirled away
in runnels of rain— until the torch of desire
burned clean and the pulse in the wrist
ticked like the faintest fragrance in the wind.
I don’t know that I have learned yet
what the green fists of bracken in the grass
have learned, how to open their complex fingers
to the sting of rain as if to say Let it come—
Sunlight gilds every surface today
but also knifes through every anguish;
and I don’t know who or what I address
as I lift my face and say Not yet.

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

“In my end is my beginning.”

There is a mole on the outer corner of my left eye,
another on the upper part of my thigh. The distance
between them: the time it takes for a tear to evaporate.

Where else on the body might you read what’s insisted,
recapitulated, what’s written small? Here is the mouth
with its characteristic stutter, the eyelid with its

recurring tic. Here is skin laid like an embroidered
table runner across the abdomen. On the field
that soon shadows in late afternoon, birds gather.

See the stroke of white on their tails, the faint
orange patch crowning their foreheads.
I want to decoupage the fragments of shadow

they’ve left on the green, the sad, sweet
impermanence of their flickering. Driving home
tonight, I hear on the radio about two comets

that must have collided in space, leaving trails
of dust: they’ve formed a pattern, a kind of tattoo
engraving the otherwise uniform dark.

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

If this is the middle, how long does it last? Once only, I may have come close; but I was never that girl who might have lain in her two-piece suit across the bed of a truck or on a beach under an overhang of rock, saying Let’s give them something to talk about, baby. Forever the wallflower then, even in math class: moving the popular girl with skin like almond cream to stride past in study hour and yank in disgust the extra pencil I’d tucked behind my ear. That calculus is over. This rain at dawn, though: in the half-light, how it makes the green more vivid, how the faltering songs of wood-thrushes chime like timepieces from another world. The flare is brighter still from pent-up longing. The world hasn’t gone away; its roots push deeper. The wind on my tongue tastes like salt from the sea; this late in life I want to roll up the cuffs of my jeans and walk without stopping along its wavering edge.

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

Take me back: I tell you I have come too far
from myself. A pebble drops into a well
but I cannot hear its thunk to let me know
it has come to rest. From the kitchen in my
childhood home, I could see the church belfry
clear across the roofs of houses, and the thin
grey cord of birds unspooling overhead at dusk—
Imagine the carillonneur in his wooden cabin
under the bells, striking out the music with his feet
and fists. Through the green wall of woods today,
the dawn sky leaks through a hundred holes.
I rummage in the bowl of random fortunes
and my hand picks out only those with no
coherent answer: Do not walk by yourself
in the dark. Or, It is better to have a hen
tomorrow than an egg today. And my heart
after all remains a sieve— Come sorrow; come love;
come mutable chord and struck descant of things.

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.