Via Negativa

Dress comfortably, but not in last night’s negligee.
Nothing by mouth after midnight: personally,
I don’t really like the taste of nothing. I am reminded
of sawdust, or of certain fiber residues a.k.a. lint
from the dryer. Everything, therefore, should be
permissible. The treadmill will incline in the correct
direction if you can successfully use the word
cardiovascular as a slant rhyme. If you cannot use
your legs, you will be allowed to crank a bicycle with
your arms. If you make the electrodes click to the rhythm
of Tico-Tico, the test results may become unreadable,
or perhaps more readable. This is very serious, I am not joking.
It is important to know the measure of certain things in regard
to the heart: whether the blood, loosed like a caged animal
no longer used to the wild, will be able to return through
corridors narrowed by an abundance of grief and care,
or made dense with neglect; whether it will consent
to lie down in chambers that have grown too small,
their walls opening to looped circuits without end.

Methodical clicking, light metal against another surface: and I think that someone
in the kitchen is slicing an onion— this sound that wakes me after midnight.

For a moment I don’t know the day, don’t know the hour— But I am almost perfectly sure
that on the red and white chopping board, an onion is being diced, after midnight.

The night lights are out, only the clock’s green numbers float on the ceiling.
Outside: raindrops like tiny pearl onions, dark baguette of sky at midnight.

The rain has peeled away some of the heat. But there are always more
layers underneath, like an onion. And now I’m sleepless, after midnight.

I wish I knew how to tell which spiral leads into another. Then perhaps some things in life might be
simpler. And why I thought of the onion, I don’t know. But now it keeps me awake after midnight.

So many thoughts that unroll like parchment in the mind. And a poet I love once wrote in praise of
the onion and its honorable career: for the sake of others, disappear. All this, past midnight.

And long ago, someone spoke to me of marriage, bringing me home at dusk. I fingered the latch at the gate,
unable to put a finger on some vacant unease, tiny space at the onion’s heart. I think of it too at midnight.

It’s true there are worse things in life that bring tears, and that fumes from candle flame
help dissipate an onion’s sting. But what remedy for the soul’s unease, after midnight?

In response to small stone (107).

Sweet-gum, what good your Latin name
I say, who barely remember your common one—

And though the fig tree may not blossom
nor fruit be on the vines, I dig

and prune and water for promise: thread
of what language could offer up for me

or you— if you are out there— perhaps.
And through the patchwork grass, all morning

I have been scattering insects
with the noise of the lawn mower—

I’m sure they are right about me.
Humans and concocted gods— they dot the I’s

and hierarchically reshuffle. And if we two,
sprawled below on the sand, are burned

and offered, it is to no god we will name.
Seagulls perch on the rafters in the shadow of cypress,

or move from column to broken column submerged in water:
a Greek temple where no one now remembers the name of the god.

From moment to moment the world becomes memory,
a still life, what the French call nature morte.

***

NOTE: A Cento is a poem made up of parts from other works; late Latin, from Latin, patchwork garment; perhaps akin to Sanskrit kanthā, patched garment; first known use: 1605 (Merriam-Webster Dictionary)

Source texts of lines in this cento:

Debra Greger, “On First Looking into Chapman’s Flora”
Habakkuk 3:17-19
Kaspalita Thompson, comments on Dave Bonta’s (note to self)
Quincy Troupe, “Listening to Blackbirds”
Julie Martin, comments on Dave Bonta’s (note to self)
Dave Bonta, (note to self)
Rosanna Warren, “At Villeneuve-les-Maguelone”
Hayden Carruth, “Song: So Why Does this Dead Carnation”

In response to (note to self).