Via Negativa

Dark silhouettes of pine, valleys fanned out
as open-sided buses crest the ridge at dawn.

Frost-trails of breath lingering on the coldest
morning of the month so far. Tin shanties hold

their chilled sides close along the hills.
In one, a naked lightbulb: its tungsten

yellow glow above a kitchen sink,
where a grandmother is heating coffee

and putting the eggs in it to boil.
You glimpse her in the window as the bus

rolls by— lit end of her cigar
poised in her mouth, eyes scanning

the day for what warmth it will bring.

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

The flower dangles by its stem; the stair-
case peels its progress, plank by plank,

diminishing into that well of light
we call a landing: what shore suspends

midway between the gradual earth,
the gradual sky? Night turns to day,

and day to night, reversing strip that
lightens at the edges. Lovers meet

and then soon part: whispers in the hedge,
while in the air, haloed and beaten,

disc that floats like labor’s emblem, its
coat-of-arms. Burnished and driven, I lip

the rain that poems the smallest flame,
that dangles the flower from its stem.

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

You want to know how many hours remain
on the fringed lilac faces of these clocks—

Oh take heart, unstrap your sandals, walk by
the shore, leaving the animal that’s lowered

its head to nuzzle wet sculpted sand. And then
come back to lay beneath the windowsill—

You’ll hear the honeybee still sharpening
its rhetoric, the far-off notes made

by bodies nested in burr and fiddlehead fern.
The latch of the gate falls close at evening’s

approach. Its brassy little sound bursts
like a small blue blossom puncturing the dark.

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

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.