Via Negativa

"...to transcribe is just that— to bring a message 
across a threshold" ~ Mary Capello




And in this way, everything is a note—
            fan-shaped siftings of sunlight 

                       in the corner where a woman is talking
       with someone, headphones cancelling out

            the noise in the rest of the room as she
herself takes notes— 

                       The shirtless man jogging in the direction 
       of the bridge, insistent message of heat
 
             traveling from brow to nape to somewhere 
along the middle
               
                       crease of the spine's crumpled envelope—
And isn't language indebted in this way  

       to both the image and to thought? When the leaf 
              in the window bay emerged

                       as one of many along the stalks 
       transferred from some hothouse into a heavy urn, 

did it just then start to stipple its undersides in yellow,
              each dot circled as if in red pencil, or

       wasn't it always quietly transcribing in the dark? 
              Signals proliferate the way a lighthouse blinks, 

its one eye furious in a storm, the way
                        one cry, one blast, gives birth to whole

galaxies— Miles and centuries from the instant,
       are we not among the things still rocking in its wake—
          

"I will surely bless you, and I will surely 
multiply your offspring as the stars of heaven, 
and as the sand that is on the seashore."
                                - Genesis 22: 17



My mother whispered story after story into my ear
at bedtime. In each of them, a king on a sick bed,
in a stupor. The quest to find a cure or break
a spell.

Except for a few images of my childhood home yellowing
in a box, I have nothing left. Either fire ate them,
or water swallowed them whole. 

The pictures persist, though. Cunning shapes 
crocheted into curtains— hearts and deer, lovers
touching hands; flowers massed on the mantel. 

Burned as if with solar flames through a stencil, 
heat magnified to render a wound on wood, cork,
or leather. 

In one tale, the task is to gather: a thousand pearls
from the forest floor, grains flung from a sack. 
A sieve to cup the water as it did when whole.

In another, entire kingdoms need to be roused 
from sleep— the last one to taste honey on her lips
is the one you must kiss.
 
I know that time exists by the radiance it extracts
as it spools: days into each other, days into months,
months into years like brambles. 

And its speed is relative— relative to distance,
to the way you inhabit a moment or want to flee
in search of a new hiding place; or finally,
to the knowledge there is nothing to do but
hold still. 
 

How much can it hold                    in   This body

To be free of blemish                  free of stutter


and limp   Blaze fire                 forged by the god

of cunning                             of craftsmanship


If only there was       a way to seal the perforated 

A bolus to slip under      skin   A tincture bathing


the heart and its retinue           worn down organs  

Unclasped over decades        Asterisms    Necklaces  
                                 

Look at our shiny foreheads, 
our cheeks 
           that haven't yet  
lost all trace of softness from 
youth. And look  
                at the way we
stand, our toes either pointing
awkwardly toward each other or 
fanned out 
           the way dancers' do; 
at the indentations on our shoes 
where a bone out of joint pressed 
against leather, 
                 where an insole 
cushioned uncertain tread.
But there's still
                  so much we
can't fathom, can't know
enough to prepare for—
What weather
             ahead, what state
of being in the world; how to gather
wishes 
       to make our will known.
                

         That place to which our loves
                     have been consigned after perishing 
from snake bite—    To which they've been 
         abducted and exiled after a crack 
                     in the earth opened—    A lustful god 
tore them off the sidewalk or out of the fields  
         like flowers—   It's characterized 
                     as a place from which there's no hope
of return; still, stories of negotiation
         abound—   Throw sweet breads to the dog
                     with three snarling heads—   Appeal
the terms of passage—   A mother says, trade you 
         six months of the year for six kernels 
                     of crimson fruit the girl 
couldn't help put in her mouth, so desperate 
         was her hunger—   Play heart-rendingly 
                     on your instrument so as to move
the coldest juror and melt the prison bars—  Blindness
         and the long road back—   A shorn head, loosened
                     cuffs; chains snapped for a body restored—