Via Negativa

What was that thread of music I heard just now,
what was the sound of my name, my secret name,
the one the elders bestowed on me in childhood

under the aegis of a spotted moon to confuse
the gods too generous with their gifts of fever
and blood and the blisters than ran up and down

my limbs like steps to their dollhouse-sized temples?
It comes back as the warbler lisps at the woods’ edge,
as the green-feathered trunks run dark with rain

so I think I hear old tunes on an upright piano—
my father and uncles gathered in the living room,
singing “Wooden Heart”, “Begin the Beguine”,

“Let Me Call You Sweetheart”, and “Besame Mucho”.
And the self that was me is still there, scribing
time under the bedclothes, fingertip to broken skin.

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

(after “Flight of Swallows Over the Field of Gold” by Clive Hicks-Jenkins)

“… [his] breath kindleth coals, and a flame goeth out of his mouth.” Job 41:21

What you are made to understand from
the beginning is that everything is winged—
not just the swallows scissoring the air
across the warrior’s bolero jacket, but the field
itself caught in the blue curvature of furrows
coming unfixed from the landscape.
Against the screens (are they sycamore,
are they birch?) at the edge of the woods,
and the ivory of the pennant which billows
from one end of the lance, who could tell
a gray tail’s flicker from the side of a nine-
pointed leaf? Even the beast’s glorious
vermillion wings unfurl, as if to say there
has been no shame in using such power,
subdued now under the calm gaze of the one
who has yoked the rippling energy of this
world, as if he could make it do his bidding.

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

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.