Via Negativa

At times you come across information 
that hardly seems believable, until you fact-
check and find out it's true. For instance, 
pineapples take anywhere between 18 months 
and two years to grow. Ophthalmologists say 
you'll make fewer and fewer tears as you get older, 
though this doesn't guarantee you'll have less to feel 
sad about. Today, after a meeting in the conference 
room, I buy a coffee at a crowded bagel shop
and wait in line. When the lady at the counter 
calls "Jesus Christ #164," no one even blinks. 
I watch to see who'll pick up the breakfast 
sandwich, but Jesus Christ has apparently 
given me the slip. Looking around, I don't see
anyone with bits of egg and bagel on their lip 
or beard. Students hunch over their laptops, 
sipping iced lattes; noise-canceling headphones 
cancel out the rest of the world. Some of them
will pass the finals, and others fail despite 
having crammed for it two sleepless nights 
in a row. Outside, the grounds crew bags leaves 
that have fallen. At noon, they'll sit in their truck 
to eat lunch. Maybe one of them will smoke
a cigarette. Maybe they'll come inside to use
the restroom, then think about getting a Coke
or an Americano. Maybe no one here is a god or
everyone is a god, guaranteed some kind of idea
of their fate—Mayflies live only a few hours, luna 
moths about a week. Giant barrel sponges 
have been known to live over 2,000 years. 
When hurt, threatened, or sinking into decay 
on the ocean floor, immortal jellyfish know 
the trick of reversing the life cycle and coming 
back to life. Don't ask me about tomorrow,
though I could perhaps tell you what I plan
to do with the rest of this shortening day. 

You wanted to forget what came before,
        and for some time, you do: the falling-apart-year, 
the year thieves broke into your unfinished house 
       during a storm; the earthquake year, the year of 
burying. Then, years of constant traveling, years 
       of letting yourself into the house past midnight 
while others slept, oblivious to your arrival. You  
       wanted to forget—only another way of saying   
you remember everything. Sometimes, with other 
       passengers, you took your luggage out of the hold 
and all of you sat huddled on the side of the highway, 
       waiting for another bus to come along. You can still  
see the clear, dark sky, the crescent moon suspended like
       a feather;  your figure, smudged and distant at the end  
of a scope you look through from where you sit tonight.

The odor is unmistakeable—
delirium as entrance to an underworld,
solemn as a pillar of salt. A palmful
is enough to change fire into a wreath
you can lay on all the graves of your dead.

Is this why you want to sit 
with an apron full of these branches, 
snipping off the green digits as though  
they made up time you might 
still retrieve despite its passing?

Every night, you descend deeper
into the twilight of dreams. There are
whole towns in the distance; streets,
steeples, groves of green. A path
to the river, winding like a sheet.

The neighbors lay out stuff 
on their front yard: patio furniture, 
planters of various shapes and sizes,
bowls and books and magazines; quilts,
winter coats and summer jackets. All
day long, people come by to take a look.
Someone walks away with a small shelf,
another with a desk lamp. At the age
I'm at, I've long wanted to start my own 
cleaning-out but can't seem to get to it. 
I wish I could say I don't want anything 
more, but that wouldn't be true. I had  
a toy piano in childhood, and even if I 
can't remember it well, suddenly I miss
its firetruck-red stain, its octave of 
imitation keys.  In another week, 
it will be time to turn back the clocks
an hour. I wish I knew what's ahead
besides the dark dropping earlier,
besides the leaves of the fig 
curling up like hands hiding 
their last green gashes of color. 
  

I wish I could reassure you that soon,
this brooding will fade, this ache
seemingly fixed on the edge of the daily; 
ink-green of a forest encircling the little 
clearings we make and have come to call 
our residence—our flour-dusted streets 
and neat hedges, the cotton squares 
on which we rest our heads to sleep. 
Animals call to each other at the edge 
of the river and in the eaves of trees. They, 
too, must swallow the hard seeds of chance. 
Everything passes through our bodies:
we take what sustenance we can, and let go 
of the sorrow which glimmers in heaps, 
in moonlight. Look, these are the things
that must not have been strong enough 
to keep resisting toward the idea of joy.