Via Negativa

The trains of Norfolk Southern rumble 
past the new cafe. It's the same line 
that carried vinyl chloride in 2023, 
when something overheated and 38 cars 
derailed on the edge of East Palestine, 
Ohio. Think of the rain that must have 
hissed and crackled in the aftermath. 
Of dark plumes rising into the earth's 
free troposphere, as families packed 
their children and pets into cars
and drove away. A couple of years after
cleanup, some people have returned 
but some have stayed away. I don't 
blame them. How does anyone know 
the earth has no more toxins, 
if air and water particles are 
no longer sheathed in emissions? 
When even one coupler misaligns 
and a railcar wheel slips the track, 
your mind runs away with it— You won't 
even have time to blow kisses or wave 
goodbye, in the brief moment of cartoon 
suspension after you're run off a cliff. 
 

"...you are not as heavy as the cup of earth, 
not placid as is the cup of water, not 
turbulent as is the cup of air..." 
                   ~ on the Four of Cups, Rider Tarot



In the card, the man seated crisscross 

under a tree wears a mildly petulant 

expression. A hand emerges out of a cloud, 

offering a draught from a golden chalice. 

In the foreground, three other cups in a row 

might mean he's already drained them. Did he 

not like the flavor in any? Does he no longer 

care for the offer of another chance? Under

its tunic waistcoat, the tired heart looks  

for the hinge in every conflict, the signs

saying it's time to push out the long skewers 

that have turned it into nothing but a plump 

pincushion. Just look outside: someone has raised 

an arbor, started to deck it with flowers and fruit. 

The mascot of my school is a lion; a monarch,
to be exact. Meaning king, the creature who sits
atop the food chain in the wild. Except its statue 
on the quad has no cojones; just a rough undersurface 
of concrete. Is this departure from anatomical 
correctness intentional? A conservatism made
sure the mermaid mascots around this port 
city are flat: flat-hipped, flat-chested, no tit-
illation of boobs beneath painted bandeaus. 
It's not clear when balls was first used  
to mean both the possession and lack of bravery 
or nerve. Decades ago, my ex pushed my father 
against the wall and swore lukdit mo to his face, 
meaning dickhead. We were living with my parents 
and he was angry at not being the man of the house. 
I didn't have the nerve to speak up against this
injustice. Perhaps I hadn't grown my own balls yet.
But really, I had not yet come to understand 
how strength, like in the Rider tarot, can be 
a woman subduing the fearsome beast so it lets her 
pat its head and scratch its chin, while the symbol 
for infinity whirls gently above their heads.  

At the office doing business all the morning, and my wife being gone to buy some things in the city I dined with Sir W. Batten, and in the afternoon met Sir W. Pen at the Treasury Office, and there paid off the Guift, where late at night, and so called in and eat a bit at Sir W. Batten’s again, and so home and to bed, to-morrow being washing day.

doing business all
in one thin city

with no pen
the office of tomorrow

Erasure poem derived from The Diary of Samuel Pepys, Monday 10 March 1661/62.

"...late 14c., prouynen, proinen, of a bird, "to trim 
the feathers with the beak;" of a person, "to dress 
or groom oneself carefully," from an extended or 
transferred sense of Old French proignier, 
poroindre "cut back (vines), prune" — etymonline.com


They tell Mark, we have no tall ladder, 
no tools to dismember the limbs of the tree: 
this annual pruning before spring's promise 
of regreening, so summer will be full of fruit. 

They also show him three planks on the deck's 
back steps— ends rotted through, middles soft— 
they need replacing. Along another length, 
dark streaks which call for power washing. 

He will cut, he will replace, he will fix
what needs fixing without fanfare; an hour
here and there in the weeks ahead, after 
his day working at his construction 

sites. They will pay him the honest cost 
of his labor by the hour, plus materials. 
The arrangement suits all of them. They come 
from people with histories of migrant labor—

people who've bent to furrows in the soil 
for ten cents a day and climbed the roofs 
of orchards when everyone else declined; 
people who've always struggled 

to make do with less. But today, as he
sits on the bottom step, he pauses; pulls out
his phone and tells them he's just returned 
from the islands, where he had to claim 

the body of his son from the morgue; 
arrange cremation, and then for the ashes 
to be sent to him. Only twenty, felled
by bullets after his own family 

kicked him out into the streets.
The photo he shows them leaves 
no doubt this child grew from 
the tree that is his father. 

Tall and willowy of build, angular 
jaw, smooth skin; so young. Eyes 
already shadowed by knowledge of what 
the world exacts by way of maintenance.