Via Negativa

Weekends, we used to take the children
to the park, or what used to be the American
base where there was a mini-golf and skating
rink; a playground with cheerful painted animals
you could mount, spinners, teeter-totters 
and monkey bars. There they could have
their fill of grass to run and tumble in 
under the towering pines while we sat
on benches, until they tired and wanted 
a cold drink or an ice cream. To the west,
we could glimpse some of the road
that led past Teacher's Camp to Mines
View Park, where tourists tossed coins
into the gorge and posed with natives 
wearing g-strings and feathered caps. 
At that time, only members could get into
the Country Club, or dine at their smör-
gåsbord, or swim laps in their pool. Still,
I don't feel my children were deprived
of any joy. On cold mornings, they sat
together in bed, sneezing into tissues
while reading picture books. The world
then was everything we could name 
with certainty, not yet knowing how it 
could divide us from each other.

It doesn't seem that long ago, the day
you hugged your children before walking 
          through sliding doors at the terminal, 

emerging on the other side in this land where 
you' d go to school, to find space where you might 
          listen more closely to the sound of your own 

voice. You peel back previous coverings you'd
been given—daughter, wife, mother. In other 
         words, you can't exactly renounce the things 

that life's brought you (and don't want to), but 
you can try to change your relationship to them. 
         So here it is. You learned about distance in ways 

you didn't know before: how it brings some things 
into sharp relief, how you're still paying dearly for others.

Once, we dreamed of walking 
the famed Camino, pilgrimage 
covering months and miles through 
parts of Portugal, France, and Spain; 
ending at the field of the star where 
the saint is buried. It could even 
have been the honeymoon we never 
had, since after we married, a winter storm 
bore down on Chicago and we wound up 
spending the long weekend with our guests 
in a time-share rental whose dining table 
was still strewn with crumbs of lemon
poppyseed cake and edible flowers.
But we are no longer young, having spent 
so much of our lives working for the where-
withal that gave us this mortgaged roof 
(shingles rattling above our heads in high 
wind), that made it possible to put children 
through school and pay various doctors 
for our ailments. How curious, this word
which means with or by means of which 
a thing or outcome might be procured,
typically by financial means—a compound
of adverb and preposition followed by
a suffix indicating condition or state.
The Milky Way, in legends of the Camino,
was made of the dust raised by pilgrims'
feet. So many souls walking the paths
marked by shrines and scallop shells
in search of penance or of miracle, 
the exhausting labor of each step 
a ransom for their requests.
 

"I shall not lament 
the human, not yet."
                          - Dorianne Laux


A nematode wakes from forty-
six thousand years of sleep. So
long buried in permafrost, it loses
no time and straightaway starts
producing babies. Under 
a microscope, it resembles 
a figure eight unwinding 
from infinity; a silk sash 
looking to tether itself
to something more than 
the icy silence of a tomb.
There are times you feel 
like you've come back 
almost from the dead 
like that—certain you'd 
promised not to give your 
heart again, not to leave it  
in the open like a slug 
tempting a scattering
of salts. Is this a weakness,
a fatal flaw hardwired not
in the brain but in the gut?
Mornings in summer,
waiting at the train station
a few blocks from the bakery,
a warm wave of milky scent 
rolls in on the wind. You think
of the child who hasn't 
spoken to you in years 
now, the mother you couldn't
return to the earth with your 
own hands. You teeter just
a little on the brink.