Via Negativa

Not accepting, not rejecting
says the Buddha as the demons
elect to live with him

underneath the tree.
He welcomes them, tells them
they are his honored guests;

they may stay. I want to know
how he does that, how he keeps
any facts of his pain

or anger to himself.
And at the end of the tale
how does he know this is the one

way to appease the final
and most terrible demon? He lays
his head in its lap, he tells it

“Eat me if you wish” while the sky
darkens or lightens and the tree
of history appears unmoved.

 

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

In her TEDx talk, Jae Rhim Lee is clad
from head to foot in what looks like a black

ninja suit with crocheted branches embroidered
across its surface. These contain spores

of infinity mushrooms, which she has patiently
cultivated in petri dishes and trained to eat

clippings of her hair, skin, and nails. The idea
is to use the mushrooms as a natural decomposition

agent upon the body’s death, so we no longer
have to worry about soaking corpses in formaldehyde

or pumping the skin with chemical filler
before applying makeup, thereby rendering

the body’s return to its organic state as clean
and green as possible. There will be no more

burning in a cremation chamber, no expensive
casket of metal or pine with satin linings.

When they suit our dead bodies up, lay them
in the earth and cover them with soil, in the dark

the mushrooms will begin their quiet work: digesting
the slowly dissolving body, neutralizing its poisons,

until at last it, too, becomes merely a handful of spores,
dust settling into that common bowl that once we sprang from.

Here we are, and here
we will file into the fields
at dawn to make our voices known.

And if, according
to the strident dictates
of those grown blind on stupid

hate, we should have left
this world— We need only
to look at our hands and feel

the solid weight of every kind
of work we’ve done. Fish
we have fished for you,

chrome handle on the sides
of hotel doors and banks
with marble floors

we have opened for you
and the progress of others
who never saw us standing there.

Water we have filled
with tears and memories
of exhausted seafaring.

We should live out
this life and take from it
all grace that we can take

as far as humanly possible
and at the end say we will not
stumble, we refuse

to swing at the end of a rope…
Here we are where the century
has left us, where the future’s

impatient horse gallops in
from the far horizon and arrives
at the door of our homes, whinnying.

Sketch one line.
Then another.
Then a third.

Include a hinge somewhere
(it may appear
not just in the middle).

Stop, or go on.

Write a question.
Then write an answer.

Write another one,
and go on.

Write a memory,
then write a taste.

Write a dream,
then write the waking.

Write another one,
and go on.

Write an answer.
Then write what you don’t know.

Write another.
And go on.

Stepping out
into the hallway
at the end
of my class,
and a student
stops me to ask
could she have
a word, for next
week it is
registration
for spring;
and am I going
to be teaching other
classes in poetry—
And she is disappointed
when I tell her yes
but not at the under-
graduate level.
She was hoping
to take more poetry
having really
connected
this semester.
When I tell her
I am really glad,
she says she wants
to write her story,
then without
transition
or preamble
she is talking
about her only son
and how she
loves him very much,
and I know it must
be so because
her eyes light up
and her voice
changes; then,
okay, she
has to confess
she had him
when she was 12
and that’s why
she wants so much
to write this story
and all the amazing
things she has learned.
I don’t remember
much anymore what I
might have been
thinking about
or doing at that age
—probably picking
secretly at the scabs
on my legs from being
prone to every
imaginable food
allergy; or self-
conscious
about the way
I thought everyone
in my school must be
looking at me
in disgust; 12,
probably wishing
I had normal parents
who would let me bathe
or wash my hair
more than once
a week when I
had my period,
because they
were of a generation
that believed it
unhealthy for a girl
soiling the water
with her blood.
As if blood and water
couldn’t mix, or as if
hygiene was less
an issue than a taboo.
I wound up
marrying young, too;
though not as young
as 12. I blame this
in part on our lack
of communication
about anything
resembling
the intimate— how
instead of candid talk
about questions and
anxieties, I got a book
called On Becoming
a Woman thrust
into my hands when I
was 10, the age when
I began menstruating.
It had a cover
depicting a smiling
bride dressed in white,
surrounded by a bevy
of bridesmaids,
in front of a cottage
and a garden with masses
of flowers; and any
mention of sex
and where babies come
from was written,
it seems, almost entirely
in euphemisms. Far cry
from something like
Our Bodies, Ourselves,
which my daughters
got to read in their
own time. I don’t
get a chance to say
any of this to my student,
who is rushing off to her
next class; and I
as well have to get
to a meeting. But I do
reiterate my encouragement
of her desire to do
something more
with her writing—
even manage to tell her
of a contest run by a journal
looking for narratives
of profound changes
in a woman’s life.
Then we are off,
and the week is soon
over. I say See you
in class next week,
and Don’t forget
to vote.