Via Negativa

are pressed into crevices of limestone.

Their limbs, their bones, are smaller now,
pebbled or smoothly pleated. Their shrouds

have attained the quality of paper.
Tresses? Eyelash hair? These have become

slight as wind, but brittle. Removed from
village life, they do not care if animals

inquire into their secrets, hoard seeds
or feathers in the louvres of their ribs.

Nights dark as ink, then dawns
splayed through blue fingers of pine.

If it were here and whole, the heart
would think this was a nest.

             “Let heaven and earth be my coffins…” ~ Chuang-tzu

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

Two bright ceramic pots beneath the window: purple for starbursts
that haven’t seeded, orange for lavender. In other words, they’re empty.

Waiting at the doctor’s, a feathered strip glimpsed beneath
the awning. Blue wing, black bars, then the space emptied.

Geckos call on the fringes of the factory where young migrant workers
cobble computer tablet parts together. The suicide nets tonight are empty.

There are days I want to move boxes out of cold storage, not
knowing what’s inside: take them to the curb; purge, empty.

Cleaning my drawers, I find a small stack of unused journals.
The leather-covered one you gave me, my favorite, is still empty.

I dream of choosing a rich Japanese ink to fill my pens, with names
like Dew on Pine Tree (Syo-Ro) or Old Man Winter (Fuyu-syogun).

How much a flourish on cream stock gathers: scroll of morning glory,
blush of persimmon. Wildness of horses’ manes, the horizon empty.

Loosely held, the brush gathers the line as it goes. Uncertain at
first, it stumbles on the trail, then speeds: moving away from empty.

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

All night rain rattles soft against
the windows, forms pellets bordering
on frost; they fall like asterisks

upon the sill, language dissolving
as soon as spoken. Even the oboe
of a distant loon, the stream’s

purling clarinet, cannot prevent
this imminent slide toward silence—
The bell quieting toward the damper,

the mouth withdrawn from the reed;
the instrument returned to its velvet-
lined case, the tongue curled back

into its underground cave. So rich
and fragile, so little understood.
Maligned silence, milky as the swirl

at the bottom of a cup, toward which
the face bends to drink, wanting more.

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

A man wakes in a city between
the Indian Ocean and the Atlantic.
He feels like a stranger in the sleeping

house. He wakes before first light,
before the first bird leaves the nest,
before the silence is broken by a rustle

in the leaves. His feet are cold
on the floor of this room, someone
else’s room. He wears his clothes

as if they were someone else’s.
Where has the bird flown? The man
dreams of being a swallow who can fly

to the roof of the world,
to its balconies tiled in warm
terra cotta. Does he also dream

that his daughters are swallows
with green bead eyes, that their wings
cut out of silver paper and strung

with flowers, ring the walls with their
bright cries? In the grey stillness of dawn,
shut your eyes in the room like a man

without sight: tell me if this way,
you hear more acutely the signal of wings,
the small lift of air underneath each stroke.

 
(for Jim Pascual Agustin)

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.