Via Negativa

The story is that an eagle mistook 
Aeschylus' bald head for a rock, 
and dropped a tortoise upon it. 
Did it shatter his skull or give
him a giant concussion? In any case,
he was supposed to have died instantly. 
Aeschylus, described as the father of 
tragedy, wrote: He who learns must suffer. 
And even in our sleep, pain that cannot 
forget falls drop by drop upon the heart. 
What of the tortoise— did it incur any 
injuries? In Maso Finiguerra's pen-and-
sepia-ink drawing of the scene, the idea 
of catastrophe makes a light impression. 
There's the writer, seated placidly by 
a stream, book on one knee, nodding off 
perhaps because of the leaves rustling in 
the grove. Strangely, the before and 
after of the turtle's fall is rendered 
in the drawing. One moment it hovers 
mid-air like a cartoon alien ship. 
In the next, it's landed smack 
on its back on the artist's head. 
The eagle itself wears an expression
of mild dismay, perhaps having just 
then realized it aimed at the wrong 
target. But such is the nature of tragedy— 
how the small, seemingly inconsequential 
thing leads to the undoing.

My student was talking about a film 
he described as terrible— about terrible 

human beings and how they did terrible things 
to each other, with no relief at the end. Not 

even a shot panning away from the broken window-
pane and into the shadowed hills, not even the noises 

animals make in the woods, magnified by the dark. Why 
even does it exist, he asked? why do people watch it? 

A movie can be like a poem, and a poem like a movie.
Nested images, personae, mood, some kind of setting. 

A poem can seem to have several movies nested inside 
it. But even the bleakest poem couldn't have complete

cynicism: otherwise, why was it turned into a poem?
Someone took all the koi out of the small pools

by the entrance to a battleship— nine guns, three
main gun turrets— now turned into a museum.  

We recall seeing the flash of orange and gold
scales as fish darted through moss-green water.

Chained by two anchors, the ship almost doesn't 
seem connected to something as terrible as war.

Before I went to the office my wife and I had another falling out about Sarah, against whom she has a deadly hate, I know not for what, nor can I see but she is a very good servant. Then to my office, and there sat all the morning, and then to dinner with my wife at home, and after dinner did give Jane a very serious lesson, against we take her to be our chamber-maid, which I spoke so to her that the poor girl cried and did promise to be very dutifull and carefull. So to the office, where we sat as Commissioners for the Chest, and so examined most of the old accountants to the Chest about it, and so we broke up, and I to my office till late preparing business, and so home, being cold, and this night first put on a wastecoate. So to bed.

falling dead is a lesson
we take to the poor

if a full chest
cold is a waste

Erasure poem derived from The Diary of Samuel Pepys, Tuesday 2 December 1662.

 
Behind the small folding bookshelf
in the guest room, I find three
canvasses. Each one bears traces 
of the start of a project— landscape, 
portrait, indeterminate still life; 
none of them complete beyond a first 
thin layer. I must have seen things 
then that beckoned as finished visions, 
but that now I must conjure if I want 
to complete them. Not to make 
a copy of the thing, but to manifest 
the heat that cut through the distance— 
wheel of yellow, bowl teeming with fruit; 
girl blowing a profusion of dandelion 
seeds into the wide open sky.

Such an office has been established and forgotten  
and revived too many times to count. Smaller variants
exist— Whistleblower Hotline, Consumer Complaint 
Department, Ombudsman's Office, Ethics Committee.
It's a ministry because it's almost a vocation
to which you swear a vow: to transparency and
accountability, freedom of speech and of the press,
observation of due process, establishment of sanctions.
But it's growing a global network, staffed with  
the compassionate and civic-minded. They are not 
allowed to take bribes nor award ghost contracts 
while looking the other way. They will visit families 
whose dwellings have been swallowed by flood, and 
document the absence of well-built dikes, dams, 
and bridges despite billboards along the highway 
lauding progressive infrastructure. They cause 
warrants to be issued for officials and businessmen, 
and demand scrutiny of financial records. After 
following the money, it should become clear who 
enabled and who signed off on, who claimed they were 
only following orders while tucking millions into bank 
accounts. They receive reports leaking secret 
conversations about the launching of torpedos against 
small sailing vessels. They gather in the hundreds, 
blocking garages before illegal enforcement units 
can get into their vehicles to make yet another raid 
on ordinary civilians— the ones they've been ordered 
to bring to private detention facilities whose earnings 
rake in hundreds of millions a year. Sometimes they 
are actual ministers: a pastor brandishing a bible 
in the faces of those who dared to enter a church 
with evil intent. Most times they peacefully organize 
food and coat drives; they chant or play music, 
hold up signs on the periphery of courthouses.

The former leader of a small 
southeast Asian nation sits 
in a jail cell awaiting trial 
at the Hague. Well-appointed, 
with its own kitchenette, but 
jail nontheless. When the petition 
for his interim release is denied,
his followers weep and embrace
carboard standees. Elsewhere,
families of victims in his "war
on drugs" follow the news by video
link, and clap. They clutch pictures
to their chests too— of husbands 
and children felled by bullets 
fired by death squads, masked 
and riding tandem on motorcycles.