Via Negativa

is what they call artists who didn't go
to art school or take a single formal
art lesson in their lives. And yet
visions in their minds took shape
in clay or burst open with oils 
on canvas. Grandma Moses pieced 
her quilt-square landscapes, Van Gogh 
his bending wheat fields and vibrant 
yellow-green interiors. Fingers   
listened to every shape and shadow 
in the world. A tarnished teakettle 
on a windowsill is no accessory— only 
part of the equipment of daily life. 
Tea sets with missing cups. Mismatched
plates, silverware from yard sales;
armchairs covered with oily antimacassars
pressed to stiffness from the light 
of countless afternoons. Isn't this how 
you've always learned— figuring it out 
one trial at a time, as if from memory 
before it becomes memory? The lesson:
you prepare for joy the way you prepare 
for sorrow. How to stand without flinching
as orchids and velvet moths circle your head
and a black monkey coils a necklace of thorns 
around your neck, from which a dead hummingbird
with wings outspread now dangles like a pendant.   

~ after "Self Portrait with Thorn Necklace and 
Hummingbird," Frida Kahlo (1940)

My beginning poetry class is unsure
about tercets and triplets. They're both 
stanzas with three lines. The difference 

is that all three lines of a triplet rhyme. 
I ask, Who has triplets in their family? 
The girl who always sits front, center, 

raises her hand; she's one of a set 
of triplets. She looks slightly confused 
when I ask, Which one of you is here? 

~ for Marianne


Will it be saag paneer, warmly  
green with spice, or pork belly
glossy under bar lights; that pupu
platter at Alkaline where cocktails
are cute and the sake is tinged 
with the smile of tropical fruit?
It's noon and we've changed 
our minds half a dozen times 
but there's no need to apologize
or forgive the wild swings of desire.
After all, isn't this our practice?
Tasting, arranging, revising, 
paring away then calling out Wait, 
bring back the menu? We want it all,

including a world wide enough
for our hungers. We want the longaniza 
and egg rice bowl, but miss the tart
bite of atsara that should be on the side,
and so we'll ask politely for vinegar and
garlic. There are some people who fold
at Take it or leave it, as if the self  
is an exact system. But we know this is it  
each time. There's no rehearsal, no understudy 
waiting in the wings. So we come as we are, 
with all our mess and improvising, bearing 
everything we carry to the table. Lint and loose 
change in our pockets, maybe not even quite  
enough to feed the meter, but right now it's OK. 

It took years and four apartment moves
before we decided “to buy;” years before
my husband could start to feel maybe
he could call this place home. Then again, 
he revised that to mean, home not as in this 
region of the country but rather the house 
we signed the mortgage on, this one with a fig 
tree in the yard which, even more ahead of season 
now than last, is pushing out little green bulbs 
of fruit under each cluster of splayed green 
leaves. Though we both left the country  
of our first formation, I still know 
all the street names, a  map carved 
in memory surer than stone. But sometimes 
his sense of home seems more solid than mine:
his sense of family grown both older and more 
burnished through the years, despite the death 
of both parents— whereas mine is chipped 
and cracked in so many places from a history 
of rifts predating my birth, and current ones
that make it difficult to resurface any memory 
without summoning clogs that choke the throat. 
He can conjure streamers of many-colored pressed 
rice petals strung at every window in May, 
the indistinct susurrus of children’s voices 
in the streets. Mostly, though, he remembers
what exactly a sibling or a parent said and
on what occasion of daily life, knighted
with the same quality of kindness.
Perhaps it’s why I’m the one more often
rendered bereft by circumstance; the ruminant, 
easy to collapse in tears. These days, driving
home under the newly lush canopy of leaves
that tints green-gold in late afternoon light, 
my heart constricts. It's a laden barge, 
bearing crates of artifacts from each of my 
previous lives to here, though I couldn't 
possibly do a full inventory anymore.