You – Via Negativa

This entry is part 60 of 92 in the series Morning Porch Poems: Spring 2011

Mirage, to be reflected— from the French se mirer; from the Latin mirare

Who are you writing to?
Who are you speaking to?
Every question’s pitched

toward a you. Always I and thou,
though no one meets the face
I lower to the sink except its own

reflection glancing back
from the milky porcelain
glazed with water drops,

then glancing up again
through the curtained window
where the one green leaf

at the end of a branch
shakes itself dry and turns
into a hummingbird.

About

Via Negativa is a unique experiment in daily, poetic conversation with the living and the dead. Dave Bonta founded the site in 2003 and Luisa A. Igloria joined in 2010. Guest authors contribute as well. Dave writes daily erasure poems to discover the poetry hidden in the Diary of Samuel Pepys. Luisa has been writing and posting a poem a day since November 2010, often in response to Dave’s entries at The Morning Porch. Collections of poems first published at Via Negativa include Luisa’s The Buddha Wonders if She is Having a Mid-Life Crisis and Ode to the Heart Smaller than a Pencil Eraser, and Dave’s Ice Mountain and Breakdown: Banjo Poems. Read more…

Beth says:

May 19, 2011 at 6:21 pm

Bowled over by this one, Luisa. Beautiful.

Albert B. Casuga says:

May 20, 2011 at 9:40 pm

YOU AND I

Words in their primary or immediate signification stand for nothing, but the ideas in the mind of him that uses them. —John Locke

Are you talking to me? Are you writing to me?
Answers to questions you pitch into the dark
are meanings I assign to the questions you ask.

Always, you and I, will be at opposite ends
of a half-lit hallway where echoes are as urgent
as the tremulous confessions we burden ourselves

with each time we look into our reflections
on the one-way mirrors we look into when hiding
hurts hurled like hunting knives at target trees.

When I call you, I mean to quickly hold you down,
to find your voice, to shape your feelings, to own
your thoughts, to mould you as I want to have you.

I interpret you through my own lenses and mirror
you as you would me and have our confluence
in this reflection, a dragging into a dungeon

of thought constructing meaning instead of finding
it, and the “You” becomes the “I” held in bondage.
Except than in this conquest, I lose everything.

—Albert B. Casuga
05-20-11

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