Via Negativa

The man who helped prune the branches
of the fig mounded its lopped-off limbs 
next to the recycling bin. That was two 
weeks ago. But now on the tree, the ends 
are putting forth little flames of green, 
signals of a new season of growing. 
No matter and in spite of what we do, 
despite what happens, the hidden mechanism 
of spring reasserts itself— Imagine if night
never turned into day; if the parent outlived
the child, if the sea swallowed then spat
itself out at the very place it began. 
It's said snakes don't feel pain 
when they molt. But sometimes, old injuries, 
infections, or even weather can prevent 
shedding. Over time, stuck in its own skin, 
it might wither away from blindness and 
malnutrition. In solitude, I crave
sweet occupations that can be enjoyed
with others. When I am with others, 
sometimes my spirit turns restless,  
desiring only the intimacy of silence,
the absence of expectation. Perhaps that's
kind of what people mean when they say I 
don't know what to do with myself. 
Either way, we're full of questions. Night 
after night, the skies fill with a language
we are still trying to understand.  

Mother Superior is out again, 
I joke when my greys start to show: 
band barely an eighth of an inch, 
edge of a wimple framing forehead 
and temples. Why don't you just 
let it go, my daughters ask, instead 
of buying box dye— Platinum's trendy 
these days. The average human has 
over a hundred thousand hairs 
or hair follicles, and about five 
million over the entire body. 
I think of long-ago afternoons 
when my mother lay on the couch, 
pushed tweezers into my hands 
and asked me to pluck her strays 
while she drowsed. She'd pay me 
five centavos for every short, 
wiry one, which I lay on upholstery 
fabric like tally marks. She'd part 
my hair in the middle and clip it back 
on each side before I left for school; 
and stroked my head as she read me 
to sleep— I'd stretch like a cat. 
Even the very hairs on your head 
are numbered, says a bible verse. But 
they can also grow back, until the day 
they might begin to thin, or stop al-
together at an indefinite point in time.

Horizon line, vanishing point, convergence—
concepts first learned in perspective drawing 
from Mr. Caja, my first art teacher. I think

he was a clerk in some office during the day.
But on weekends the Belgian nuns and priests
who ran the elementary school on the hill

let him have two drafty rooms above the space 
where children took piano lessons, sometimes
getting their pancake fingers rapped 

with a pencil. Grey-haired and unassuming in his 
plain jacket and dusty slacks, yet he came to life
in that makeshift studio where on rough planks

he set out wooden cylinders, blocks, smooth
round or oval shapes. How does one learn 
to move more surely inside the outline, 

discern the source of light so shadow can be 
filled in properly? Easy to feel confused as lines
and details begin to crowd on paper, lean crooked

or badly measured. I want to figure out 
the world in small spaces, because the too-
real world is swollen if not with elegy, then 

with the detritus of memory. Constant cries, 
demanding love or time or sacrifice. And why 
is it these seem infinitely interchangeable?

But I don't pity the worm whose sights turn outward 
from the soil of its burrowing; nor envy the bird and its 
aerial view. Both think their distance from the horizon

is a kind of destiny or curse until one tries to snatch 
up the other, and the other tunnels deeper into the loam;
and all of us return to the mere but exquisite present.      

Once, buying a pair of kitten-
heeled pumps as a gift for my mother 
(she'd walked past the store window 
more than once to admire them), my
father tucked a peso bill into each 
toe box. Though I didn't quite 
understand how this rendered the gift, 
even if gift, more than just a thing-
transaction, I knew he believed in 
the power of symbols—how they 
scatter potency through life in the guise 
of ordinary things, then transform 
into meaning. Each new year's eve,
he'd wear the same yellow silk
shirt with orange dots, circles
being the sign for wealth and luck.
Every surface could be an augur,
a token of the future, a foreboding:
warts on a finger, the shell 
discarded by a cicada like a coat; 
fish scales refracting light 
like a prism or a disco ball.