Talked with a friend the other day about the deep appreciation I have for negative space and the volume of absence.

Burning the Old Year
by Naomi Shihab Nye

Letters swallow themselves in seconds.
Notes friends tied to the doorknob,
transparent scarlet paper,
sizzle like moth wings,
marry the air.

So much of any year is flammable,
lists of vegetables, partial poems.
Orange swirling flame of days,
so little is a stone.

Where there was something and suddenly isn’t,
an absence shouts, celebrates, leaves a space.
I begin again with the smallest numbers.

Quick dance, shuffle of losses and leaves,
only the things I didn’t do
crackle after the blazing dies

Jason Webley / Sxip Shiply

How does it happen? Somewhere between making tamales and working more than I’m expected to, my resolutions are devoured by some other faction of my will.

Here then.

What’s that smell in the kitchen?

by Marge Piercy

All over America women are burning dinners.
It’s lambchops in Peoria: it’s haddock
in Providence; it’s steak in Chicago:
tofu delight in Big Sur; red rice and beans in Dallas.
All over America women are burning food they’re supposed to bring with calico smile on
platters glittering like wax.
Anger sputters in her brainpan, confined but spewing out missiles of hot fat.
Carbonized despair presses like a clinker
from a barbecue against the back of her eyes.
If she wants to grill anything, it’s
her husband spitted over a slow fire.
If she wants to serve him anything it’s a dead rat with a bomb in its belly ticking like the
heart of an insomniac.
Her life is cooked and digested,
nothing but leftovers in Tupperware.
Look, she says, once I was roast duck
on your platter with parsley but now I am Spam.
Burning dinner is not incompetence but war.

Next month, I’m promising myself I’ll go back and write about the things I’m collecting. I look forward to spending some time with this poem, which I found on the Max with the Spin button on the Poetry Foundation’s iPhone app.  It gives me shivers every time I read it. There isn’t a before for this one.

The Abandoned Farm

By Mary Rose O’Reilley
In the northwest corner of Dakota, I saw a room
someone had left, a plush sofa returning its button-
eyed stare to the glance she gave it over her shoulder,
the dog, too, turning. In the next room, the mattress,
with mattress stories one after another tumbling
out of each spring, the window she opened first thing,
its vista of mile after mile, and the windmill hauling
its load.
I saw that, and nothing alive—

green oil-figured linoleum laid on counters,
nails of bad craft, the ripped blackening edge
that scared her more than the bed and the sound
of the windmill winning its will from the aquifer
night after night, the whack of her blade on the block.
There are houses with too many knives sometimes she said,

but when June ferned its way in she’d relent, take on its
restraint, heave again on the stained sheets her burden
of child, herself a torn girl again, combing her hair
through fingers bruised by corn shocks, sweet juice
in the cuts of her life.

She began to think of the border
and mustangs without brand. At night they’d bend
over the bed and nuzzle. One ride was enough.
She had sufficient magic to cling to a mane and fare
over the windowsill. I see where the curtain fell
and nobody mended the tear, I see where bare feet
marked like fossils her pass in the rain.

When he uncovers fiddleheads by the spring,
why does he always think of that first sight
of her thigh in the peach-colored dress, of his hand’s
searching moss with its red-gold stamens, the spring
in that arid landscape like something from Canaan
under his tongue? Even in old age he’d ponder the moment,
lying under the moon forgiving himself, her, the world
that bred their conundrum, washed in that rain.

Since I’ve shifted to music.  I never did the DJ groupie thing, though I had friends who sure did. Mostly, I remember being completely dependent on radio for music, and hence, DJs. Which led me to take an audio production college course at the military base’s AFRN station, just to be able to find new things on my own.

Then:

We Know the Night
Best things in life don’t come for free
Best things in life always come unexpectedly
Well, we watch the clock and it comes as no surprise
Till the day is late and we let out a sigh
‘Cause we know the night could fall at any time
With scissors and a comb I cut my lawn
And there’s no one in the world I’m counting on
There’s a war ragin’ outside – I hope my grass stays green
Till the day is late and we let out a scream
‘Cause we know the night could fall down on its knees
We don’t know the cloud will end in rain
And we don’t know the pain of a broken date
We don’t know what’s wrong or what’s right
We know the night…we know the night
You can bust your back from now till the sun goes west
Best things always come when your mind’s at rest
In the afternoon, my mind ain’t sleepy, it’s preoccupied
Till the day is late and we let out a sigh (oooooo-oooo)
‘Cause we know the night could fall at any time
Yeah, we know the night could fall at any time
We know the night…we know the night

Now:

I Will Follow You into the Dark
Love of mine some day you will die
But I’ll be close behind
I’ll follow you into the dark

No blinding light or tunnels to gates of white
Just our hands clasped so tight
Waiting for the hint of a spark
If Heaven and Hell decide
That they both are satisfied
Illuminate the NOs on their vacancy signs

If there’s no one beside you
When your soul embarks
Then I’ll follow you into the dark

In Catholic school as vicious as Roman rule
I got my knuckles bruised by a lady in black
And I held my tongue as she told me
“Son fear is the heart of love”
So I never went back

If Heaven and Hell decide
That they both are satisfied
Illuminate the NOs on their vacancy signs

If there’s no one beside you
When your soul embarks
Then I’ll follow you into the dark

You and me have seen everything to see
From Bangkok to Calgary
And the soles of your shoes are all worn down
The time for sleep is now
It’s nothing to cry about
’cause we’ll hold each other soon
In the blackest of rooms

If Heaven and Hell decide
That they both are satisfied
Illuminate the No’s on their vacancy signs

If there’s no one beside you
When your soul embarks
Then I’ll follow you into the dark
Then I’ll follow you into the dark

Back-filling the days I’ve let escape.

Come on Darkness

Come on slowly
Won’t you rise and come
To the top of this hill
here the cool breeze spills
Now that it’s dusk
Someone drive them off the street
Let the pavements cool
Come on now
So come on love
And lay your body down, next to mine
’cause what we’re longing for has withered in the light
Come on darkness
Lay your body down on us
We’ve been calling you for so long now
We’re weary of your name Come on blackness
Let me breathe you in
’cause with this clattering and din we are calling you
Brother, have you got a smoke
Or baby, have you got a dime
Seems like we’re all a little down on our luck
And baby if you’re workin’ now out in bakersfield
At some honky-tonk they call the wagon wheel
I feel swept and you feel rolled away
So come on darkness,
I need you today
Come on blackness, let me breathe you in
’cause with this clattering and din
I am calling you
Come on darkness
Come on darkness

Before:

Prince of Darkness

My place is of the sun and this place is of the dark
I do not feel the romance I do not catch the spark
I don’t know when I noticed life was life at my expense
The words of my heart lined up like prisoners on a fence
The dreams came in like needy children tugging at my sleeve
I said I have no way of feeding you, so leave
But there was a time I asked my father for a dollar
And he gave it a ten dollar raise
When I needed my mother and I called her
She stayed with me for days
And now someone’s on the telephone, desperate in his pain
Someone’s on the bathroom floor doing her cocaine
Someone’s got his finger on the button in some room
No one can convince me we aren’t gluttons for our doom
But I tried to make this place my place
I asked for Providence to smile upon me with his sweet face
But I’ll tell you
My place is of the sun and this place is of the dark
I do not feel the romance I do not catch the spark
My place is of the sun and this place is of the dark
(By grace, my sight grows stronger and I will not
be a pawn for the Prince of Darkness any longer)
Maybe there’s no haven in this world for tender age
My heart beat like the wings of wild birds in a cage
My greatest hope my greatest cause to grieve
And my heart flew from its cage and it bled upon my sleeve
The cries of passion were like wounds that needed healing
I couldn’t hear them for the thunder
I was half the naked distance between hell and heaven’s ceiling
And he almost pulled me under
Now someone’s on the telephone desperate in his pain
Someone’s on the bathroom floor doing her cocaine
Someone’s got his finger on the button in some room
No one can convince me we aren’t gluttons for our doom
I tried to make this place my place
I asked for Providence to smile upon me with his sweet face
But I’ll tell you
My place is of the sun and this place is of the dark
I do not feel the romance I do not catch of spark
My place is of the sun and this place is of the dark
(By grace my sight grows stronger, grows stronger)
I do not feel the romance I do not catch the spark
(And I will not be a pawn for the Prince of Darkness any longer)

After:

Nightminds

Just lay it all down. Put your face into my neck and let it fall out.
I know
I know
I know.
I knew before you got home.
This world you’re in now,
It doesn’t have to be alone,
I’ll get there somehow, ‘cos
I know I know I know
When, even springtime feels cold.

But I will learn to breathe this ugliness you see,
So we can both be there and we can both share the dark.
And in our honesty, together we will rise,
Out of our nightminds, and into the light
At the end of the fight…

You were blessed by a different kind of inner view: it’s all magnified.
The highs would make you fly, and the lows make you want to die.
And I was once there, hanging from that very ledge where you are standing.
So I know
I know
I know,
It’s easier to let go.

But I will learn to breathe this ugliness you see,
So we can both be there and we can both share the dark.
And in our honesty, together we will rise out of our nightminds
And into the light at the end of the fight.

…and in our honesty, together we will rise out of our nightminds
And into the light… at the end of the fight…

Li Young Lee came to my college. I was 17 and not ready to pay attention to much of anything but a wasteful first world kind of survival.

Arise, Go Down

By Li-Young Lee
It wasn’t the bright hems of the Lord’s skirts
that brushed my face and I opened my eyes
to see from a cleft in rock His backside;

it’s a wasp perched on my left cheek. I keep
my eyes closed and stand perfectly still
in the garden till it leaves me alone,

not to contemplate how this century
ends and the next begins with no one
I know having seen God, but to wonder

why I get through most days unscathed, though I
live in a time when it might be otherwise,
and I grow more fatherless each day.

For years now I have come to conclusions
without my father’s help, discovering
on my own what I know, what I don’t know,

and seeing how one cancels the other.
I’ve become a scholar of cancellations.
Here, I stand among my father’s roses

and see that what punctures outnumbers what
consoles, the cruel and the tender never
make peace, though one climbs, though one descends

petal by petal to the hidden ground
no one owns. I see that which is taken
away by violence or persuasion.

The rose announces on earth the kingdom
of gravity. A bird cancels it.
My eyelids cancel the bird. Anything

might cancel my eyes: distance, time, war.
My father said, Never take your both eyes
off of the world, before he rocked me.

All night we waited for the knock
that would have signalled, All clear, come now;
it would have meant escape; it never came.

I didn’t make the world I leave you with,
he said, and then, being poor, he left me
only this world, in which there is always

a family waiting in terror
before they’re rended, this world wherein a man
might arise, go down, and walk along a path

and pause and bow to roses, roses
his father raised, and admire them, for one moment
unable, thank God, to see in each and
every flower the world cancelling itself.

A Certain Kind of Eden
By Kay Ryan
It seems like you could, but
you can’t go back and pull
the roots and runners and replant.
It’s all too deep for that.
You’ve overprized intention,
have mistaken any bent you’re given
for control. You thought you chose
the bean and chose the soil.
You even thought you abandoned
one or two gardens. But those things
keep growing where we put them—
if we put them at all.
A certain kind of Eden holds us thrall.
Even the one vine that tendrils out alone
in time turns on its own impulse,
twisting back down its upward course
a strong and then a stronger rope,
the greenest saddest strongest
kind of hope.

Mirror