Via Negativa

Runner-Up: 2025 Charles Simic Poetry Prize

A narcissus bulb half-buried

half-bared to the sun

gnawed by animals

flowered into the earth

like a brain into a skull

clumped and cramped

the crowd of waxy petals

pushed out walls

made a chamber

of the dark

*

Another day another baby

born beneath the besieged

city of Kyiv

(you will grow underground

is what you will do)

*

God is a dark night

said St. John of the Cross,

praising the black cloth

of midnight that saved him

*

the plant flourishing

against its constraints

is a kind of making-do

(what’s the point of what if

or if only)

*

You must imagine

how it appeared from above—

picture a small urban garden plot

winter-swept, with a leafless peach tree

and stranded foundation rock

a ripple of snowdrops

crocus then a wave of phlox

frilly daffodils purple hyacinth

the whole bed blooming

and, off to the side, all alone

the sunburnt top

of a rust-brown bulb

scraped by squirrel teeth

I toss a handful of dirt over it

and days later, a fist of green

appears beside the bulb

*

At a garden party

a well-known poet said to me

I don’t know what I

would have done

if my son had wanted

to be a poet...

give it up, I guess,

and not write poetry

Could you?

Could you really give up writing?

I wanted to know

*

If a man wishes

to be sure of the road

he’s traveling on,

then he must close his eyes

and travel in the dark

*

My friend met a man

online, they played

scrabble, talked across time

zones, continents— nights

and nights of revelation

This is Love, she said

then he confessed

he’s a scammer, looking

for money, my friend

locked down assets

Now she sends

money for textbooks,

helps pay his tuition

he’s become a beloved

son, she’s yet

to touch his hand

*

O heart in the darkness, how much

you want, how little you need

*

When I ask my grown sons if they want

their childhood toys, they answer

We don’t need them

I say want

is different from need

The flower needs water and light

the flower wants nothing

Myself, I am full of want,

a living body of need

*

St. John was kidnapped and dragged off to the Priory...

There he was shut in a gloomy, ill-smelling little closet; half starved;

permitted no change of his flea-ridden clothing for eight months,

and beaten...with such zeal that his shoulders were crippled for life

*

I waited for the sunken ribbons of green

to find their way up, to reach toward the sun,

a vertical leap I depend on

Surely it was a matter

of time, the sky irresistible

for the growing thing—

all my life, roots have traveled down,

flowers unraveled by light—

but the days and the nights

were seemingly one for what was caged

inside the earth

*

With ropes twisted from strips of blanket and tunic,

St. John let himself down from a dizzy height into the darkness

*

Buried flower,

you forged passages

through your fuse

the small

knuckle of leaf

bared to the sun—

sufficient

*

I know a man

who loved his wife

And when she died

he loved her even more

Each day he talks with her

says he knows her better now

than when she was alive

*

Faith is a dark night for man,

but in this very way it gives him light

*

I watch on Zoom

(lit-up screen

propped on my lap)

as poets under

siege in Ukraine

read love poems

*

Google says

subterranean

flowers can thrive

underground

swapping water

and nutrients with

what lives above

*

Finally, I take a trowel

and make a trench to release

the green wad of leaves

and that’s when I find

the underground bouquet—

pale sickly bundle—

in a shallow grave

Quickened, the bulb

rooted, leaved, and flowered

etching the walls of its cave

*

St. John was taken in

“looking like an image of death,”

and given pears stewed with cinnamon...

the very day of his escape,

he dictated some verses

he had composed in prison

*

what is the word for what emerges

unintentional  inevitable

undeniable

(how the durable flowers

cupped the dirt

that held them)

*

Only his final illness saved him

from further persecution...

his voice rising from the rotted flesh

in delight at the beauties

of the Song of Songs

*

I transplanted the bulb

roots down, into

a proper pocket

of rich wet dirt

and spread its leaves and flowers

like a mantle on earth’s surface

where they lay

spineless and blanched

separated from their night

expiring hour by hour

beneath the strange sun

*

NOTES: Unless indicated otherwise, the quotes are from St. John of the Cross; most can be found in The Poems of St. John of the Cross, (Revised English versions by John Frederick Nims, 1968), which is also the source of the biographic passages about St. John.

Mary Buchinger’s most recent books are Navigating the Reach (Salmon Poetry, Honors, 2024 Massachusetts Book Award), The Book of Shores (2024), and Virology (2022) both from Lily Poetry Review Books, and she is the winner of the 2024 Elyse Wolf/Slate Roof Chapbook Prize. Her work has appeared in AGNI, Plume, Salt Hill, Seneca Review, and elsewhere. She teaches at the Massachusetts College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences. www.MaryBuchinger.com