Rituals and Effigies

 Every so often, I inflict some of my poetry on the innocent public--this is one of those times...from a chapbook I made once, entitled Rituals and Effigies... (note: the Chinese poems are free translations--the raw translation from the originals are in italics, and what I made of them follows below it)

RITUALS

 AND

 EFFIGIES

BY

Mark Mann

 Child Jesse

The earth is only lent

so my grandfather Jesse took it

into his lungs his skin his eyes

years miles below the tipple

buried in the great Maryland seam

until, more earth than man,

he began to give it back

black spittle black blood black tears

until the earth could say

child Jesse, let us begin again.

Childless

This fantasy     this collection of names

inspection tours of suitable colleges

these unopened albums       your very own key,

goodbye                       every new poem

your face         their swift hands

so very like mine

love as an involuntary signal

sent up into the long dark

tracing the empty sectors     the journal entries

addressed to the diminishing image

the fiftieth birthday arriving

like a goodbye      the mirror of a father

H3O                    the terrible rise of time

the golem in the living temple

so breathtaking this dark     so unlike a dark

so long     astonishing

Two Wheels

It’s a common tale, but this is how I remember mine:

I was six, maybe, and on my blue bike

at last without training wheels, and my father

held onto the back of the seat and pushed

promising, “ I won’t let go”

and down the alley we flew, getting faster,

getting better, and I told him

right there I loved him, that this

was the beginning of my life,

that when he was old I would return the favor,

that I understood him better than he ever knew,

that the truest moments live in the future,

that everything was practice for everything else,

and when I looked back he was so far

away I could hardly see him.

Traveling South

After Meng Haoran

Tree shed goose south cross

North wind river on cold

My home Xiang water bend

Far distance Chu cloud edge

Home tears travel in exhausted

Solitary sail sky edge watch

Lost ferry wish have ask

Level sea dusk wide

The trees have lost their gold to the southbound geese

The winds have frozen all the rivers north of here

My home at Xiang sits at the river’s mouth

So far south from Chu it crosses the border of the clouds.

Thinking how weary I am, how far from home, I cry

As, in the distance, a single sail cuts along the sky’s edge, and disappears.

I am lost-- too late to ask when the next ferry comes.

This sea is so quiet, so cold. This dark, so wide.

1978

As if you were 16 again, and I was 18,

and the sky was younger too, and the grass a lighter green,

and the summer longer, and sweeter, and slower and

the water was clearer as it tried to climb the sand

at Lake Logan, when we lied to our parents about something to do

with school, and took my mother’s car and filled it with our whole crew

and spent that entire day skin to shivering skin-- no, it must have been May

and too early to be wearing so little but you were 16 and I, 18, let’s say,

and your lips were numb you said, and I remember thinking they looked blue,

but we were young, and suffering for love was all we knew how to do. 

ARS POETICA

Poetry I

I like my poetry

underwater,

bending the light,

carrying new sound

to all my hidden creatures.

I want it to drift back to the moon,

down to the cold.

I want it to rise, amniotic and slow,

the litany of sky, tree, lake,

you, me, you.

Poetry II

If you are a traffic cop, the noise

you once heard when you were nine, coming

from your parent’s bedroom.

                                                If you are an uncle,

all the silences throughout the house.

                                                                          If you

play the piano or skin rabbits,

love the word “metastasize” 

in your mouth, outside in the snow

running with the neighbor’s adopted Chinese.

It will follow your wife to the elevator,

your mother to her grave, the Dutch elm

to certain valleys in West Virginia.

If you are busy becoming your father

around each corner, covets your loose change,

follows you home, a diseased stray,

a furious child.  The desert of your life.

Ghost Villanelle

Father, smoke and moon and glass

Arrangement in the barrows of

Some future boon that I will ask:

Your reasons for your wicked past

Your long reach for the smoke of love

Oh, father (and smoke and moon and glass)

Believe me and you’ll see how fast

The lies the moonlit patterns wove

Into this future boon I’ll ask

Will give your sons this ghostly cast

This need to learn the need that drove

This father of smoke and moon and glass

We rise, your sons, and turn at last

To look into the eyes that prove

There is no future boon we’d ask

That, granted, would repair the past.

We offer this imperfect love,

My father, my smoke, my moon, my glass

This boon, this light, this need to ask.

Red Wheelbarrow, Revisited

For every dependable

                            red wheelbarrow

          there must be one

         that cracked under the glaze

                 of the constant rain,

               and the many complaints

of those relentless white chickens

Dreaming of the Queen

after a study that revealed each night

 one-third of the people in England

dream of their queen

For some of us, Elizabeth II of England is a saucy minx

in fishnet hosiery, a bright red slash of a smile

on a face curiously knowing, as she reclines on a magnificent

rug made entirely of Pembroke Welsh corgi pelts.

Other nights, she is the friendly widowed neighbor,

the comfortable one the police bring along

to help carry the news your son has been killed by Arabs.

Yet, even though the part of you that’s always awake

knows you have never had a legitimate son

the fact that Elizabeth II of England occupies the next flat

but one doesn’t violate your dream-logic, and as you close

the door on the grateful policeman, you accept her kind offer

of tea and bickies, which she produces from her handbag,

and pours with immaculate, expert hands.

Each evening, the great shadow stretches over all of England,

and one-third of us, over twenty million sleeping souls, discover

her cleaning our bedrooms, repairing our cars, on the floor

of our nursery schoolrooms, playing with the flop-eared

class bunny named Charles. Sometimes we catch sight of her

running on the pitch at test matches, or riding in a pumpkin carriage

along a Dublin back lane, oblivious to the unblinking eyes in the windows.

More often in recent years, she dies in our guest rooms,

surrounded by her family, and our uncle Ted, who pats her hand

until the death rattle subsides.

How exhausted she must be! Each morning, returning to her corgis,

weary from a night of answering prayers, or ruining them.

She has a wash, poached eggs while reading her correspondence,

and then it’s out into the bright day and the official opening of a new factory,

trying not to think about the evening’s work that lay ahead of her.

Trying to smile as she waves to her cheering people.

Trying not to notice the wink of recognition from one-third of them.

Sacrifice to the Cat that Scared all the Rats 


After Mei Yaochen

Self have 5 white cat

Rat not invade my books

Today morning 5 white die

Sacrifice with rice and fish

See off it at middle river

Incantation you not you neglect

Before you bite one rat

Hold in mouth cry around yard remove

Want cause crowd rat frightened

Thought will clear my cottage

From board boat come

Boat in together room live

Dry grain although its thin

Evade eat drip steal from

This real you have industriousness

Have industriousness surpass chicken pig

Ordinary person stress spur horse drive

Say not like horse donkey

Already finish not again discuss

For you somewhat cry

When we lived together, my cat with five white spots,

The rats never touched my books

This morning, old friend, you died

From the boat I offered a sacrifice of rice and fish

And set you off from the middle of the river

Then I chanted for you, Five White, in remembrance

Of the day you caught a large rat

And carried it crying around our yard

To warn the riot of other rats to stay away

From our clean little cottage

When we had to come and live on this boat

and share this small room

with its thin but dry store of grain

I never worried about rat foulness or theft

because you were always on patrol.

Some say the chicken or the pig works harder.

Some people swear by their horses or donkeys.

I don’t argue with them today.

I cry for you a little, today.

Summer Ends at Alkire Lake/South American Coup d’etat


More often these mornings, we wake as if in mid-tango,
legs hooked, your arm traveling the length of mine,
Your morning breath west, mine east.

Autumn arrives by dark in mid-September. It cuts off
the root speech of the rose garden, creeps behind the mist
of the lake, calls to action the geese murmuring in the reeds.

It's anthem, swelling the curtains of our bedroom,
summons the sleepers to rise. The new season, its uniform
festooned with victory, waves from our balcony.

Skull Island

When the sailors drugged Kong and shipped him off to star on Broadway,

the natives of Skull Island, after an initial demonstration of grief,

got down to the business of creating a new god. 

At first they tried worshipping some of the giant lizards

of the island, but always they remembered how easily

Kong had defeated them, and soon attendance at the weekly services

dwindled to dangerous lows.

Next they considered the white adventurers who’d taken Kong, but gods

who supplant other gods and then leave are not reliable. Who next?

For a moment, the local shaman seemed up to the job,

but there wasn’t a man or woman or child among them

who had not seen him, from time to time, eat too much poi.

For a long period they worshipped nothing. They rose each morning

and looked to the empty altar beside the enormous gate,

and to the silent green mountain beyond that—the thanks they gave

for each new day’s bounty was received only by the indifferent sea air

and certain impious prehistoric birds. Weddings became joyless

rituals of financial alliance , and the lighting of funeral pyres

allowed the natives to rid their huts of the clutter of old Kong effigies.

That is all anyone knows for sure. I’m told they flirted, for a brief time,

with certain Hollywood religions—some left the island

and returned with tales of storefront mysticism, in lands ruled by invisible gods,

which made the wisest of them smile—for what can replace the certainty of a thousand drumbeats, and the redemption of witnessing your god rise from his lair

in the far sea cliffs, and the awe of his approach, and all of this ecstasy  purchased

with the simple gift of a stolen virgin in bottle-yellow hair?

Though You Said You Would Come

After Li Shangyin

Come be empty word go without trace

Moon slant tower on fifth watch bell

Dream be far part call hard call

Write reason hurry achieve ink not thick

Candle shine half cover gold emerald

Musk vapour tiny degree embroider lotus

Liu young already regret Peng shan far

More separate Peng shan ten thousand times

Though you said you would come tonight you are not here

The moon slants past the bell tower as it sounds the fifth watch

Better to sleep and dream you are too far to call

And believe the ink is too thin for me to write

But the candles bring life to my gold and emerald covers

Your perfume lingers on the lotus embroidery

Already I regret knowing how far the nearest Pengshan hill sits,

Knowing you must be ten thousand Pengshan hills away.