WRITING : POETRY
Below are just a few of the poems I've worked on over the past few years. Feedback always appreciated!
The Great Wall*
*A long poem. The following poem is the first voice that appears in a series of voices that weave in and out of each other through the history and landscape of The Great Wall and the myth that it is.
Peasant, flatland, Qin Dynasty - 215 BC
With spades,
our shoulder blades,
we break earth
from earth, we raise
dust; from dust,
we are to raise
a wall, wide enough
that two of us can fit
head to foot,
like how we sleep
on cracked wood numbed
cold from night
and how we know
under our dried skins
split crimson from day
its thickness by heart,
a thickening sinking
deeper with every fallen sun…
I fantasized once.
Twice.
But who else here
was I to love?
What here was I
to love?:
The reeds from the stream
we cut just to tamp
between the sheets
of dust we stack?
Or the ones back home,
in memory,
which we would gather
that she and the children
still together, I hope, gather
and weave into baskets
to carry rice to bowl
from our paddies
swollen green with buds?
I can love neither now--
the felling of hope so near
nor the filling of it so far.
And so it was he;
who I slept beside,
whose earlobes hung low
like red lantern luck;
whose breaths, flaking,
betrayed the lungs
of the same one
who had decapitated
five Northerners,
the ones they fought
on horse by sword
before the Emperor
ordered us to fight instead
with a wall.
He was a high soldier.
He spoke it to me
in his dreams,
and I believed him.
Yet none of this
could stay his crumbling.
And we had no time
to give him burial,
because the Mongols drew closer
daily, we were told.
And we did as we were told;
we built over him.
Heaving earth upon earth
to some height we grew
to know by heart
to make ourselves forget
the act when we packed
dirt into death,
that we would not hear
the crack of bone.
As if we did not already
feel it echo
through our own.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Two Installations, in Conversation*
*For reference: Carl Andre - Equivalent Series & Ana Mendieta - Silueta Works in Mexico, 1973-77
Installation I:
Carl Andre - Ninth Iteration
Publicly, I constructed
eight iterations of one sculpture,
an equivalent series of
120 bricks, each
2 bricks thick
rectangular pressures pulled
flush
against the earth
by gravity
and inertia
alone.
Eight straight slates like
raised pools of stone
ankle high in wading, whetted
edges throwing surrounding space
into focus; the room
a shell for these yolk
that pared horizontally,
still equate in symmetry
in theory just ninety degrees
from the human kind, but
in flesh a mess and messier still
with Ana, whose very yolk,
Performance Art, shell-less bled
seeking the land
that fed her
childhood before History
displaced her,
pushing her to manias of pulling
red palms, wetted
with tempera paint and chicken blood
down the canvas--
futile offerings of fire, water, vital fluids
in exchange for solid ground.
And people lauded her disregarding
that her work fed parasitic
off my honor,
and I--the Untitled chicken for which she became
known to the world, that she beheaded
and held upside
down to watch beat its wings,
to be dropped into the deep end
where forgotten names float--
had to restore
equilibrium.
So emerged
my ninth construction,
a deconstruction:
A displaced slab
of flesh now flush,
symmetry horizontalized,
against the earth she sought
34 floors down.
Installation II:
Ana Mendieta – Siluetas
I will make my silueta in the sand on the shore so that it fills up and empties with the salt of the world’s plasma. Kneeling, I soften my body through my palms. Damp grains of glass grind along the grooves in my fingertips as I close the gaps between my fingertips, cleaving more deeply like I am carving more deeply into the past the farther I bore into the wetter zones lower down, the two sides of me in tandem: sunken head, candelabra arms, cocoon hip-legs grafted together. Figure of fertility. Figure of fertility never fulfilled. I loosen and gouge out the innards rendered compact by the weight and repeated washing over of waves, smooth them back into the surrounding land, and slide forward into my shadow to whom I cede my face by burrowing there its convexities. I do this because I want Yemaya to know well who is calling her.
Extracting my body from its trough, I see that nearer the horizon, Yemaya’s bustle is blooming by the ten-fold. I reverse a small bowl of red pigment onto my belly as if doing so makes me capable of cradling new life, such that when She comes, softly at first, the lace of her hem sweeps in, bonding seed with water, filling me iron red, then lapping me back into her own. Momentarily tide out, she leaves my womb exploded and my cocoon dyed.
It is as the Faith has always sung it: The orisha consumes the blood and the worshipper the meat. Yemaya is ocean and motherhood, and she has gorged upon me to her depths so that in minutes, the crumbs of my cipher will exist only inaudibly somewhere deep in her urges, and I will one myself again into the earth, and I will one again still after, and after still:
I will make a silueta using pigment-covered sticks so that the wind comes and sweeps away my color.
I will scoop out my figure into snow, set match to muddied grass, and so smolder, bound both for sky and earth.
I will lay a cocoon in the riverbank with gunpowder and after the spark, cleave the air apart and in blackness on limestone be buried.
Then I will pour hog’s blood over my smoothness and curls and roll around in cock’s feathers and show the world that this is not the way to fly.
And then the two of us will stand by the window, I in confrontation with the void and my orphanhood and the unbaptized earth below, he in confrontation with his gutlessness.
I will face him, and I will scream once into the void to let him know that his shadow has calcified so far that even its fossil has decayed and now all he is is a casket of bricks held together by nothing more than two dead layers of manmade on manmade, that any last remnants of his resin that may still exist in the world will vanish when I hit the tar whose pitch will have then been doubly perverted, first by Man, then by a man.
*A long poem. The following poem is the first voice that appears in a series of voices that weave in and out of each other through the history and landscape of The Great Wall and the myth that it is.
Peasant, flatland, Qin Dynasty - 215 BC
With spades,
our shoulder blades,
we break earth
from earth, we raise
dust; from dust,
we are to raise
a wall, wide enough
that two of us can fit
head to foot,
like how we sleep
on cracked wood numbed
cold from night
and how we know
under our dried skins
split crimson from day
its thickness by heart,
a thickening sinking
deeper with every fallen sun…
I fantasized once.
Twice.
But who else here
was I to love?
What here was I
to love?:
The reeds from the stream
we cut just to tamp
between the sheets
of dust we stack?
Or the ones back home,
in memory,
which we would gather
that she and the children
still together, I hope, gather
and weave into baskets
to carry rice to bowl
from our paddies
swollen green with buds?
I can love neither now--
the felling of hope so near
nor the filling of it so far.
And so it was he;
who I slept beside,
whose earlobes hung low
like red lantern luck;
whose breaths, flaking,
betrayed the lungs
of the same one
who had decapitated
five Northerners,
the ones they fought
on horse by sword
before the Emperor
ordered us to fight instead
with a wall.
He was a high soldier.
He spoke it to me
in his dreams,
and I believed him.
Yet none of this
could stay his crumbling.
And we had no time
to give him burial,
because the Mongols drew closer
daily, we were told.
And we did as we were told;
we built over him.
Heaving earth upon earth
to some height we grew
to know by heart
to make ourselves forget
the act when we packed
dirt into death,
that we would not hear
the crack of bone.
As if we did not already
feel it echo
through our own.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Two Installations, in Conversation*
*For reference: Carl Andre - Equivalent Series & Ana Mendieta - Silueta Works in Mexico, 1973-77
Installation I:
Carl Andre - Ninth Iteration
Publicly, I constructed
eight iterations of one sculpture,
an equivalent series of
120 bricks, each
2 bricks thick
rectangular pressures pulled
flush
against the earth
by gravity
and inertia
alone.
Eight straight slates like
raised pools of stone
ankle high in wading, whetted
edges throwing surrounding space
into focus; the room
a shell for these yolk
that pared horizontally,
still equate in symmetry
in theory just ninety degrees
from the human kind, but
in flesh a mess and messier still
with Ana, whose very yolk,
Performance Art, shell-less bled
seeking the land
that fed her
childhood before History
displaced her,
pushing her to manias of pulling
red palms, wetted
with tempera paint and chicken blood
down the canvas--
futile offerings of fire, water, vital fluids
in exchange for solid ground.
And people lauded her disregarding
that her work fed parasitic
off my honor,
and I--the Untitled chicken for which she became
known to the world, that she beheaded
and held upside
down to watch beat its wings,
to be dropped into the deep end
where forgotten names float--
had to restore
equilibrium.
So emerged
my ninth construction,
a deconstruction:
A displaced slab
of flesh now flush,
symmetry horizontalized,
against the earth she sought
34 floors down.
Installation II:
Ana Mendieta – Siluetas
I will make my silueta in the sand on the shore so that it fills up and empties with the salt of the world’s plasma. Kneeling, I soften my body through my palms. Damp grains of glass grind along the grooves in my fingertips as I close the gaps between my fingertips, cleaving more deeply like I am carving more deeply into the past the farther I bore into the wetter zones lower down, the two sides of me in tandem: sunken head, candelabra arms, cocoon hip-legs grafted together. Figure of fertility. Figure of fertility never fulfilled. I loosen and gouge out the innards rendered compact by the weight and repeated washing over of waves, smooth them back into the surrounding land, and slide forward into my shadow to whom I cede my face by burrowing there its convexities. I do this because I want Yemaya to know well who is calling her.
Extracting my body from its trough, I see that nearer the horizon, Yemaya’s bustle is blooming by the ten-fold. I reverse a small bowl of red pigment onto my belly as if doing so makes me capable of cradling new life, such that when She comes, softly at first, the lace of her hem sweeps in, bonding seed with water, filling me iron red, then lapping me back into her own. Momentarily tide out, she leaves my womb exploded and my cocoon dyed.
It is as the Faith has always sung it: The orisha consumes the blood and the worshipper the meat. Yemaya is ocean and motherhood, and she has gorged upon me to her depths so that in minutes, the crumbs of my cipher will exist only inaudibly somewhere deep in her urges, and I will one myself again into the earth, and I will one again still after, and after still:
I will make a silueta using pigment-covered sticks so that the wind comes and sweeps away my color.
I will scoop out my figure into snow, set match to muddied grass, and so smolder, bound both for sky and earth.
I will lay a cocoon in the riverbank with gunpowder and after the spark, cleave the air apart and in blackness on limestone be buried.
Then I will pour hog’s blood over my smoothness and curls and roll around in cock’s feathers and show the world that this is not the way to fly.
And then the two of us will stand by the window, I in confrontation with the void and my orphanhood and the unbaptized earth below, he in confrontation with his gutlessness.
I will face him, and I will scream once into the void to let him know that his shadow has calcified so far that even its fossil has decayed and now all he is is a casket of bricks held together by nothing more than two dead layers of manmade on manmade, that any last remnants of his resin that may still exist in the world will vanish when I hit the tar whose pitch will have then been doubly perverted, first by Man, then by a man.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Imitation: David Ferry
Ferry’s Favorite Things
Nobody seeming like much of anything anywhere at all;
The women wrinkling silently away in their rockers
Like pickles in glass jars; the barking sound of dogs
Outside by the wood, they are talking weighty matters;
The green trees in the wind and the rocks by the river.
The women sit in their bodies like cages; nowhere at all
Is anybody seeming like much of anything; the dogs are discussing
The wind, which has blown a number of rocks into the river;
There is a shuffling of limbs among the trees and the dogs
Who feel the earth as the women inside but do not.
Imitation: David Ferry
Ferry’s Favorite Things
Nobody seeming like much of anything anywhere at all;
The women wrinkling silently away in their rockers
Like pickles in glass jars; the barking sound of dogs
Outside by the wood, they are talking weighty matters;
The green trees in the wind and the rocks by the river.
The women sit in their bodies like cages; nowhere at all
Is anybody seeming like much of anything; the dogs are discussing
The wind, which has blown a number of rocks into the river;
There is a shuffling of limbs among the trees and the dogs
Who feel the earth as the women inside but do not.
