Desmond Kon Zhicheng-Mingdé, 11 june 2012
under the umbrella fire, a silhouette scales the brackish
the fire like our auburn outlook, th)s small room of crimson
reds and whites under the rafters, another clothesline of flags –
on it strung all our sibilants like a mother’s soothing
our spectacle under a skyline where thumboo’s poem lies clerical
to the left; no error or erasure, a smudge in the poet’s eye
so he stares into his counting fingers to say it’s all right
it’s all odic trumpets and sentiment, the ballad a knot and tassel
and how it convenes the angels, their soft consonance rapt
between books and undersongs and covers to scale the watercourse;
we see his high hat turned on its side, now light and ornamental
we scale too the beams that yaw and bend and stay the weight;
beyond the box and underbelly, the young faces wanting more
of the happy struggle and run; the wide bottle is half-empty
the tall jug too, the big white pillow a new bed, a kind one –
it negotiates us into our bodies of thought and thus, urgency
the clay now bricking the kiln, our past stowed under its orange
as are we; they paint us ochre wall colours issued into soft sciences
so the pain is no more evident, no more its own dictum
the silhouettes now their better nature, their own master cause
the same plainspeak that never forgets where it came from
so the words scale a new theatre, tracts sailing outside
the windows – three sheets, scud winds, a gust and fuller swing
and thus deliverance, and thus our soft hope an open sky
the shadows too remember the underpinning – this airlessness
what it’s like not to breathe, then to see rivets and fire
what it’s like to be peripheral, what it’s like to not know
or grasp, then in elbowroom, to light the torch for a love song
* This poem first appeared in Shampoo. An odic ballad, it was first penned during the world’s inaugural Youth Olympic Games, held in Singapore in August 2010.
Desmond Kon Zhicheng-Mingdé, 10 june 2012
“Listen, man, I am going to grow a mustache.”
~ Peter Davis
Dear Doctor, Ming is overthinking things again, how the insole of his shoe
is not just an addition but also a subtraction and removal and thin piece and
part and parcel of something else, like a bizarre gestalt, rumbling like this
mausoleum of cracked mannequins, each human shape dysmorphic, no,
more lived in and bawdy, more delusional and grandiose, not bottled like
a pale-faced Ming writing limericks about Hitler, said he hated Hitler, as if
alliterating it made it hit home hard, like a sock to things unassuming, as if
such reiteration, retelling of history and its darkness, was a boot, big shoe
in the face of tragedy, the moguls and fashionistas craving its gravity like
a libretto milked for dramatic tension, and their retinue of sycophants and
manic nursemaids still happy servants to arcane ideas of good and right, no,
truth and beauty, wisdom too, a superstructure of ideals glistening in this
miasma of sinking labyrinths but buoyed in a slowly dying dystopia; in this,
there is no equivocation clever enough, no logic, or just means, or smiles if
Ming would emerge from his room, all smiles as he did in the old days, no,
in his own stories, now recycled into void fill, or crushed to fit into shoes
as if they still served a purpose, their fiction fading, cheap ink in rain, and
how I am fanlight smiles, and the miles running back in time, memory like
Ming crouching in a street corner, sucking on a Winston and Winfield like
that casting director liking the sound of things he put into his mouth, this
Chesterfield after the Richmond, both borrowed, from the playwright and
Austrian model with pink bangs and tattoo of Aquarius behind Libra, as if
Arius had drawn both in with a Surrealist’s charcoal, darkened the shoe
so the sandal straps looked like shackles or falcon wings, as binding, no,
as ominous as a toothbrush mustache, its strict lines, black quadrangle, no,
more muzzled utterance, ready to roar into engines and rolling tanks, like
Ming downing a half bottle of Bushmills, then Shanahans, wielding a shoe
horn like a fencer’s foil, its invisible tip aimed at nothing in particular, as if
Ming’s anger simply needed emanation, whiskey coursing in his blood, this
feeling of ether, cloudless numen in dive bar body, making him levitate, and
his soul soared, an egret to scan the world below, its natural features and
hidden turns it already knew so well, until Ming stopped himself, said no,
that no poem could bear the weight of philosophy or its abstractions, and if
it did, it became something of an ugly manifesto, sly in its coercions like
this roofing slate as paperweight, barefaced, wrapped in newspaper, this
whirring quiet, caldarium like a sail vault, Ming shining his last good shoe,
making it matter, and frowning to concentrate, eyes into thin slits, horseshoe
mustache penciled in with his wife’s kohl, no, permanent marker, yes, as if
the shape returned Ming to think it’s okay to just stay in, be happy like this.
* This poem is a reprint. It was first anthologized in The “Mo” Anthology, published by Silkworms Ink towards the Movember Prostate Cancer Movement.The epigraph is an excerpt from the poem, “Hitler’s Mustache: The Teenage Mustache Sestina” by Peter Davis. The title of his book, Hitler’s Mustache, prefaces each poem title within the collection. There are two other sestinas titled “Hitler’s Mustache: The Hitler Sestina” and “Hitler’s Mustache: The Mustache Sestina”. Of this book, Peter Johnson writes: “Nothing escapes satiric scrutiny, even postmodernism. The mustache itself is a metaphor for both everything and nothing, allowing Davis to toy with and subvert discourses and genres, past and present, high and low, always keeping us off stride with his clever juxtapositions and puns.”
Desmond Kon Zhicheng-Mingdé, 10 june 2012
And meanwhile it has arrived. It’s here, invisible.
And an almond tree begins to bloom.
And only, as once for you, this remains real.
And the scent garnered me, all knowing ceased.
And so, one morning. In biting frost, all is cold.
And meanwhile it has arrived. It’s here, invisible.
And how to bless a moment if it is without pain.
And every shame, every grief, every love.
And only, as once for you, this remains real.
And chrysanthemums and the full moon.
And the visible world is all that remains.
And meanwhile it has arrived. It’s here, invisible.
And every word carved in stone grows its hoarfrost.
And I could only repeat it, instead of thinking.
And only, as once for you, this remains real.
And it should contain more than images.
And I with them. Not comprehending.
And meanwhile it has arrived. It’s here, invisible.
And only, as once for you, this remains real.
* This poem is a reprint. It was awarded an Honorable Merit in the Sketchbook Journal Found Poem Contest. Found in Horace’s Ars Poetica, the Latin phrase, “ut pictura poesis”, translates into “as is painting so is poetry”. This cento was written in 2011 to mark the birth centennial of Nobel Laureate Czeslaw Milosz. Each line is excerpted from one of Milosz’s poems, the villanelle experimenting with rhyme placement but retaining the form’s traditional repetitions and refrain. The nineteen lines have been derived from the following poems: “Preface”, “Natura”, “No More”, “Good Night”, “December 1”, “Dante”, “City of My Youth”, “A Meadow”, “To My Daimonion”, “After Enduring”, “Helene”, “When After a Long Life”, and “From the Rising of the Sun”.
Desmond Kon Zhicheng-Mingdé, 10 june 2012
“I was going up to say something,
and stopped. Her profile against the curtains
was old, and dark like a hunting bird’s.”
~ Thomas Kinsella
Sebastiano Ricci painted Artemis without wings like Potnia Theron.
Perhaps hidden or clipped behind her back. As if more fragile, less severe.
The lunate crown a high arc across her brow, deep curve of a sickle,
filigree designs like silk threads, adorned with tourmaline and moonstone.
An emerald cabochon, keeping in the light. Within its opaque green,
as it housed the world beneath its nephrite. Sanded sheen, polished.
There was no leopard in repose, or piebald stag standing by her side.
Only a coonhound and whippet, both looking on as if witness to tragedy.
Nana had the same distant look when she died. Of shame. Hands crossed
over her chest, jade bangle clutched in the left, folded letter in the other.
I stood by the bed. To say something too, but stopped in mid-thought.
It was Mother’s profile this time, her silhouette ominous, like an osprey.
What of history? How much of it a ready truth, how much an invention?
How much an unresolved fiction, like family and the mythic ties that bind?
Mother wore celadon, instead of a funereal black. A thick, woven cotton.
The same cloth worn by widows. A Mandarin collar, hidden buttons.
Of all women, the way artists envisioned, Nana loved Artemis most of all.
She had the same tan skin, and lean frame. Small hips, muscular limbs.
Artemis was her patron saint, Nana mentioned by the parterre beds.
A vision by the cypress as a girl. And later, when she had lost her child.
There’s no muting of voices here, no shuttling between different ideals
at war with each other. There’s simply the sitting, and acknowledgment.
Of something larger than ourselves. Of mortality, our small importance,
the way we act and tend to the everyday. The way we look at people.
And ask for help, and help in return. Artemis in relief, writing an ode.
Open heart. Finger dipped in iron gall ink, fletching pulled from an arrow.
* This poem is a reprint. It was first anthologized when it won second prize in the Hungry Hill “Poets Meet Politics” Poetry Competition. The White Tower of Thessaloniki was one of the sites of peaceful demonstrations in Greece, now known as the Indignant Citizens Movement. 2012 marks a century after the tower was whitewashed, when Greece gained control of the city.
Desmond Kon Zhicheng-Mingdé, 10 june 2012
I.
A poem is a mathematical problem, its craquelure.
Tonight, I will dream of Pissarro again, and look for him a proof.
He will paint our Montmartre in time, its thronging crowds.
Along the boulevard, its tall and naked trees. The cars looking like toys.
The sky receding into an unwritten script, a reduction.
An empirical understanding.
Of the other voice, akin to another person in the room.
He will overlay the archivist, who will be included as an afterthought.
The pedestrians will be walking east, inconsequential to his canvas.
Did we dream the same dream last night?
Art is, indeed, a revelation to the artist, himself a Euclidean space.
Art engenders a cruel but liberating double bind.
Art becomes the artist’s unleavened burden. And an ethos, trembling.
Its artifice an evolution. A created voice, that’s what we agreed on.
II.
Such consciousness, distilling into space and time, their fetters.
This, after I popped cubes of brown sugar into my mouth.
They melted within seconds, each moment like a digon.
The way Pissarro’s chatting women seemed part of their surroundings.
As light a mood as the calm sea behind them.
If there’s a cupped voice, it is as much mine. As angular, an inception.
Perhaps an anthropomorphized creature. Swimming. In mid-stream.
I dreamt of Pissarro painting Eragny, within a Penrose tile.
There was a burly woman with strong arms.
She had an orange blouse. She wore a scarf that arched in the wind.
There were haystacks everywhere, like gilded mountains.
Have these striae become an open letter to every kind of person?
And have you become a revolving point, an Archimedean spiral?
A centrifugal force around which these letters need their anchor?
* This poem is a reprint. It was first anthologized as the winner of the Cyclamens and Swords Publishing Poetry Prize.
Desmond Kon Zhicheng-Mingdé, 10 june 2012
Just now, I unwrapped her box of letters. Gertrude was an iconoclast
to her gravitas. What she did not know she let travel, recurrence
of rhymes like falling leaves buffeting, autumn breeze from East Side.
Gertrude did not know home tonight or home in the summer.
By the Hudson. Did not know pudding from sauce from Helfgott’s letters.
Its mention of parlor poetry as dried hydrangea as pastoral,
as another Gothic point of view. As the bird feeder broke into two,
as freer roads after the scuttling, as prying apart the living architectonics.
Like her piano rolled down the stairs. Of play and vinaigrette
and too much cayenne. That the Tribune was the Tribune after all.
But also a need and problem within the chronic hours.
Gertrude did not know the object beyond the object.
Beyond the waterfowl, a duck of oval, of beak and weathervane wing,
of zipper heart, and an accordion tongue. Gertrude did not know
where to put the centre of things. Gertrude did not soak Henry’s cloak.
Nor Mildred’s, its hem another herringbone stitch another section
not whole enough or wholehearted or wholemeal enough.
The whole world was no longer a lazy afternoon or abiding love,
an old Gertrude looking at herself in the mirror of the ponding water.
Her head taking the shape of the barn, its shadow a black soot.
In midday sun, quiet afternoon cradling itself into the moonless night.
Gertrude was earnest in losing things — the beat-up rosebush
one more variation, foot divisions misaligned, word endings falling
over each other, frothy tumble. Gertrude’s diaeresis, Alice in a deep sleep,
the lean and fallow years from that trembling point onwards.
Gertrude’s dactylic dimeter drumming itself into the hexameter,
a twist as with the helix, as with rollercoaster feelings
when affectations run wild, when The Salon levitated
into The Cloud of Unknowing, its noetic white as wispy and dissolving.
Then a removal so she would always ask more questions.
As supple as her very last. Gertrude’s Sunday clatter in another suite
to rile Chaucer, even in death, even in love from a distance.
Even in wise restraint and a portrait left in the dark, its phonic echoes
a new refrain of face and facet. And fractured verseforms.
Gertrude’s sudden awakening to sovereignty’s shining eye.
Not decadence but wonderment. Not meaninglessness but a prayer,
a detachment and reasoned feeling. A small run of sounds and pictures.
Of a sapling writing out its unknown destination, its basis
and other evidence scaffolding, relaxed into a vine far down the road.
In the vineyard, a redder rose held out in the palm of her hand.
* This poem is a reprint. It was first anthologized as the winner of the Stepping Stones Nigeria Poetry Prize.
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