Two
poems from Derek Mong's The Nearest Thing to Heaven in the Lower 48
followed
by a note on the author
Equivalents
Concerning
equivalents:
lost
amid
the Roman catacombs, a priest will halve
his candle flame
until
one glow doubles
and redoubles on the tongues of terra-
cotta pots –
a
lesson the split earthworm
learns,
as he stands twice the chance of being
split again:
a
wise move to reproduce
for two worms slither twice as far as one,
which
explains
why
warheads unlock themselves
above a cityscape, thus brokering
a
wider
higher
bloom –
their
sanguine hues
and
party stars spread throughout the ether.
Are fewer survivors
what
this division
equals? How does such backwards algebra
apply to the holy
whose
wafers, cracked
in eighths, constitute a body, though whole
ones
add up to crackers? Furthermore, how
am I standing here,
by-product
of bi-
furcating cells, each one teased in two till
too many pulls
spelled
embryo, and one
final tug divided me from other?
Period
Cicero,
In L. Catilinam Oratio Prima: 254-58
July
2005: as regards
t wo
Humvees crisped
like
matchboxes on CNN, leading a congressman
to claim, and with the same voice
he
taped six months ago,
that the meaning of this loss will become evident
if
we hold out one more year
–
I
too wish none of it
were
true, for what are we to do when the language
of the state begins to ape (it
flirts
toward
all it lacks)
the language of seduction? We won't leave until this
darn
job is done, sounds less like a duty than a death
sentence
–
Period!
And though they wrote
the war's cause off, the hawks still garner faithful
legions.
Autumn
63 BC:
M.
Tulli, quid agis?
–
Cicero,
Roman consul this year, begins to speak
in impersonatio, his voice
hangs
from a leash
within his grasp, feigns the Republic's tone, then turns
a
question on its master. Neither his answer
nor the query now matter,
save
that Catiline's response
must be guessed at in the margins, and the State's
sentence
(it translates subject,
blood
and verb) knots its clauses
noose-like,
delays its winnowed meaning: read period.
What writer wouldn't be seduced,
become
complicit?
Dallas, just last summer: I'm standing beside a man
(God,
he must be
nineteen)
who wears our state upon
his
sleeve and feels its boots walk him wherever it says
he's needed. Our airplanes
wait,
his lover sobs, TVs
hum like word balloons above us; in them five men speak
of
foreign threats,
their
bodies framed by pillar after
pillar.
Hours pass, the soldier sighs, I read a book
to keep from looking.
I
wish that none of this
were true, that the heartland grew question marks and
stopped
taking
the bullets
it's
been given. As it now stands
my
mother's last best Ohio friend answers every
Apache crash (her son
pilots
them) with valium,
dissent expends its last nuanced breath, and word after
word
is hollowed out
(patriot,
terrorist), strung into
the
same delaying thread, the great deferment
of climax.
Yesterday,
I came upon a painting
–
it
was Judith, her arms awash in blood, cradling
the
head, the half-bit
tongue,
of Holofernes. The maid
is
there, the knife glints silver, scarlet. Here is the part
that's missing:
her
tease, his hushed oh please,
the slow verbal seduction, which despite her
looks, his lust,
remains
the sharper
weapon.
Holofernes must have known
that
this was wrong, that somehow this was what she wanted.
Still, he walked to
the slaughter
–
M.
Tulli, quid agis?
In Rome they're roiling in the death throes
of
their Republic.
Within
the month Catiline's five
conspirators
are dead, choked by the State outside
the Forum. Their leader lives
another
few weeks (maybe
hears Cicero elected pater patriae) before
he's
carved up
with
his legion. Do we know
now
where this sentence goes? Can we translate auctorem
sceleris? Somewhere
a typewriter
stalls;
some guns
are jammed but smoking. I have not placed
one
useful word between them.
©
Derek
Mong is the 2008-2010 Axton Fellow in Poetry at the University of Louisville.
He has taught creative writing at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (as the
Jay C. and Ruth Halls Poetry Fellow), SUNY Albany, the University of Michigan,
and with the Edna St. Vincent Millay Society in Austerlitz, New York. Born in
Portland, Oregon, raised outside Cleveland, he currently lives in Louisville's
Douglass Loop neighbourhood with his wife Anne O'Brien Fisher.
His awards include the 2007 Happy Hour Poetry Award from Alehouse, the Jeffrey
E. Smith Editors’ Choice Prize from the Missouri Review, two Hopwood
Awards, and two Pushcart nominations. He holds an MFA from the University of Michigan
and a BA from Denison University. His poems, translations from Jesuit Latin, and
prose have appeared in Breathe: 101 Contemporary Odes (C&R Press),
the Southern Review, Crazyhorse, the Kenyon Review, the Michigan
Quarterly Review, Pleiades and elsewhere.
"Equivalents"
first appeared in the Kenyon Review, and "Period" first appeared
in the Michigan Quarterly Review.
