Angelo Mao

Two poems from Angelo Mao’s A White Horse Is Not a Horse

followed by a note on the author

The Great Sparrow Campaign

I once chased a wild turkey
down to the water’s edge.
The day was beautiful and cool.
The bird ran back and forth,

like a pea on a platter,
its head afloat on two feet of neck.
Then wingbeats blurred wings
into an approximation of wings.

Two years before my mother was born,
it had rained sparrows.
People had gone under trees

to shout clap bang pots,
and those sounds could be said
to have driven the sparrows
into flight, the way that wind

drives water vapor into air,
until it seemed that the earth itself
were tossing birds into the sky’s
exuberant blue dome, tossing

to reel them back down,
reeling from mid-flight,
repeatedly until exhaustion,
and corpses raining.

Come down, plunderer of seeds,
small thief of the fields,
raindrop creature.

Come down with your pink mouth
open, streak of neat tawn.
I imagine your lungs burning

and, because birds’ lungs
extend even into bone,
that the burning slid into bone.

What did we do with your bodies?
Piled up to burn or left out for the pigs?
I try to remember any sounds

the wild turkey made,
recall its frantic communications,
but the wings only elaborate air

in silence. If after the sparrows—
looping, auroral—was a vacuum,
its quick fill was the clicking-

open of chitinous legs, locust wings.
But shouts do not enter a vacuum:
sound requires throats to go throat

to throat, trespassing material
and appraising with its force—
like Plato’s mind rubbing the real—

only density, which is mass
and how much space it compacts,
commands, corrals

and programs into volume,
the way we had corralled sparrows
into a program of locusts, famine,

and memory: a silver print
on gelatin, the photographed urn.
Gelatin comes from pig hide

and was used to hold silver ink in place.
Long ago, we used birds for music
because their bones were hollow

enough to hold breath into song.
But the bodies had to be a certain size.
A wild turkey, for instance, would do.

I omitted the fact there was not
one bird I had chased to the water’s edge
and into the air, but three. Come down,

once you are tired of the sky.
Let me hear the silence in your bone.
The day is beautiful and cool.

 

Angelo Mao

 

On Ai Weiwei’s Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn

The urn lies on the floor in shards.
The man stands behind it with hands
raised. The backdrop is a brick wall.
It was a joke with my husband.
Chinese once read right-to-left.
Therefore, perturbing the photo’s
left-to-right order must be read
as permitted, legitimate. But if so,
what counts as perversion? One shard
hunches like a territorial crab. It lords
a breach. Rules are hard to forget.

The urn is knee-height above the floor.
The man stands behind it with hands
raised. The backdrop is a brick wall.
Every father is a territorial artist.
The photo is Chinese and had
urn shards on the floor. It started
as a joke (what are the rules?) with
myself. It was a private breach.
The messy hair is like urn shards.
The disheveled urn was a Han piece.
Dismemberment is earned for treason.
Rules for forgetting are hard.
The man has hair like my father.

The urn is held in a man’s hands.
The man stands with his back to
the wall. The wall is brick.
Silence repairs the past. The urn
appears whole without seams.
Pieces dis-remembered. The man
holds the urn with care. But until
when? What are rules tomorrow
can’t breach? Has he forgiven
the urn? They have forgiven each
other, everything can go unsaid.
Still: man holds the urn in the air.
Hard to forget. No one does.

 

Angelo Mao

 

The Great Sparrow Campaign first appeared in The Adroit Journal, and On Ai Weiwei’s ‘Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn’ first appeared in Poetry Magazine.

Angelo Mao is a biomedical scientist and writer. He obtained his PhD in bioengineering from Harvard University. His first book of poems, Abattoir (2021), won the Burnside Review Press Book Award. His poems have appeared in Poetry Magazine, The Georgia Review, The Drift, and other journals. His prose about poetry has appeared in Poetry Northwest, The Adroit Journal, and elsewhere. He edits DIALOGIST, an online poetry journal.