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Out of Research Into Reveries

Mai Der Vang - 1981-

Give up the brain

Offer down its clumsy
meditations its blurred face

of fury its hellbound
policies bugged into my throat

Cough out
that sickled attitude the ragged shelves

downing my ankles every
era of hibernation

It’s all in the performance the butcher
operating on slabs

of my identity the bereaved dissecting
memories of an octopus

Lift out far from of it

Careen the elbows out of murk
with wine taken by

the midsummer full
moon

Constantly stoneward

hunting toward heartstill

More by Mai Der Vang

Yellow Rain

First, the sting
in your nose.

Then in your eyes,
a furnace flared

To hollow
your face.

Flies above
your empty sockets.

Maggots made
your split skin.

Another cow dies
from breathing

as you swallowed
from the same air.

How many days before
it wintered you gray

in this wilderness turned
makeshift-graveyard.

How many hours
before the lesions,

before your vomit
hardens the earthen

floor. Somewhere
a house ages cold,

no longer warmed
by the hearth

you once tended.
No one lights

any spirit money.
No one chants the way.

Mai Der Vang

2016

I Am the Whole Defense

Mid-1700s, Southwestern China

Lightning is the creature who carries a knife.

Two months now,
The rains hold watch.

Statues bury in teak
Smeared with old egret’s blood.

I feel the pulse of this inferno,
Tested by the hour to know

That even torches must not waver.

In the garrison, I teach boulders
To trickle from the cliff.

My fallen grow parchment from their hair,

Calligraphy descends
From their lips.

Infantry attack
But my musket knows.

They scale the sides
Yet I tear the rocks.

I am not wife, but my name is Widow.

Let them arrive
To my ready door,
The earth I’ve already dug.

Mai Der Vang

2016

That All, Everyone, Each in Being

Decades I have waited to make sunlight
for all of this to matter, a mark built to
rest and a mark laid living. I am sworn
to my worth even when the scales weep
their own little swords, slanting outside
the song and full of soothing to speak each
vowel. Everything happens toward its own
making, an infinite becoming from all that
is yet to be faced. When it seemed
as though I had touched the arm of love,
little did I know, I had found a door
with which to enter the sky. And to
the sky, little did I know, the door would
open for me. All, as it will be, as it should be,
in effort of The Great Balance.
Five days ago, I stood under a flight of egrets,
shifting between fenced field of mud and factory
yard. What could they have guessed of stability,
a fairness of wings, restoring what had always been
theirs to have. Like them, I have
steeped myself with others, for so long my roots
sprouting from the cloud of this fight, daring to follow
where the arrow leads, until it is my turn.
Until now, my turn.

Mai Der Vang

2020

Related Poems

I felt a Funeral, in my Brain (280)

I felt a Funeral, in my Brain,
And Mourners to and fro
Kept treading – treading – till it seemed
That Sense was breaking through –

And when they all were seated,
A Service, like a Drum –
Kept beating – beating – till I thought
My Mind was going numb –

And then I heard them lift a Box
And creak across my Soul
With those same Boots of Lead, again,
Then Space – began to toll,

As all the Heavens were a Bell,
And Being, but an Ear,
And I, and Silence, some strange Race
Wrecked, solitary, here –

And then a Plank in Reason, broke,
And I dropped down, and down –
And hit a World, at every plunge,
And Finished knowing – then –

Emily Dickinson

1951

Flores Woman

A species of tiny human has been discovered, which lived on the remote Indonesian island of Flores just 18,000 years ago. . . . Researchers have so far unearthed remains from eight individuals who were just one metre tall, with grapefruit-sized skulls. These astonishing little people . . . made tools, hunted tiny elephants and lived at the same time as modern humans who were colonizing the area.

—Nature, October 2004

Light: lifted, I stretch my brief body.
Color: blaze of day behind blank eyes.

Sound: birds stab greedy beaks
Into trunk and seed, spill husk

Onto the heap where my dreaming
And my loving live.

Every day I wake to this.

Tracks follow the heavy beasts
Back to where they huddle, herd.

Hunt: a dance against hunger.
Music: feast and fear.

This island becomes us.

Trees cap our sky. It rustles with delight
In a voice green as lust. Reptiles

Drag night from their tails,
Live by the dark. A rage of waves

Protects the horizon, which we would devour.
One day I want to dive in and drift,

Legs and arms wracked with danger.
Like a dark star. I want to last.

Tracy K. Smith

2007

Lonely Planet

You’re used to it, the way,
in the first wide-eyed
minutes, climbing from parking lot
to fire trail, or rifling through
cupboards in a rented kitchen,
I can’t help but tell you
we should visit here again,
my reverie inserting
a variation in the season,
or giving friends the room
next door, in stubborn panic
to fix this happiness in place
by escaping from it.
“We’re here now,” you say,
holding out the book I bought
with its dog-eared maps and lists
and, on the cover, a waterfall,
white flecks frozen, very close.

Nate Klug

2017

poets.org

Poems

Out of Research Into Reveries

More by Mai Der Vang

Yellow Rain

I Am the Whole Defense

That All, Everyone, Each in Being

Related Poems

I felt a Funeral, in my Brain (280)

Flores Woman

Lonely Planet

poets.org

academy of american poets

national poetry month

american poets

Poems

Out of Research Into Reveries

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