Afterland
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Is that the jungle flower you plucked when you fled, the one you cradled
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A F T E R L A N D
Winner of the Walt Whitman Award
of the Academy of American Poets
2016
Selected by Carolyn Forché
Sponsored by the Academy of American Poets, the Walt Whitman Award is given annually to the winner of an open competition among American poets who have not yet published a book of poems.
A F T E R L A N D
POEMS
Mai Der Vang
Graywolf Press
Copyright © 2017 by Mai Der Vang
The author and Graywolf Press have provided this e-book to you for your personal use only. You may not make this e-book publicly available in any way. Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the author’s copyright, please notify Graywolf Press at: us.macmillanusa.com/piracy.
This publication is made possible, in part, by the voters of Minnesota through a Minnesota State Arts Board Operating Support grant, thanks to a legislative appropriation from the arts and cultural heritage fund, and through a grant from the Wells Fargo Foundation. Significant support has also been provided by Target, the McKnight Foundation, the Amazon Literary Partnership, and other generous contributions from foundations, corporations, and individuals. To these organizations and individuals we offer our heartfelt thanks.
Published by Graywolf Press
250 Third Avenue North, Suite 600
Minneapolis, Minnesota 55401
All rights reserved.
www.graywolfpress.org
Published in the United States of America
ISBN 978-1-55597-770-2
Ebook ISBN 978-1-55597-964-5
2 4 6 8 9 7 5 3 1
First Graywolf Printing, 2017
Library of Congress Control Number: 2016938843
Cover design: Jeenee Lee Design
Cover photo: Matt Black / Magnum Photos
For the ancestors
Contents
Another Heaven
Dear Soldier of the Secret War,
Light from a Burning Citadel
Tilting Our Tears on a Pendulum of Salt
Water Grave
Carry the Beacon
To the Placenta of Return
Yellow Rain
Lima Site 20
Transmigration
Toward Home
Dear Exile,
Matriarch
Beyond the Backyard
Sojourn with Snow
Original Bones
The Hour after Stars
My Attire Is the Kingdom
After All Have Gone
Grand Mal
Last Body
Gray Vestige
Heart Swathing in Late Summer
Meditation of the Lioness
Days of ’87
At Birth I Was Given a Book
Late Harvest
Cipher Song
I Am the Whole Defense
Diadem on Lined Paper
Ear to the Night
Phantom Talker
This Heft upon Your Leaving
Final Dispatch from Laos
Terminus
I the Body of Laos and All My UXOs
With Animal
Ambush
A Mouth and Its Name
To the Longhorn Hmong
Mother of People without Script
When the Mountains Rose beneath Us, We Became the Valley
I Shovel into the Heart to Find Its Naked Face
Three
Crash Calling
Thrasher
Progeny
The Howler
Offering the Ox
Dear Shaman,
Dressing the Departed
In the Swallow’s Breath It Is You
Calling the Lost
The Spirit Meal
Gathering the Last of the Dark
Your Mountain Lies Down with You
Afterland
Notes
Acknowledgments
A F T E R L A N D
Another Heaven
I am but atoms
Of old passengers
Bereaved to my cloistered bones.
This rotation is my recipe,
The telling of every edition
As a landscape on slow windshields.
The body no longer
Baskets fatigue,
No envelope with oxygen left to cure.
When funeral recites
The supper gardens of my forefathers,
Cross-stitch from my mother kin,
Then I will come to you
Dressed in my armor of earth,
Ready as you chant my tale.
When I reach the sloped halls
And hammock sun,
I won’t tell why the split orchid
Falls behind. Instead,
I tell why it arrives.
Make me the monarch
morphed from suffering.
Dear Soldier of the Secret War,
Laos, 1975
You once felt the American hand
that blew its breath
to drive the fire.
Now they’ve ended the war.
The American has gone home.
Your Hmong village is a graveyard.
Do you think of your missing wife,
how the Pathet Lao dragged her
naked, screaming, and bleeding
by her long black hair,
deep into forest shadows.
Or your son’s head in the rice
pounder, shell-crumbled.
And your brother, the youngest
who followed you into combat.
It was scalpel that day they captured
you both. They sliced off
and boiled his tongue,
forced it down your throat.
Do you think of the American returning
to the coffee cup,
new linens
in a warm bed,
pulling into the driveway.
Sorry about your mountains,
they say, here is the last
of the ammunition,
a few cases of grenades.
Do you picture him reading
the morning paper,
turning on the nightly news.
Maybe you clench your rifle closer,
sling your elegies
to your back,
hold them as a newborn baby.
You will wait
for hours in ragged fatigues
with others abandoned
swarming the dirt runway,
shoving toward the locked
aircraft door
among the scattered shoes,
shirts, blouses, suitcases
thrown out.
What grief-song erupts
when you see the last
American plane take off,
distant above Long Cheng.
How loud do you beg in your gut,
pleading to some invented god
or ancestor or politician:
all of our thousands who died on your side,
why won’t you authorize
another plane.
Light from a Burning Citadel
Once this highland was our birthplace. Once
we were children of kings.
Now I am a Si
amese rosewood on fire.
I am a skin of sagging curtain.
I am a bone of bullet hole.
I am locked in the ash oven of a forest.
Peb yog and we will be.
The sky sleeps quilted in a militia of stars.
Someone has folded
gold and silver spirit
money into a thousand tiny boats.
Peb yog
hmoob and we will be.
I am hungry as the beggar who cracked
open a coconut to find
the heart of a wild gaur.
Hmoob and we
will be.
The tree is more ancient
than its homeland,
shedding its annual citrine
as hourglass dripping honey.
Peb yeej ib txwm yog
hmoob.
I dig and dig for no more roots to dig.
I soldier with my severed
legs, my fallen ear.
I’ve become the shrill
air in a bamboo pipe—the breath
of an army of bells.
Tilting Our Tears on a Pendulum of Salt
You must take the hidden road
For your way
Out of these bitter woods.
I will go another route.
No more do our nail banks
Lie down in milky water.
Let us make
Our separate ways,
Until we meet
Our body’s dusty gallery,
Hollow-eyed, until we’ve
Passed the troops
Who have set our forest table
With tracheas.
Our howling knees
Are empty.
Home wages
Ear-splitting nightmares.
I keep your torn jacket,
Talisman of escape,
Sweetly-clutched as a guava
From our childhood.
When I see you again,
We’ll build refuge
From newest boughs
Like the praying mantis
Who sinks into frigid leaves.
Water Grave
We cross under
the midnight shield
and learn that bullets
can curse the air.
A symposium
of endangered stars
evicts itself to
the water. Another
convoy leaves the kiln.
The crowded dead
turn into the earth’s
unfolded bed sheet.
We drift near banks,
creatures of the Mekong,
heads bobbing like
ghosts without bodies,
toward the farthest shore.
With every treading
soak, the wading leg,
we beg ourselves to live,
to float the mortared
cartilage and burial
tissue in this river yard
of amputated hearts.
Carry the Beacon
Think of the pause dragged over
tumultuous days.
You wait and you watch.
But don’t linger if a man
swallows a bomb.
When they burn the olive trees,
wait a little more.
Paint yourself with ash
from the last branch.
Wait for the sky to blister outward,
all over.
The world moves with you
in gradients of orange
and red.
When a far-off noise murmurs
your name, it is the devil disguised
as a hound.
Ants are spies for the dead.
The cyanide in your left coat pocket.
Mines have been planted.
Sometimes your eyes hide
apparitions.
Sometimes your eyes just hide.
The moon draws close
you could throw a rock
and hit it.
Wait for torches to whistle.
A lasting call.
The genius moment.
Think of a candle
that goes boom in your chest.
To the Placenta of Return
I buried you after your birth.
For my son, I placed
You near the central stake,
Not by the bed.
Soldiers came one day
To steal their offering of men.
With baby, I ran to the forest.
We hid beneath
The claret shrubs.
Then his cries, and I pushed
Opium in his mouth.
Now nothing, no sound,
As I shake here
In the arms of a liana,
Whisper my crumbs into prayer:
Birth coat, it won’t be long
Before he re-clothes
In the lit needlework of you.
Clean him, cover him
Toward his way to find
The old ones.
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.
Lima Site 20
Firewood falls from the sky.
Call the mystics to raise the ramparts
with clandestine men
whose eyes are fueled by sulfur.
Tell the evergreen’s heir,
the calyx creatures
who give their acoustics to morning,
the library of opaque memory
inside a canefield.
The verb for neutrality,
they say,
is to aim covertly.
This is the phantom attack
that never happened, but our fallen know it did.
Tell the weathered architects
of the jungle, limestone
growing inside the cellars.
Wait for the echo to land
before firing the next shot.
To raze the geography
of their ribs, to shred into their names,
tell them I will come back
as the carved edge of a claw.
Transmigration
Spirit, when I flee this jungle, you must too.
I will take our silver bars, necklace dowry, and the kettle
forged from metal scraps just after the last monsoon.
Among the foliage, we must be ready to see
the half-decayed. You must not run off no matter how much
flesh you smell.
Nor should you wander to chase an old mate.
Spirit, we are in this with each other the way the night geese
in migration need the stars.
When I make the crossing, you must not be taken no matter what
the current gives. When we reach the camp,
there will be thousands like us.
If I make it onto the plane, you must follow me to the roads
and waiting pastures of America.
We will not ride the water today on the shoulders of buffalo
as we used to many years ago, nor will we forage
I am refugee. You are too. Cry, but do not weep.
We walk out the door.
Toward Home
Say a rooster is my mother.
Say there is a coffin in its body
That can only fit my skull.
Say I find a lighthouse burning
In a cave. Smoke above
The field of broken feathers,
I’m flightless, slipping windward
Without a bridge to home.
Say the oven is a bone room.
Say the rock bleeds out
Its boiling eye. I don’t know
Where I’m from, but say my feet
Endure because I must have
Come from somewhere.
Say the oryx is a creature
Made of windows. I look inside
Its ear and I see its spirit.
A thousand needles thread
The ends of my hair and
I’m trembling in the storm.
Dear Exile,
Never step back Never a last
Scent of plumeria
When my parents left
You knew it was for good
It’s a herd of horses never
To reclaim their steppes
You became a moth hanging
Down from the sun
Old river Calling to my mother
Kept spilling out of her lungs
Ridgeline vista closed
Into the locket of their gaze
It’s the Siberian crane
Forbidden to fly back after winter
You marbled my father’s face
Floated him as stone over the sea
Further Every minute
Emptying his child years to the land
You crawled back in your bomb
It’s when the banyan must leave
Relearn to cathedral its roots
Matriarch
She points at the television as if she could translate
Rocky, make sense of Rambo. She is camphor blouse,
Grandmother, keeper of jars for flamed cuppings.
She knows where men have been, those falling into
Tarnished landscapes, sinew machine built from
Fire as if coal were burning their insides. Rocky’s arms
Draw skin-drip of diamonds in the meat locker. Rambo
Is carnage cloaked in her homeland mud. She knows
Them as one, their howling stare before they yield,