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| Desmond Kon Zhicheng-Mingdé |
| PROFILE About me Friends (57) Books (154) Poetry (16) Prose (16) Graphics (88) | |
Desmond Kon Zhicheng-Mingdé, 12 june 2012
a haiku is diego velázquez at home
lacquer table, black
plums like olives, mangosteens –
notions, orbs, backlit
yellow cabs, standstill
empty corridor – we sleep
airport of violins
how was life, cut up?
the cubist years of whitman
bread, fish paste, fondue
shared snacks over tea
you must need something – love notes?
blue shower curtains?
the way north is named?
tin soldiers stashed, old poster
rhetoric blinking
* This poem first appeared in the journal, "Umbrella Factory".
Desmond Kon Zhicheng-Mingdé, 17 november 2012
The Object of White Noise: The Oak Park Sestina
Loneliness, I remember you before Polonius’ talk of friendship in old verse,
final ellipsis in short taps and kicks, gusting metaphor extending itself, to think
of death early on, at once counterpoint and bargain end to life, as if to say
long marches were tedium, as Stein’s invitations to garden parties, as want
as insatiable, ripped off book covers, on the quarterdeck or bowsprit, to see
larger ships, castle view beyond Pont Neuf, its elbow of a park, where I read
something of 12 rue de l’Odéon, as concrete a place as Mary’s Avallon, a read
open as Sylvia Beach’s hand, firm shake, first kindness, like the first verse
sciolti da rima, where rhymes recede, caesurae percolating, as the poet sees
rather than hears his words, oblique, their cello and echo, Rodin’s Thinker
in a new tableau, left arm extended like a big wing, fast updraft, as if wanting
flight as escape, denouement, hurtling towards the poplar, rising obelisk to say
this is the way Marlowe wrote of undying dandelions and mirrors, to say
Milton’s Aegean isle was like any other mapped dot, as open an autumn read,
as dismal and removed and blank a slate and stare, singly at Artemis, and want
a new fabric, sky and land, less architrave and Phrygian cadence than verse,
that invention meant movement, a rotation clear of the drydock, of thinking
what virtue to make into a creed, what rendered scruple to surface and see
in the light of day, not to decorate or scaffold, but in burning, to truly see
and intend the words, creation for all its vagaries like a tremulous saying,
its memory, distinct tremor, of Hecht casting Yolek between soldiers, thinking
his lungs would give way, along with his tiny legs, all for one midnight read,
with Spenser asleep, as with the common nightingale, in Augustan verse,
the way Nani tasted cumin, garlic within Ríos’ albondigas, softly wanting
more chiftele in her soup, more celery, carrots and halved onions, to want
so desire is made clear, like agulha rice soaking in flavoured water, and seen
from outside the Oriel window where a boy swivels his orpharion, girl’s verse
rolled into a scroll, yellowed, tied with daisy chain and bow string, as if to say
I made this for weight and resistance and home, so read it the way I read
your every word, fistmele of thought and image, on our long walks, to think
life is but its own long wait, Tennyson searching for the Happy Isles, thinking
maybe a late sun after the rain, in Paris too, its Cubist book carts, same wanton
disregard, or just joie de vivre, like Frost in his seat, same street café, to read
the same tone and rest at line’s end, his road home through apple trees, seeing
Joyce in a make-believe Dublin, as filled with grain and mettle, as if to say
even this libretto, even this madrigal has emptied itself into portamenti, verse
of wanderlust; think Illinois sonata into Hemingway’s Seine, its wave of seers
and their want of love, hope for soft courage, one more ostinato today to say
read me to sleep, beyond this city’s noise and history, and meandering verse.
* This poem placed as runner-up in the Georgetown Review Magazine Contest. The title is an allusion to Hemingway’s poem, “[Blank Verse]”, written in Oak Park, 1916. Published in Trapeze the same year, the poem is made up of missing texts, evidenced only through the presence of punctuation marks and symbols.
Desmond Kon Zhicheng-Mingdé, 11 june 2012
this sky and its soft position and release
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
Horseshoe: A Sestina
“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
Ut Pictura Poesis
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
White Tower of Thessaloniki
“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
Tangential: A Movement in Two Sonnets
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, 11 june 2012
Gertrude Stein’s Agnosia
A complex number doesn’t have to be truer than binomial theory, right?
Continental philosophy doesn’t have to be truer than an inward turn, right?
The sound of a bass clarinet doesn’t have to be truer than the sound of a sitar, right?
In The Little Shop of Antiquities, she wrote about relics and artifacts, touching them, letting their glow go to the riverbank and send back their sparkles. How the material object moves the spirit. The incomprehensible magic, the shapeless wonder, the familiar history in a middle to high passage.
Their irresolute beauty like an oiled and torched mirror. Slowly crumbling, then shattering.
Was it a wink or a squint as he scraped the bacon bits off the top of the bun?
Was it a duck or the snow or buttons of bark flaking themselves off?
Was it a shout to hurl itself over to the other side of the asphalt?
And who returned the question like an echo into the wind and orange dust?
* This poem first appeared in Fuselit, a literary journal out of London.
Desmond Kon Zhicheng-Mingdé, 11 june 2012
Fluxus at Chelsea
There, Albert Gleizes hangs onto the shouldered architrave,
fingers straining against the old gypsum. The archivolt widens
into an atrium with flower beds. Blood irises. And magnolias.
From Iowa, then Hanover. Gleizes now nibbling at honeysuckle.
There is a minotaur, hands thrown up in mid-air as if flagging
the two men in black to stay behind the white and blue line.
Two libraries have risen out of nowhere. Miles of books, tomes
littering the horizon like an archipelago, like old tortoise shell.
Huelsenbeck insists on interjecting his aria with something odic.
Let him draw the clefs as triangles, surfeit of sweet things.
Let him draw his instruments as unaccompanied and strong.
Let the parasol moments remain sudden and flaring, like joy.
Let him break the square corners of this body, now shanty
in its cupboard construction. Its edges and angles frozen, riveted.
Blake’s giant angel, keyed up to its own dark irony. Is it there?
Has all of the garden been drawn in – its bramble, acacia, cypress?
Gleizes knows the garden will percolate a warmer summer,
new world of sunnier days, an open esplanade, its champagne
the shade of stratus clouds. Two builders downing their beers.
At noon, the women in denim walking into the virtual museum.
Richard Huelsenbeck’s musical notes, ticklish and tender
as ivories. Hear the long four-minute silence as if time stood still,
its head dropping into the hollow of a creek, Gleizes’ eyes
locking in, as if witness to a new syllogism, its tract of paint.
Let Gleizes draw his decorative and industrial art. On the white.
Not to worry about what will stay, what remains resilient.
Or fades with time. There, another peony has drawn itself in.
Into a scene, a tea ceremony with kabuki, flamboyant and loud.
Into the third act, its pavement as thick and sturdy a roofing.
Limestone, a bit of bitumen. Let Huelsenbeck draw in circles.
Let him doodle. With pencils and crayons. Oils and acrylic.
He’ll place himself in it. And Gleizes smiling, in his big chair.
* This poem is a reprint. It won the Writers Billboard Poetry Prize.
Desmond Kon Zhicheng-Mingdé, 11 june 2012
The Villanelle’s Window
The German tavern made of timber, stacked logs.
Heavy against the sky, seated on long grass.
And an old stone. Between the stable and the pier
the cypress tree like a mother pulling up her hair.
You hear the knocking of three quatrains
against caesurae, their cadence an echo
of some fable told two hundred years ago.
A washcart falls on its side in the rain, three wheels
unbuckling, thick oak tumbling in big thuds
storm’s velveteen curtain east of the ridge.
Two barristers hold their coffee close to the face
leaning against the maypole, ribbons wet down
thin like another old willow, its shivery shadow.
The boy and girl exchange small, handmade letters
one sealed with candle wax and a thumbprint.
The other folded in with blue flax and dried myrtle.
“Wildflowers are hardy, simple. Little to look at.”
He looked out into the lake, then back to the pier.
Beneath their feet, a lavender spread of harebells.
* This poem was first anthologized in "Writings from the Heart: Stories and Poems from Around the World".
Latest comments:
27 april 2024
kb
hm tutaj pokazano niejako wprost sprawcę światła.
27 april 2024
sufit, uśmiech i barany... no tak to jest, sama
27 april 2024
"wszystkie modlitwy wymyślili grzesznicy"
27 april 2024
social-real. bardzo fajnie ujęte
26 april 2024
jeśli tylko
właśnie :)
26 april 2024
Adam Pietras (Barry Kant)
Dzięki, Violetta!
25 april 2024
violetta
Dziękuję:)
25 april 2024
Bociany są takie ufne:)
25 april 2024
Yaro
Bardzo kobiecy wiersz:) Pozdrawiam:)
25 april 2024
Bardzo prawdziwe słowa.
25 april 2024
eyesOFsoul
A nawet mniej.
25 april 2024
Piękne:)
27 april 2024
Satish Verma
26 april 2024
wiesiek
26 april 2024
Satish Verma
25 april 2024
wiesiek
25 april 2024
Satish Verma
24 april 2024
Satish Verma
23 april 2024
Adam Pietras (Barry Kant)
22 april 2024
Satish Verma
21 april 2024
sam53
21 april 2024
wiesiek