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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, 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, 12 june 2012
nihil obstat?
read and prophesy, he said; patrick white, joyride nor sorry astride —
of a juniper berry and clove-wing heart, cradled in pink coral from the reef
of his weathered eyes and rescue and leaving — that solitary line a bouts-rimés
what desert-fat(er-figural nothings;
but bobbing whispers, no wheel
the triple-nozzled lamp filled to its brim
and eventually, his backward glance and sigh
* This poem first appeared in the literary journal "Dear Sir". Its title, “nihil obstat?”, meaning “nothing stands in the way” in Latin, was written after I encountered White’s 1976 novel, A Fringe of Leaves. This poem is a novel-to-poem idiomatic/ekphrastic translation that experiments with hybridity and transformation, in an attempt to explore the difficulties of textual equivalence.
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, 10 june 2012
Little Girl’s Antistrophe at 27 Rue de Fleures
Just now, I unwrapped her box of letters. Gertrude was an iconoclast
to her gravitas. What she did not know she let travel, recurrence
of rhymes like falling leaves buffeting, autumn breeze from East Side.
Gertrude did not know home tonight or home in the summer.
By the Hudson. Did not know pudding from sauce from Helfgott’s letters.
Its mention of parlor poetry as dried hydrangea as pastoral,
as another Gothic point of view. As the bird feeder broke into two,
as freer roads after the scuttling, as prying apart the living architectonics.
Like her piano rolled down the stairs. Of play and vinaigrette
and too much cayenne. That the Tribune was the Tribune after all.
But also a need and problem within the chronic hours.
Gertrude did not know the object beyond the object.
Beyond the waterfowl, a duck of oval, of beak and weathervane wing,
of zipper heart, and an accordion tongue. Gertrude did not know
where to put the centre of things. Gertrude did not soak Henry’s cloak.
Nor Mildred’s, its hem another herringbone stitch another section
not whole enough or wholehearted or wholemeal enough.
The whole world was no longer a lazy afternoon or abiding love,
an old Gertrude looking at herself in the mirror of the ponding water.
Her head taking the shape of the barn, its shadow a black soot.
In midday sun, quiet afternoon cradling itself into the moonless night.
Gertrude was earnest in losing things — the beat-up rosebush
one more variation, foot divisions misaligned, word endings falling
over each other, frothy tumble. Gertrude’s diaeresis, Alice in a deep sleep,
the lean and fallow years from that trembling point onwards.
Gertrude’s dactylic dimeter drumming itself into the hexameter,
a twist as with the helix, as with rollercoaster feelings
when affectations run wild, when The Salon levitated
into The Cloud of Unknowing, its noetic white as wispy and dissolving.
Then a removal so she would always ask more questions.
As supple as her very last. Gertrude’s Sunday clatter in another suite
to rile Chaucer, even in death, even in love from a distance.
Even in wise restraint and a portrait left in the dark, its phonic echoes
a new refrain of face and facet. And fractured verseforms.
Gertrude’s sudden awakening to sovereignty’s shining eye.
Not decadence but wonderment. Not meaninglessness but a prayer,
a detachment and reasoned feeling. A small run of sounds and pictures.
Of a sapling writing out its unknown destination, its basis
and other evidence scaffolding, relaxed into a vine far down the road.
In the vineyard, a redder rose held out in the palm of her hand.
* This poem is a reprint. It was first anthologized as the winner of the Stepping Stones Nigeria 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".
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
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
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.”
Latest comments:
28 april 2024
samoA
dziękuję. uśmiech posyłam
27 april 2024
Jaga
Bardzo, widać że dobrze mu z oka patrzy ;)
27 april 2024
On tak dostojnie chodzi, że to czysta przyjemność
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:)
28 april 2024
Jaga
28 april 2024
Satish Verma
27 april 2024
Jaga
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)