Afterland Read online

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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
/>   for the sweetest mangoes.

  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,