Forthcoming in Vestiges_06: Aporia
A rift tears apart the ripped, pouring out
The never named that let slip from their throng
A hand to come forth and load a revolver’s
Chambers aiming at a heaving heart books
Mention no longer. An off-season hart
Hunting long gone out of fashion, the ashen music
From farther room is a ripped cassette
Mixtape with no machine to play it. A ripped art,
Souls reaped all night. Rippers play
Guitars in the dark. Make choppers scream over
Green hills. Or hells? I have no time to bleed
When predators are invisible. A double negative
Is an erasure back to square one
On the cadence hitherto ripped from sources
Once well-known. This bleeding heart pierced
With chambers of a mansion expanding like a tree
With deep roots spilling all over
The life it pumps till a lump sum of what’s owed
Is reached. Crisp leaves of its incandescent tree
Dancing in the air like ballerinas moving
To a forgotten score of locusts
Plunging and raiding a granary by the swan lake
And expiring. So when the bullet ends
All that came apart from the heart’s beating,
The chambers merge into a house of one room
Where a mote in lover’s burning eyes
Turned on the waterworks that extinguished fire,
Autumnal leaves covering up the Flood.
The chambers of my lover’s revolver
Spin like the revolving door of a thunder-infested
Skyscraper’s lobby numberless floors down
From the muzzle-shaped lightning rod—
And the people are getting shot
Up through the elevator shaft disintegrating
In a blinding flash, leaping into another
Dimension, leaving behind fumes.
All my lover needs to do is shoot. Shoot!
A revolver begs a game of roulette
And the bullet in the chamber is a live
One you forgot was coming in hot
Letting you know God’s temple is
The bull’s eye in the sky.
We who are shot
Up are not sleeping in the Sun,
And ashes are mistaken for sun motes
Until the night arrives with the Moon,
And the goddess of the Moon’s brilliant bow
Has a string in tension but no arrow
That we can see to endure it,
That we cannot see even at the snap of release—
But she never misses, leaving invaded shores
With the dead for carrion, Thor’s hammer
Swinging violently beside his pulsing thigh
Until energy expires and peace can slip
Into the ballot box. Only the losers
Remember who spilled what blood when.
They will ask where the lightning people went.
Point toward the firmament
Beyond the thunderclouds, the other half of waters
Divided from waters and see there
A reflection of someone at a departing gate
Making this world the last country they are from
After their own image.
Between hammer swings is the last country
I am from. The pendulum descends nearing
My heaving heart, but I will refuse to give up
My army’s movements. I will not say
Where my last country is because I refuse
To have a country, nor will I be refugee,
A refuse thrown out of hardliner’s harbors.
See how I am broke
From breaking the multiverses shoring
These fragments against my ruins. See, I was told
Shattering my mirror’s frozen surface
Was the key to my freedom. That in fact
The me-inside-the-mirror was the one
Who was free because the mirror is a made
Thing and the natural history forbids
A perfect reflection of any kind. And he never
Made the mirror, it was mine.
Now all I have is a stump for a hand
And hundreds of shards of other worlds
Where the pieces of the me-inside-the-mirror
Laugh with me in a bloody festival,
All the worlds burning from geography
And trade. I trade away my last country’s
Passport for this kaleidoscope.
And I must remain uncertain and afraid.
I have never held a gun in my life.
I have never pulled
A bowstring. I’d sooner make a harp
Out of any good bough of a tree
You give me to use as weapon, and pluck taut
Strings shining in their straight lines of light,
And each note will be an arrow
Flying out from the snap of my release. May I
Be given the voice to say the words long lost!
Had my pen not turned into smoke
At the sight of you, O goddess of the Moon,
None of the words would have been lost—
Snarling Artemis, this is advanced Tetris.
The goal of the game is erasure.
Perfect lines disappear without a trace.
No matter how many worlds come and go
They remain a shadow of this place.
In the cosmic microwave background glow
All I see is a Rorschach of a disfigured face
I take to be yet another mirror show.
No-new-life-forms-on-my-way-here is the case
Of this world that I cannot claim to know
And remain silent for all time or else
Flowers will not blossom at the end of the bough
Given to me to make a bow with my hair
As its bowstring if I am ever to be allowed
To let my hair stay long, O goddess—
It has been so long since I called on you
And now the smoke-show memory of her who I
Gave your title to is long gone and endless
Distances of desire was too much
For longing to contain but you remain still
As I shatter mirrors of many worlds
And piece them together to find
The closest distance between any two only to see
My reflection looking back at me
And here is your crown of flowers
Made from a bough I bent inside out
Till it was a circle and all the arrows got
Shot into the frontal lobe.
A projectile speeding out of metal
Tube from a chamber of my heart’s mansion,
The violent gas from torched mixture
Of potassium nitrate and charcoal and sulfur,
This listless powder, giving murderous power
To leave behind a trail of broken flowers—
But O what did I spit out?
The goddess is dead before I can say
That she was just a name. And the dream
I dreamed was the dream of harnessing
The power turning all that hate into useless
Love and removing from the equation
Any objectified material from becoming
The necessary data to feel the yearning
Giving birth only to imitations of desire again
And again but is the source of all creation.
And no matter how many dimensions I make
The shadow of my landlord creeps into view,
And under that shadow is a swamp
Pulling me into its black water
Though I thought an ogre would be too big to drown
There I met a soldier of a kingdom that died
Many deaths long ago and he bowed
Toward the Capital where now only
Grass grows despite being salted
And after finishing his incantations
Of legends fables and humanity
Stubbornly repeating dead words to death
Calling and calling hoping to raise
The guardians of the borderless kingdom and
The burning city he turned to me and asked are you
Also from a country that no longer exists
To which I said yes and have you seen—
And he said o you are here for that too
Here look at all the numbers undone
Was the sigh full sore for you too
Was the hart saying noli me tangere
For Caesar’s I am did the poor girl
Fall in love with a god resurrected
To rule the kingdom for a thousand years
I have tried to hold the wind with my fishnet
In my latest dream and as soon as he said this
I woke up with a smell of ash everywhere
And it was the coldest winter
The city I lived in had faced in its history
Morning news said a child had frozen
And in the ice were the leaves
They were building new skyscrapers
Though there was still more land
Enough for me to stand while I bow
Notes
John Milton, Paradise Lost.
Rainer Maria Rilke (trans. Stephen Mitchell), Duino Elegies: “The First Elegy.”
Yi Sang, “Crow’s Eye View: Poem No. 15.”
Zbigniew Herbert (trans. Bogdana and John Carptenter), “The Envoy of Mr. Cogito.”
Seamus Heaney, “North.”
Jin Yi-jung (진이정), “For the Upside-down Dream 4” (거꾸로선 꿈을 위하여 4).
And others.
—
Jack Jung is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where he was a Truman Capote Fellow. He is a co-translator of Yi Sang: Selected Works (Wave Books, 2020), the winner of the 2021 MLA Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for a Translation of Literary Work. His poems and translations have been published in Poetry, The Paris Review, Poetry Northwest, BOMB, and elsewhere. He teaches at Davidson College.