#199: Two Poems by Derek Mong

~This poem previously appeared in from American Literary Review (2012).

Midnight at the School of Cosmetology

     and the mannequins, vacant

as Caesars in their hall of mirrors,

enthrall a night watchman.

His fingers trace their root holes’

perfect rows. This Styrofoam,

bald as the gibbous moon, outlives

the follicles of a thousand women

thinking. Last week the imported hair

shone fulgent as polygraph ink

and delicate as relics.

He still recalls its boxed arrival—

bangs, pigtails, wigs—whirlpools

of third world beauty

cut to train beauticians of tomorrow.

And though he doesn’t fetishize

its climate or cuisine—pelmeni

in mayonnaise, rain sieved

from a tin roof’s runoff—he’s breathed

that hair before the students

kerosened it scentless.  

There is a world pressed between

a harvest and its dreaming. 

There is a hallway he taps his night-

stick back through, luminous

as the one he entered. All night

hairdos never to travel back overseas

dissolve in the field behind

the building. When his shift ends

he walks home and clicks the TV on.

He turns to stone till morning.

*****

  

~This poem previously appeared in Artful Dodge (2012).

In the Shadow of a Scrivener’s Quill

Over the O, the ah, the fable’s lazy start, its Once

Upon a Time; over the gild-work and into the text block, past

the stitched signatures and spine; over the names

remaindered from distant shores which you swept

up and re-lined; over the we, the she, the I; over

the cattlecarts clacking on cobblestones,

dead prayers, lost plays, gun-free melees,

and the other sounds those foreign consonants retain—

over the footnotes, toward the fore edge, through

the marginalia that’s raining down the vellum’s white,

inviting frame; over the gaps which absent words

plant into the lines; over the cloth

that holds your place; over the ink that’s dried;

over the flesh and under the hide of enough

animals it’s said whole herds passed

through your hands; over the grooves

your newest word still shines inside, past the pages

bound face to face, revised; over the stories,

all the oldest ones, which—like light we skim

from distant stars—renders our hurtling less lonely;

over the eons, inside the authors, onto an easel

and into your inkwell, the shadow of your scrivener’s quill

is dancing, dark foot dipped into a darker pool, it lifts

a load of sweet, unfiltered evening—

then lands, black dash to reattach the past,

and coax us up the learning curve we climb

by generations. O monk or scribe

who curled his back inside candlelight, I’ve often

questioned your motives: did penitence push

you to push books into the dark beyond—

stepping stones you leapt toward St. Peter’s ledger—

or was scribe work just an exercise in exercising options?

Take that candle for life’s defining metaphor

and the tomes you shelve begin

to resemble heaven. Perhaps you were seduced

enough to change them, as when chaperones      

left alone too long imagine misbehaving?

Or did anonymity only remind you

of the pleasures it offered in compensation: to live

for months inside Homer’s head, bundled

up in one-word increments; to touch the word

of God, put it down in red, before returning

to a relay team that runs for centuries

untended? One day our world will call you up

again, place into your hands our scraps

of self, and ask you to arrange the parts

that make us sharp, redeeming. For now may you

swim inside our memory, rippling unnoticed.        

               

*****

THE STORY BEHIND THE POEMS

Years ago, when my hairdresser told me that her cosmetology school imported their wigs from Eastern Europe—they’d clean them, cut them, and style them for exams—I began looking for a proxy who could enter that scene. I’d just been to Russia for the first time with my wife, and found myself, like the night watchman, rendered speechless. I mean this both literally and figuratively. My wife is an American interpreter and translator. Russia felt like a vast and beautiful hall of mirrors. It was natural that my wife did most of the talking. “Midnight at the School of Cosmetology” is a poem then about masculine silence. It’s also about the proximity between a fetish and the sublime. “In the Shadow of a Scrivener’s Quill” follows a similarly isolated male figure, though it is more of a praise poem. The eponymous scribe is just one of many who kept Western culture from the worms. The poem owes much to David Wojahn’s “Homage to Blind Willie Johnson.”

*****

ABOUT DEREK MONG

Derek Mong is the author of Other Romes (Saturnalia Books, 2011); the poetry editor at Mantis: A Journal of Poetry, Criticism, & Translation; and a blogger at KROnline. Last fall he completed a PhD in American Literature at Stanford University. A former Axton Poetry Fellow at the University of Louisville and Halls Poetry Fellow at the University of Wisconsin, he is the recipient of the Jeffrey E. Smith Editors’ Prize from the Missouri Review and two Hopwood Awards. His poetry, translations, and criticism have appeared in Poetry Daily, Poetry Northwest, The Kenyon Review, Crazyhorse, TriQuarterly, The Southern Review, Pleiades, The Cincinnati Review, and Asymptote. He lives in Portland, OR with his wife and son: www.derekmong.com.