Derek Mong
Dementia
astounds the mind
like sunbeams shot
through venetian blinds;
they fall in
time with the day’s
slow rise. You dream
this heat till the dream
completes you.
And we dream here
too, eight who sit
and eat, each thankful
just to be
thinking, thinking
how far our own
thoughts err or veer—what
did I want
at this store?—and
if you’ve caused our
memory to cool
like embers.
It matters not.
Being mindful
of the mind’s decline
will not set
the dust back down
once it’s gathered.
So let us meet you
and remeet
you where we spread
white napkins down—
small picnic, smaller
surrender.
You’re the man who’ll
see in mirrored
glass his last, greatest
creation.
We’re the children
whom you look through
as we try damn hard
to feed you.
O Brother
1.
Friend of the auklets, tattooed with a red hawk, who met
Franzen at random on an Idahoan birders range—
you’re paid to track the waves
of migratory joy.
But you sound like a gull, cawing merrily atop Troy’s walls.
The Pribilofs, I hear, are good.
Their birds are good. And the stellar sea lions—the Bering’s barking troubadours—
are good enough (perhaps) to pup.
And hours clocked counting chicks
through your binocs— they make you swoon. “We can’t,” you write, “keep nature down!”
Until, of course, we do.
Ice-caps wane and summers spill
through spring and fall. And you know what it all
will one day mean: your island bluffs less high.
And many, many birds will die.
Once, before decamping north,
you knew what to make of a diminished thing: just listen.
Twilight subsiding in our Ohio sky, Dad’s voice
cast wide to coax you home—
you roamed the creek, seeking some distant birdsong.
Darkness falls; neighbors called—
Your sadness stood no false mirth or expectations.
2.
Most of the stories we tell are old.
Their recurrence is proof that we’ve endured
catastrophe before, come home with pockets full
of worms and poison ivy.
Could that thought buoy the both of us?
Or is there solace in a single bird
perched near any person who could hear him?
Little brother, US Fish & Wildlife blogger, man who’s taught me
that what we tell ourselves
can change
the very light of Alaskan skies
that holds the sun hostage past one-thirty—
you’re better suited to this world where beauty flirts with destruction.
Tell me about the deer you shot to spare the tundra’s tender lichen.
Tell me the joke that ends: “this is a rat-free island!”
The World Kite Museum, After Hours
Long Beach, Washington
Windsocks locked to beams and struts,
the grommets on box kites strained
in simulated
sailing—all rise toward a light
left on, incandescent sun
that means to free them.
Or not. The allure of flight’s
a ruse. Stillness is what’s true—
that and this ceiling.
There are things we tell ourselves
to tell our kids. There is the world
as diorama.
Small son asleep in beach town
sheets, dreamer whose dog I walk
past this pantomime
of windless living—know this:
I could not find a bird’s eye
view of this great shore,
only a longer tether.
Lightning 5
Survive me
to reveal
radiance
in every-
thing you make
or still are
hopelessly
mired in.
Neckhairs swept
like windblown
grass; bodies
reduced to
their white-hot
footprints? No.
I leave you
that deeper
scar you call
tomorrow.
Derek Mong is the author of two collections from Saturnalia Books—Other Romes and The Identity Thief—as well as a chapbook, The Ego and the Empiricist (Two Sylvias Press). The Byron K. Trippet Assistant Professor of English at Wabash College, he writes about poetry for the Gettysburg Review and blogs at Kenyon Review Online. New poetry and essays can be found in Booth, Southern Poetry Review, Always Crashing, and The Hopwood Poets Revisited: Sixteen Major Award Winners. A long poem about the painter Lucian Freud is forthcoming from At Length. He and his wife, Anne O. Fisher, received the 2018 Cliff Becker Translation Award for The Joyous Science: Selected Poems of Maxim Amelin, now out from White Pine Press. They live in Indiana with their son.