Jake Addresses the World from the Garden
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……………Rocks without ch'i [spirit] are dead rocks.
……………..—Mai-Mai Sze, The Way of Chinese Painting
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It's spring and Jake toddles to the garden
as the sun wobbles up clean and iridescent.
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He points to the stones asleep and says, “M'mba,”
I guess for the sound they make, takes another step
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and says, “M'mba,” for the small red berries crying
in the holly. “M'mba” for the first sweet sadness
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of the purplish-black berries in the drooping monkey grass,
and “M'mba” for the little witches' faces bursting into blossom.
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That's what it's like being shorter than the primary colors,
being deafened by humming stones while the whole world billows
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behind the curtain, “M'mba,” the one word. Meanwhile I go on
troweling, slavering the world with language as Jake squeals
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like a held bird and begins lallating to me in tongues.
I follow him around as he tries to thread the shine off a stone
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through the eye of a watchful bird. After a year of banging
his head, all the crying, the awful falling down, now he's trying
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to explain the vast brightening in his brain by saying “M'mba”
to me again and again. And though I follow with the sadness
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above which a stone cannot lift itself, I wink and say
“M'mba” back to him. But I don't mean it.
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by Jack Myers
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from New American Poets of the ‘90s;
publisher: David R. Godine, 1991