Brandon Som: Two Elegies & Title Poem from �The Tribute Horse,� with a note by Marjorie Perloff

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Elegy (I)

My grandfather�s grave in scorched grass has two names in the gravestone�s granite: one with strokes�silent and once forbidden; the other lettered�a stowaway vowel between one aspirate, one liquid. Speech wears the written in the speaker�s absence to stay the sound & breath�s passing. I read that the wood, for Thoreau, was resonator Sundays when towns tolled bells�Lincoln, Acton, Bedford, or Concord. Pines with resin reverbed in sap what wind sent. A Chinese immigrant, on his Pacific-crossing, carried coaching papers for the memorizing. Approaching the island station, these pages were tossed to sea. A moon�s light in a ship�s wake might make a similar papertrail. My grandfather, aboard at twelve, practiced a paper-name.  What ensued was a debt of sound.

Elegy (II)

 Of Babel�s moon, I have notes. It was a marked card. It lit a chandelier out of an acacia. The trowel glinted with it. Crickets were out too, and, as if they sightread stars, settled in to leg-kick song. A light wind blew seed into the web between tines of a hayrake. A soldier stood letting his horse drink well water from his helmet. The moon trembled in it. There was nothing forsaken about it. It simply issued a shadow while burnishing a surface. This morning, I read that when returning from a trail, Thoreau knew he had had visitors by what was left behind: a wreath of evergreen, a name in pencil on a walnut leaf, a willow wand woven into a ring. Its path not without disruption, the moon, in its orbit, tethers and tethers again. The morning of the funeral, my father dressed my grandfather: from the eyelet, each button, new to full; the tie�s knot loose as if it had swallowed a small bird.

The Tribute Horse 

1 

The handscroll woven from silk

has a finch in the cane rendered
in the ink of lampblack. Because
with some beauty you feel the need

to talk aloud to it, tell it about itself,

I got closer until I could see the depth
produced by the silk sucking on
the soot, & slightly self-conscious,

I addressed the bird, asked whether

it were sketched with a switch
of willow or a brush of goat�s hair.
It was endeared & twittered there,

flit in the cane. It asked me if I were

the scholar or the angler, if I saw
the horsemen with the tribute horse
pass the village on the way to court.

2 

Often ink-stones were roof-tiles,

clay wattle from imperial houses
with names like Bronze-Bird-Terrace.
What kept rain out, kept ink wet.

A brick of ink fledges�a bird

in the stroke settles on the strokes�
branches, lifts & leaves them
a metronome�s sway. A hollow

stroke returns to smoke traces.

The dry brush returns & wets
its bristles in ground soot and gum
kept wet in the stone�s well,

that house for the ink�s dark.                                                                                                       

Under roof is want & over,

a well�s winch, a finch�s chit,
light tappings sounding the depths.

 3

If my song were smoke, I would knot

the braid & cut its movement upwards,
lariat the sinews, harnessing bone
to muscle the kite of the cane birds.

I would knot & bird the line as birds

notch the branch or leave steps
in bank mud. I would thieve the tracks
as I would the pine�s shape as it shadowed                                                

 

& stretched a figure past the furthest
branches� reach. Each tree shadows.
Each tree shades. Each tree thirsts
& traffics resin. What a pine darkens

foreshadows its pitch in the pine-smoke.

My song, if my song were smoke, would
rise from kindling & reach, pine-like,
past itself to where the wind takes it.

 4

A calligrapher, in order to regain
the confidence of birds, selects
a whisker brush fringed with rabbit fur
& bundled with an ivory mount

on a handle hewn from bamboo.

The whisker is plucked from field mice
& the fur from the rabbit�s flank
in autumn before its winter molt.

With thumb & forefinger, a bird�s

beak at the wrist�s service, he has
mastered his strokes�bending
weed, sheep�s leg, dropping dew.

But it is a seed-eating bird he wants

in the stroke-work of the word,
the trill answer in the coarse rustle
of brush across the page grain.

5

Dear finch, that you may have fed

on the worm that if left to live
makes the silk thread, on which
�woven now�you, lighter
 
at the breast, darker on the wing,
flit and rest, poised for flight
out of the cane, suggests a weaving
finer than I might have guessed.

Legend says an empress found

in her tea a cocoon undone
by the water�s heat, & wound
the thread around her finger.

Spinners need spools, dear finch.

Four sloughs & the worm weaves
a cocoon for wings. Seems you,
dear finch, have borrowed these.

[Jacket Statement by Marjorie Perloff.   �My grandfather, aboard at twelve, practiced a paper-name.  What ensued was a debt of sound.�  That name, which will also be the poet�s own, contains �a stowaway vowel between one aspirate, one liquid� (S-O-M), and it constitutes, in Brandon Som�s The Tribute Horse, a debt of sight as well as sound.  Rarely in our time has a young poet produced a set of poems in which citation and allusion have created such perfectly rendered ideograms, a collection in which ekphrasis, whether of seascape photographs or, as in the title poem, a Chinese handscroll, can generate such luminous detail, at once �Chinese� and yet wholly American in their contemporary reference and argot.  Whether contemplating the way �tunnels turn / The windows of the [subway] train to mirrors� or composing homophonic translations of Li Po�s �Night Thoughts,� Brandon Som makes not only every word, but every syllable and letter echo and resonate.  The Tribute Horse is a magical book.]