Hong - Engine Empire

ALSO BY CATHY PARK HONG Dance Dance Revolution Translating Moum For Mores Contents Acknowledgments Grateful acknowledgment is made to A Public Space , The Paris Review , Lana Turner , Poetry , Conjunctions , Web Conjunctions , Boston Review , Octopus , McSweeneys , Triple Canopy , Parnassus , Witness , Fence , American Poetry Review , Lo-Ball , and Harvard Review where some of these poems first appeared. Thank you to the following residencies for giving me time: The Macdowell Colony, Yaddo, Bellagio Center, and Fundacion Valparaiso. Thank you to my editor, Jill Bialosky, for her support. My gratitude to family and friends who have helped engine this book along: Sung Dal Hong, Haesook Hong, Nancy Hong, Ghita Schwarz, Evie Shockley, Jonathan Thirkield, Meghan ORourke, Martha Collins, Adam Schecter, Joe Winter, Gary Shteyngart, Jen Liu, Thomas Sayers Ellis, and Doug Choi. He heard the snow falling faintly through the universe
and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end,
upon all the living and the dead. J AMES J OYCE BALLAD
OF OUR JIM Fort Ballads Ballad of the Range The whole country is in a duel and we want no part of it.

They see us ride, they say :all you men going the wrong di-rection. :Were getting to California. We aint got time to enlist. If some forts ready to be sawed to colt towns, others are abandoned since ricket-limbed Southies couldnt let their grudges aside and mauled each other to blood strops. All around us forts lie built and unbuilt, half walled towns as men yoke themselves to state, but we brothers are heading through fields of blue rye and plains scullground to silt sand, afar, the boomtowns of precious ore. Ballad of Fort Mann Come to a fort of ragged cedar posts, rigged together by rodent sinews of prairie dogs.

We holler and little boys peek from above, their faces seared by blast wind. :Who you be? What you want? They shout thinly. Boys in rags and twine suspenders hold Winchesters much too big for them. They aim at us. :Where all yer pops? :They at war! We lost a brother, axed in the head by a rancid trapper, so we pluck one boy from the litter, lure him out with hen fruit and fresh violet marrow. We pounce him.

Christen him Jim. But our adapted boys head done turned. All he does is sing, his throat a tender lode of tern flutes disturbing our herd, singing of malaria, his murderous, lime-corroded Ma. Ballad of Heel Squatter Canyon The land shocks up to a clay escarpment up to towers of Cretaceous cliffs burrowed with a thousand snake holes like an Aztec civilization forgotten. Against this heathen monument, we make camp. At night, a grand illumination: the prairie grass licking up in a widening, spiraling fire.

A herd of antelope spring out from that conflagration so far from us theyre fleas leaping from pelt yet Our Jim shoots one easy as varmint and we fast reckon this queer piper can tame this fickle, harrowed land. Ballad of Infanticide Near starved, we find a fort of teetotalers who begrudge us their succor. While we eat up all their salt pork, Our Jim sings for them in his strange high voice of an Injun killing ranger who hitches up with his Comanche guide. She bears him a strapping son and is ramped with another, when the ranger hives off with a fair-haired sheriffs daughter. He then banishes his squaw and his sons like theyre prairie beeves. But she wont go quietly: she poisons his new wife with a malarial dress, and that aint the worst of her sins, that tar-eyed witch strangles her own newborn, and the other son flees The ladies cry: enough of this devil song.

Then it done occurs to us, looking at his dusky skin Our Jims a two-bit half-breed. Mob Ballad A beet-red adobe acropolis with a guano whitened belfry. Missing is its function, the great bell, so it frames only grayish light, a harping muteness. But then we hear the gropping cries. A horsehair tightrope tied from one barrack to another, and the crowd jeers and rails til a rouge-doused banker in a stovepipe hat is pushed from the balcony, trembling against the ledge. they shoot and he flinches, dances without meaning, they fire again til he fumbles one foot on the rope and before he makes his second, he falls, too fast for us to even see his suspended froggish body the thud, his silence. they shoot and he flinches, dances without meaning, they fire again til he fumbles one foot on the rope and before he makes his second, he falls, too fast for us to even see his suspended froggish body the thud, his silence.

They aint one bit sated, so full their pent. Ballad of Tombstone Omaha Days gone immortal. The bleached ruin of light lasts and lasts, no night to repair our minds, no white clip moon to give us rest, Only pitiless noon where our sleep-starved consciousness patters faintly behind our squinted eyelids. Then, sod homes, no bigger than raised graves and inside, none dwelled, only nail keg and soap box for chairs. We sacked the sod home down, drank dram beer. As we pulled the last of the spuds, Phantom harridans raged from these mounds to chase us down, earth crusted to their salt skin as if God didnt finish his making and we shot, shot, shot and nothing but plovers rose into the air.

Ballad of Rites Inside a Rookery of Avarice This is the last barricaded fort we pass. Men of faith and the whores they cured have taken reign, using brandy cask-rigged pulpits to mete out their punition. Whores have a fandango to celebrate one man hung and dry lightning splits while preachers swaddle the other thief like an Indian babe in winter, and they carouse while he measles sweat. One bastard child whips him fast on the ear. A preacher hitches Our Jim to a shaking post and his leppy body trembles to a million ticks, a foreboding of whats to come. :Hes in you.

Hes in you now! Our Jim cries from such an invasion. :No one never in me. No one. Ballad of the Occasional Indian Disturbance Our Jim kills our first, a Miwok, who done tried to sneak off with our mules. For days, we drug his gutted body, tailed by a lariat of vultures who peck him raw, a procession of wild, piss-eyed lobos. His sister rears the parade.

When we break for camp, she alights on us like a woolen moth, begs us for his body so she can mourn him. We stomp at her, unload our pistols near her, still she begs and so we take her hard. Later, she keens a wretched song til one of us brothers, tired of her yammerings, unhooks the gnawed-on body from the wagon. Our Jims gone husk. He warns us of our weakness. Ballad Beyond the Forts We stop speaking.

Our lips curl back so were just teeth. Our Jim sings as if all his bodys reed. No thought flickers behind his linseed eyes. Soon were the same, A small parasite bore into our bellies and memories slide out like gut. We kill the few pickings of buffalo, butchering their huge roddled heads, their liver tongues. Blood bursts from Earths throat in a mighty tornado and speckles itself across the soil, hardening to ruby poppies.

A mighty empire arises. Ballad of Grace But the mighty empire is a false pond in this eternal light where night never descends, where we pass old travelers forever dying, their lamb-milk eyes astonished by years passing as one long noon. It is here we call Our Jim to drain them of the last dregs of their consciousness he shoots them easy as horses and we move on, passing a legendary mining town drained of its ore yet still, still the isolated men settle to dig and dig, furrowing wilder into the earth. We see the empire rising. Ballad in O O Boomtowns got lots of sordor: odd horrors of throwdowns, bold cowboys lock horns, forlorn hobos plot to rob pots of gold, loco mobs drool for blood, howl or hoot for cottonwood blooms, throng to hood crooks to strong wood posts. So dont confront hotbloods, dont show off, go to blows or rows, dont sob for gold lost to trollops, dont drown sorrows on shots of grog.