From the manuscript of Ghostmasters
Shorts
Some deaths are well-dressed
Butterflies neatly folded
Some have banners
One ragged wing banging in the wind
One by one the petals bowed
Such polite timing
We gave each its due
Now uncapped
The smiling pod seedy teeth
The old bitter-gourd
Shaking to be a rainstick
On the contrary when
You are dying you change
To prose
The family finds out who gets what
You are finally understood
Worker
Pressed poet
Having to thing poems
The lights are off
Speak in your own person
Anon – Nonym – Nymous
Strong Weak Relative Nons
Us Them Impersonyms
Hate Like Ignoranymous
Many master words
Poet – pretender
Light – thunder
Permit no ambit
Even loser's glory
Humility:
Prolog's cunning
Epilog's arrogance
Stay young fox don't learn panic
That I think it is not to be feared does not mean I don't fear it. I used to be someone. I placed so
much value on it I acted humble, prefacing the admission of my fortune with 'undeserved'. How
low an opinion I had of myself that I became satisfied.
Art Artifice log away
§
As soon as you start to read my poem I start to feel fond about you
Do you believe in love
the small l
those little fires
much huddling
two tossed aquariums in the ocean
Love|lies
All|lies
Outside The Aviary
Two Freewheeling Snowplumes
Interlocked
Coi !
Ploded Verges
Flurry In The Cages
The Sky Separated In To Two
The Nets High Humane
Across The Room. Hair Moon Clouds. Smile Said Between You And I. Sudden Gun And
Shot. Eyes Jumped Water. Why The Sidelong Glance. A Line Between Mountain And
Ground. The Range Watched. Grew. Not The Size The Lightness. Not The Lightness
The Shapeliness. Not The Shapeliness The Sharpness. Not Of A Rumble. Of A Sesame
Seed. Itch Around Which Forms Grain. Need Wind Not Water. Light Sway. Upward
Stroke. Eye Open Dumbell.
Two Rings. Mortal § Immortal. Soft Flame. Fingernail Size.
∞
Flashfires
Not much writing
Greek plays – accounts of murders done off stage
Why I find toes weird because I don’t use them
Why I fish without bait because I love jaws
Heart’s enlarged
Do I have to have it out
The having to honor what
means nothing but what
not honoring does not mean
Triumph threw me
Out on my ass
Ears blown
Lay throbbing
Tumortime
∞ I was supposed to swallow
Wait for the webs
Maggotflowers
Gratitude for the gone
Unsummonability
Airing at a sniff
Easy in the envelope of your hands
Rewinding to the memoir
The glyph in your graze
Rrrrrip Rrrrrip Rrrrrip
E a s y I said to the deaf habit of a jawdisc
What’s the hurry
The season sprawls
My fiber was coarse
All five: flavor color odor vibre texture
We ran amok dusting air unsettling
And now bereft jumped on the moon
Straycow
Honeybell
What else to do but ruminate
Come graze ghost bees
About time
Void Plate
When the gates of spring squeaked in the mouths of birds I put out a hand
Sunflower seeds embedded in my flesh
A bare-breasted mother re-filled the feeder with liquid suet
Fat River Love
Fire Forest
O the knots on Osage for fire to suckle
Sootfaced I stood uncurling fruitdrops
I could not feed the fire considering it untouchable
My only way was through it
The only way to knowledge is through God I had to say
And what is God she had to say
The void is the plate
Engraving zigzag
Fire the flare of sound through it
Voice ashen
Is this writing
Then where is my tongue
I’ve abandoned the pail and pitched my tent on seesaw water
What if I am my own witness
My ears believe each other
The poems in this selection are from Mani Rao’s manuscript, Ghostmasters. “Worker” and “Airing at a Sniff” first appeared in Tinfish and XCP respectively.
This excerpt is an Almost Island exclusive.
Mani Rao is a poet, translator and independent scholar.Mani has ten poetry collections including Sing to Me (Recent Work Press Australia, 2019), New & Selected Poems (Poetrywala India 2014), Echolocation (Math Paper Press Singapore, 2014; Chameleon Press Hong Kong, 2003) and Ghostmasters (Chameleon Press Hong Kong, 2010). Her books in translation from Sanskrit are Bhagavad Gita (Fingerprint India 2015; Autumn Hill Books USA 2010), and Kalidasa for the 21st Century Reader (Aleph Books India, 2014). Her latest book Living Mantra— Mantra, Deity and Visionary Experience Today (Palgrave Macmillan 2019) is an anthropology of mantra-experience among tantric practitioners in south India. Translations of her poems have been published in Latin, Italian, Korean, Chinese, Arabic, French and German. She did an MFA in Creative Writing from UNLV (2010), and a PhD in Religious Studies from Duke University (2016).