The Terra Cotta Poet

Frog swallows moon.

Frog spits it out.

Begins swallow-moon again.

I’m here at the end of the last corridor

of four hundred score of soldier, archers,

clerks and strongmen whom the Emperor

hatched from riversides to guard him

on his way to the afterworld:

I deeply resent my station.

I can barely see the burial mound

a quarter mile east over the tops of heads

of the charioteers, cross-bowers, lieutenants.

Is this what will pass for time passing?

Frog swallows moon.

Frog spits it out.

Begins swallow-moon again.

Mercury creeks circle his coffin

through paved earth cracks

as I stand back here

considering lines to the Emperor’s glory

and what was done in the years

a million slaves baked and molded clay,

dug trenches, carried tons of statuary

into the ground so he would never

sleep alone and appear as powerful

in the ground as when he walked upon it.

I swallow. I spit. Again.

Thumb twitching to sharpen quill

and get on with it, write blind.

I never take my eyes off the soldier’s head

in front of me who laughs forever,

proud to be but next-to-last.

Appendix, forgotten end of the line

thingamabob with no use still

jammed with nerve endings in pain.

No one will figure it’s me wailing

until they check the rest of the body.

Frog swallows spit. The moon is out.

Frog abandons metaphor.

Sings the body terra cotta.

I contain multitudes of mud paste,

river water, clay and hay particles

fused and fired, painted with tree dye,

fired by aspen logs, hastened with glaze.

Frog abandons pastiche,

discontinues satire.

My face, short bun of hair,

sharp mustache, fat cheeks modeled

after that rabbit-keeper in a village nearby

where the Emperor first got laid,

he kept sixteen women there

in that memory, and before he died,

claimed it as his birthplace,

but it’s not, he was born in Yenshui

where my mother collected chicory,

kept it in a sheath beneath a baby

on her back. On blue mornings

she’d steep the chicory for my father

before he went to plant, plow,

reap and weep, but first he tasted

hot chicory tea in a bowl

on the steps of our hut,

he looked in my mother’s eyes.

Frog swallows moon.

Oh my Emperor, now you’re claimed, exalted,

two thousand years after our lives

by a regime so ruthless

in its administration, in its science

of the processing of intimidation,

the offices of pride and envy,

morselling out power and privilege,

that it makes your eternal army’s

bronze-bladed arrow-tips

look like erotic back-scratchers.

My liege, here’s for you, prehistoric

monster, ancestor to the powerful ways

we will always be brutal to each other

because we cannot bear to be alone

with just our thoughts. May my risen

memories follow you like bad souls,

may you sleep troubled forever

in my wan slight shadow speaking volumes.

Frog spits it out. Et cetera.