Mộng-Lan got it goin on

Of each of the excerpts assigned, Mộng-Lan was the poet I connected with the most in terms of imagery, metaphors, and each page's word placement. When I tried to think of beat and space as a mechanic to represent voice, Mộng-Lan's work seemed to almost literally display what I would think would represent beats, pauses, breaths taken to speak and indulge in what's being spoken. 

From Mộng-Lan's "Ravine," two passages struck me the hardest. 

The first:

the back of your neck
                       is a bird's shadow ascending
     your spine a line
            a ravine where things are lost:
      marbles      the sound of a cello
faded photos      brittle letters
         I lace your body with my hands
                                your legs    loaves of bread
                    your feet      slippery fish
             broken fins
swimming through uncharted waters

In the second line of the poem, Mộng-Lan uses the word "branchings," which I formed an almost immediate relationship to the structure of her poems, and how each piece seems to be a different "branching" of thought, feeling, reflection of the past, etc, which the section of the poem I just mentioned is wrought with. Your spine carries a lot of weight and receives a great amount of strain and the comparison made to it being a ravine is too good! A ravine is an earthly black hole and there's no hope to recover whatever's lost in it. The things lost in the spinal ravine - marbles, the sound of a cello, faded photos, brittle letters - all fill me with a sick sense of nostalgia. The marbles and sound of a cello force me to think of childhood, of playthings and things of skill, and the faded photos and brittle letters denote the remembrance of a time long gone.

The image of lacing one's body with their hands is something that also I related to the "branchings." When I read this, I imagined these delicate, white roots of lace wrapping around a person's body. This wrapping takes place perhaps as a means of protection, which seems to be supported by the line that follow.

The second:

as they come for you
                   I wipre sleep off your shoulders
      put the gun in your hands
               tell you to aim
you point

                         to your head

The word "they" as an opposing force to the speaker (or whoever the speaker is speaking about) is used often, but in this last bit, the "they" are directly coming for "you," and efforts are made to escape them (with the gun pointed to their head) rather than to defend or fight back (with the gun pointed toward them). When "they" are first mentioned, I would naturally assume "they" are physical people, traveling some sort of physical distance to the next. As the poem progresses and I find myself at the literal end, "they" transformed into "you" (bear with me on all this confusion, I swear I'll do my best to make my point haha).

I don't know who the speaker is talking about, but whoever it is seems to be haunted by their past and I looked at it in two way: their personal history feels like it's been lost long ago, but there are so many efforts made to keep the history intact -or- their past is so alive and present, stalking them through their daily life that they are trying to run from it. This is where I saw the "they" and "you" become one. The "you" separated themself from the gory bits of their past and turned it into a separate entity.

Mộng-Lan's presentation of the speaker's voice on the page is genius, especially at the very end where we're given the only break/space between lines in the entire poem and it's where a really dark, heavy image of a gun being pointed to one's own head is revealed. I'm unsure if Mộng-Lan intended to use each placement of a phrase, each break and space as a means for spoken breaks, pauses and breaths, but when I read through her work aloud, it worked as a sort of guide on how to read it. BUT I DIGRESS EITHER WAY I LOVE MộNG-LAN.