New York, NY: Nightboat Books, 2016. 80 pages. $15.95.
There is a sense when reading The Old Philosopher that no one takes more pleasure in writing poems these days than Vi Khi Nao. This collection, the 2014 Nightboat Poetry Prize Winner, features the poet marveling at the selection and order of words which “are merely nudes / in their veneer sense of homelessness.” For Nao, orthology is the house of transformation and a single word or phrase will regularly surprise with its bloom. Whether funny, erotic, sacred, or tragic, these poems are alert to the wonder of possibility, and in that way, they are truly reflective of life.
But life is given form by its opposite, and Nao is careful to attend to this truth. Death roams the pages of The Old Philosopher. It is compressed into the details of a mundane morning in “Today I Lost My Hat”: “Today I lost my hat, took the wrong bus to work, / grandmother died.” Death arrives among minor irritations of the everyday, and the poem itself is thrown by the tragic event. We are soon launched from a world of physical objects (hats, socks, coffee makers) into a cosmological setting, where we see “the moon dancing, tumbling off the precipice of the universe.” This tragedy is captured through a more mythic lens in “The Day God Smokes My Grandmother.” In the poem’s opening lines, Nao efficiently establishes a scene equal parts serene and strange:
God pulls my grandmother
out of a finely made cigarette pack
made of human tobacco & Long Khanh’s red earth &
bed sheets as long
as a rubber tree.
Whereas “Today I Lost My Hat” details individual experience, “The Day God Smokes My Grandmother” is more concerned with familial experience, how death moves through a family and leaves its mark. With a recursive flair, and repetition and recapitulation does figure largely into this collection, an uncle “withdraws a cigarette / from his jean pocket and drags a smoke. / A cigarette smoking a cigarette.” The mythic frame of this poem amplifies its sense of loss, but it is the smaller details that reveal the strength, bitterness, and humor of the living:
My uncle stares into the ashtray of his hand
and sobs until his hand becomes soot.
We stay inside of our floorboard cigarette case
and ponder when God is going to
develop lung cancer
from smoking us.
In order to understand the games that life and death play upon the body, Nao explores the subject of the sacred with a tender boldness. Her poems exist in a land beyond mystery. Her god is self-evident, a recursive structure. This is presented in no clearer terms than in the opening poem, “dear god i am god,” as “angels fold their wings a flock of them / which means god is clapping / dear god i am god.” The uncle in “The Day God Smokes My Grandmother” pulls a cigarette from his jean pocket and proceeds to smoke, “a cigarette smoking a cigarette.” The repetition and mutability of named things is potently represented in an extended narrative passage titled “Skyscraper,” where Nao describes how, “in the world with God, rain and skyscraper take turns wearing each other’s clothes.” These poems revel in intersubjectivity. One can never be too certain who or what will suddenly emerge in one of Nao’s poems, which makes the experience of reading her work a thrilling wager.
Despite Nao’s ethereal direction, she remains firmly committed to bodily remembrance. “Fog” neatly joins the two in the space of only a few lines: “the sun drops his knee on fog / a diurnal genuflection that / explains the lack of clarity in the prayer’s thought.” In the titular poem, “a drop of rain sits down / to pray.” Her poems are bowed things. They expertly perform the contortions of a body and spirit in prayer. The beginning of prayer, though, occurs in the body, which Nao catalogues with anatomical rigor in “Bird Poem”:
They float aimlessly in the ether
Winter in their Heart
Summer in their Thyroid Gland
Spring in their Liver
Fall in their Left Temple
Here, Nao pins anatomy to time and change of season. Even more impressively, the ritualistic charting of these organs suggests a subversive take on the sign of the cross, lifting the poem into a delightful sort of heresy. This poem, as do others in the collection, moves toward the mouth, concluding “What kind of love is this / when it can be broken in segments inside our diaphragm / ready to burst into ravenous flight on its way out of our mouths?”
There is an almost cartographic interest in the body in Nao’s poems. In “How Can Something So Unmoving Move Everything Around It,” we learn that “the heart is a quiet mountain in the Northern Hemisphere of the Body.” In “You Called Yourself Joshua,” Nao joins together body and landscape by writing “You asked me once where I buried the snow. Along the river or was it along the spine of your brother’s childhood as he stood rigidly before the tall pine.” In drafting her strange geography, Nao has made the body something of a country, and these lines of poetry function as maps. With such a devotion to mapmaking, Nao appears to be preparing for a very long trip somewhere. But where?
The answer to this question may come in the form of “My Socialist Saliva,” the beating heart of Nao’s book. It is here that Nao’s themes converge upon one another during her visit home to Vietnam. It opens with one of the book’s more striking images: “My seven-year-old face pressed onto the serene field of my mother’s back / as she rode her motorcycle through the red earth / flanked by rubber trees.” What follows is a meditation upon Nao’s childhood that negates distinctions between land and people, family and country, private and political, past and present. Rarely is the door to the past opened so cleanly, and so well lit. Nao transports us to this scene and transfixes the reader with powerful imagery:
I held my mouth open
To receive the aromatic rain of rambutan & coffee beans
The wind tossing & turning as my mother circulated us around a
curve
My mother’s hair flipping through the pages of the air
The clarity of Nao’s description here is nearly heart-stopping in its capturing the motions of a lived moment. Such moments of recognition occur throughout the pages of The Old Philosopher. Sometimes harrowing, always beguiling, Nao’s poetry does not attempt to disturb. Instead, she is more interested in having her particular forms of inquiry and reverence march in step together. In that she has been totally successful.
