There could be an argument that Angelo Mao’s poem, “Split the Lark,” is just a play on nothing. The openly ironic game where a poem toys with nothing. It pretends nothing is nothing, and when it shows that to be true, then it turns the poem to ask why are there all these ways to talk about nothing. And if you look past the poem you’ll see the poet literally turning away from the page, showing their poetic calf muscle, and posing with pouty lips while they take a selfie. The caption: “Did I really do that?” Of course you did it you nasty poet-beast! Or I’ll admit that was me last time I brought “nothing” into a poem, I was imagining myself in that selfie pose. It felt good at the time. To poetically churn through nothing. To channel my inner Larry Levis, who was the true sentimentalist for nothing.
And, in a way, that’s where Mao starts his poem, “Split the Lark” (published in Oversound 9). With the grand litany of because’s to set the terms for this poetic inquiry. There is the concept of the “nonexistent” (or nothing) and the city that demands forms of something whether it exists or not, and then the poet with his sentimental nod to the creature, the “Little bird” set on the poet’s knee. It feels like a grand gesture signaling a poem that would propose an explanation for this nothing after presenting these points of consideration, “because” that’s what prompted the poem in the first place.
What I appreciate in Mao’s poem is how it mounts this expectation for explanation. How explanation also calls back to the poem’s namesake written by Emily Dickinson. Where she proposes to “Split the Lark — and you’ll find the Music.” It revolves around the troubling notion that by cutting a bird open you can access its full volume of song. That Dickinsonian gesture that can sometimes resort to violence as a means for locating the precious, then love that preciousness for existing in the world. A “Gush after Gush, reserved for you.” What can only be a “Gush” of blood!
Mao’s poem directs the reader to a similarly troubling consideration. But in his case it’s a name “stitched” somewhere in this little bird’s body. Which I read as some biology that would distinguish one bird from another. And I’m not a biologist, but I’m sure there are categorical traits that would nail down every bird’s name. What, then, is Mao looking for? What “name”? The poem conducts a scalpel-like analysis that takes readers
Past beak, past the vacuum cleaner
hose-like trachea
past voicebox,
past lungs
and past openings
of dead-end bone
Mao tours the reader past many biological traits of the bird. But it’s not some abstracted presentation of knowledge. While the poet describes these things, he is also draining the body of its blood. He is witnessing the body’s gradual lifelessness. Descending through the different names of organs he could imagine the blood draining from. Thinking of the bird’s white blood cell response to intruders. A response that doesn’t account for names. There’s no pausing in the bird to take account of each cell intruding when the bird was alive.
In a sense, Mao conducts the reader through a scientific accounting of this bird’s life, and it leads to what? That “Gush” from Dickinson’s poem? The place in the blood where song resides. Where the audible part of the word “lark” would exist in this bird, whose bounty was worth such praise for Dickinson? Mao is a scientist, and his poem is going to fill the bird with a Silver flow of formaldehyde. The inert body still doesn’t give the poet access to that name “stitched’ in the bird’s body. Instead, he mutes the “Lute” (another call to Dickinson’s poem) to where the “bone is the color of / fingernails after a hot bath.”