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Interiors
18
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Category Archives: Perception
Untitled from 1988
This was first published in 1988, in Aileron. At the time I was experimenting with movement and breath and line, and wrote quite a few of these meditations in this form, some more successful than others.
where breath begins
it ends consider
light its secret
structure the sense
of limit defined
if a hand
recalls what the
eye cannot which
is the source
of remembrance one
touches more deeply
or allows itself
to be touched
a difference only
in the approach
Mirror
Mirror
The attraction is not
unexpected. We see
what is placed
before us, not
what may be.
The mirror is empty
until approached.
One of six short poems included in my micro-chapbook, You Break What Falls. Available for download here: http://www.origamipoems.com/poets/236-robert-okaji
“Mirror” first appeared here in May 2015.
Requiem II
Requiem II
To say what becomes: this word
bends in the wind of our
breath. Is this too simple to
say? Our bodies gather yet retain
nothing. Numbers, phrases, the way
the ocean rolls. Once I saw
a whale at dusk. Or rather I saw its
tail part the water and disappear
into darkness, an answer too complex
and sweet for tongues to comprehend.
But waves seldom explain. Imagine
something nearby but beyond reach.
Think of clouds and shrines, consider light.
“Requiem II” first appeared here in May 2015.
Palinode (salt, mask, descent)
Palinode (salt, mask, descent)
Tracing the map to the swaying places, she rises
through the interior world, garnering peace by
syllable. Water, clouds and sand mark her ascent.
The expectation is return, renewal. My friend did not
awaken this morning, and tonight I praise her
passage with drink and song. Matter into spirit,
mountain into sky, redemption, freedom. We bathe in
light, reclaiming the liminal. Our tears evaporate,
leaving salt and untrod paths in our wake.
The paths in our wake delimit the future, but
everything falls. Which do we desire more, the grasp
or its release? That instant preceding fear defines a
yearning particular to its course, a cycle of regression
and progress: ancestors descend into human or
animal form, die, depart to the heavens, and return
anew. Distilled power, a bridge to the spirits, the
mask unshutters and conceals the conscious mind.
Opening my eyes, I release the sun.
I release the sun and observe the results. From sky
to soil, from above to below, to solidity. Spirit
acquires matter, disperses and regroups. Rain and
alluvion, flooded homes, the dark night of childish
laughter. Each to her own path, each to an end. Muting
the string, I touch the harmonic into the world, linking
civility to proportion, lowering dissonance. Everything
falls. Everything. From curve to angle, we resist and
rejoice. In this design parabola, she descends.
“Palinode (salt, mask, descent)” was first published in Otoliths in slightly different form.
Scarecrow Dances
Scarecrow Dances
A case of the almost
tapping into the deed:
I dance in daylight,
but never on stairs
nor in countable
patterns, the wind
and birds my only
partners. When the
left arm twitches
counter to the right
hand’s frisk, my
head swivels with
the breeze, catching
my feet in pointe,
a moment endured
in humor. Luther
Robinson switched names
with his brother Bill
and became Bojangles,
but my brothers remain
nameless and silent,
flapping without desire
or intent. Why am I
as I am, born of no
mother, stitched and
stuffed, never nurtured
but left to become this
fluttering entity, thinking,
always thinking, whirling,
flowing rhythmically
in sequence, in time
to unheard music?
No one answers me.
But for now, I dance.
“Scarecrow Dances” first appeared in The Blue Nib in September 2016.
Recording of “Magic”
We Call the Neighbor’s Fat Burro Donkey Hotei, but His Name is Cantinflas
We Call the Neighbor’s Fat Burro Donkey Hotei, but His Name is Cantinflas
Certainty grows in corners, away from light.
From his mouth issues the breath we take, the words we keep.
Enjoy the collusion of shape and sound.
We share the hummingbird’s taste for sweet, but not its fierceness.
Its heart beats 1,200 times a minute,
and you ask me how best to bury money.
Hotei’s name means cloth sack, and comes from the bag he carried;
a man of loving character, he possessed the Buddha nature.
What we own cannot be held.
Most plastics are organic polymers with spine-linked repeat units.
The space you’ve left expands exponentially.
Left in the rain, the bell grows.
Christen me at your own peril. Agaves flower once then die.
Fluency in silence.
I dropped my pants when the scorpion stung my thigh.
The wind takes nothing it does not want.
After vulcanization, thermosets remain solid.
The Cantinflas character was famous for his eloquent nonsense.
Vacuum wrap the bills in plastic, place them in pvc.
Having mastered imperfection, I turn to folly.
Not the thing itself, but the process laid bare and opened.
Hoping to hide, the scorpion scuttled under a boot.
Thought to action, whisper to knife: which is not a curse?
The wind wants nothing; the burro sings his loneliness.
This first appeared here in May 2015. My failures often lead to success. I’ve never quite completed this piece, and don’t know that I ever will. But the first draft (nearly five years ago) set me off on a new path, one that has served me well. What more can I ask?
Wasp
Wasp
Outward, the quest for
space and the wings’
hunger to unfold and
shed this home of dark
flesh and encompassing desire.
And each thing remembered, the broken
sheath, the flowering desert’s return,
reflects the notion of being, of intent
in action and its corollary,
the gift of living through death.
* * *
“Wasp” first appeared here in October 2015.
Morning Covers You
Morning Covers You
1
We extract
light, bleeding
it out one
diamond-shaped
hole after
another.
Finger the results.
Remediation
in form
or placement
to best
advantage?
At night
loneliness cradles
our bones.
2
You arrange our bodies to greater effect,
presuming lesser horrors
to be less.
A list emerges.
Refuting one,
accepting another.
Choices fixed.
Ecstasies of failure
purged.
Morning covers you
like a blue
shroud, so pale.
So cold
and bitter.
This originally appeared in Boston Poetry Magazine in April, 2014, and on this blog in October 2015.
O at the Edges 