This is pure fun! My micro-chapbook, You Break What Falls, is available through the Origami Poems Project. What is a micro-chapbook, you might ask? In this case, it consists of six short poems on one sheet of paper, folded (hence origami) to form a chapbook. You may download it, free of charge, here: http://www.origamipoems.com/poets/236-robert-okaji
Oh, yes. Folding instructions are on the Origami Poems Project site.
Interiors
The history of shadows, a longing
for brightness to bring through your
eyes shapes and their
belongings: our differences, entwined.
It is evening. Wind breathes in the trees and
through your hands at the piano, returning
speech to its origin, clouds, the moon,
burning wood. November, dying.
How often I fail through lack of words.
Beauty in form. Not to create but as in
respiration, to share, to accept and
return without thought. In and out,
the days reciprocate. White, black. Figures
waiting in darkness for light to come bear them.
Love, Scattered (Cento)
I cull and offer this and this,
and these last definite whorls
or later star or flower, such
rare dark in another world,
outdistancing us, madness
upon madness, the crest
and hollow, the lift and fall,
ah drift, so soft, so light,
where rollers shot with blue
cut under deeper blue as the
tide slackens when the roar of
a dropped wave breaks into it,
and under and under, this
is clear—soft kisses like bright
flowers— why do you dart and
pulse till all the dark is home?
I am scattered in its whirl.
This cento is composed exclusively of lines taken from fifteen pages in the Collected Poems of H.D., 6th printing, 1945. Hilda Doolittle is a fascinating figure in 20th century American poetry. You might look at the Poetry Foundation’s biography for further information:
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/h-d
The Echo is Neither Sound nor Hope
empty trees
a darkened
window
the void
between chairs
unchanged
as if you’d never spoken
Shadow
walking,
crushing juniper berries
at dusk
the dog shadows me
in his absence
Epiphanies
What greater doubt
than if
preceding only,
or hope cascading through the withheld
unspoken phrase?
Or the conditional, as it slows to place
an obstacle in its very own
path. If only I could
I would deny its existence,
but the conjunctive
bears blame as well,
though nothing’s put before
the preposition (which one
would certainly never end with).
My poem “Bread” is featured this week on Extract(s):
My poem “Trains,” which originally appeared last spring in Lightning’d Press, has been reprinted on Aubade Rising:
Memoir (Cento)
Your hands touched
everything. Will you
be a fountain
or a sea?
A woman sleeps next to me
on the earth. Now
nothing else keeps my eyes
in the cloud.
Each rock is news.
A cento is composed of lines from poems by other
poets. This cento originated from pieces in:
77 Poems, Alberto de Lacerda
Because the Sea is Black, Blaga Dimitrova
Body Rags, Galway Kinnell
Song of the Simple Truth, Julia de Burgos
Love Poems, Anne Sexton
For further information and examples of the form, you might peruse the Academy of American Poets site: http://www.poets.org/poetsorg/text/poetic-form-cento
The Art of Flight
What wings accumulate is not air
but space, an exemplar
of restraint defied. I listen
and hear feathers
ruffling in the shadows,
a vibration that swells
until it becomes flight or
regret, the retrieval of our
bodies from this dream of ascent.
The art of flight is one of
disturbance, of angles and lift
and touching what can’t be seen.
What we hold carries no meaning.
The beauty lies in the gathering.
O at the Edges 