My chapbook, If Your Matter Could Reform, is scheduled for release in April as Dink Press’s initial publication in its National Poetry Month Series.
https://dinkpublishing.wordpress.com/2015/02/09/dink-press-2015-publishing-catalog-as-of-2915/
I’m very pleased, as you might imagine. Many thanks to Kristopher Taylor for accepting the manuscript. Let the celebration begin!
Aubade (Inca Dove)
Such delicacy
evokes the evolution of hand
and wing, a growth
which reflects all that one
comes to know. Two doves
sit on the fence, cold wind ruffling
their feathers. What brings them
to this place of no
shelter, of wind and rain
and clarity defied? Fingers
often remember what the mind
cannot. Silence
complicates our mornings.
Originally published in The Balcones Review in 1987, I found this in a folder earlier today. Seems I was enthralled with birds back then, too…
Nocturne (Blue Grosbeak)
Why tremble
when nothing
arrives to be seen?
The architecture
of the day
comes and goes
in the same
heartbeat,
a disturbance
more felt than heard.
But listen.
The grosbeak sings
his presence
and departs,
leaving behind
the echo
of a motion
blending with night.
The air is cool.
A leaf utters
its own message
and falls
unnoticed.
Nothing awaits it.
Thinking of Li Po at Sky’s End (after Tu Fu)
Cold wind rises at the sky’s end.
What does he consider?
And when will the geese arrive?
The rivers and lakes are full this autumn
but poets’ fates are seldom pleasant.
Demons love to see us fail.
Let’s think of dead Ch’u Yuan
and offer poems to the river.
The transliteration on Chinesepoems.com reads:
Thinking of Li Po at the End of the Sky
Cold wind rise sky end
Gentleman thought resemble what?
Goose what time come?
River lake autumn water much
Literature hate fate eminent
Demons happy people failure
Respond together wronged person language
Throw poems give Miluo
According to the notes at Chinesepoems.com, the wild goose is a symbol of autumn, letters and travellers in difficulties. The wronged person is Qu Yuan, a poet of the fourth century BC who drowned himself in the Miluo river – another exiled poet later threw some verses into the river as an offering to him.
Mockingbird
Withdrawn, it unfolds
to another
voice, like that
of a child lost in the wind.
Or, lonely, it rises from its place
and sings, only
to return and start again.
The pleasure we accept derives from
the knowledge that we are not alone.
Each morning we walk out and sit
by the stones, hoping to observe some
new patterns in his life. What we
see is an answer. What we hear is no song.
Galveston, 1900
First the wind, then a tide like no other
uprooting the calm,
a visage tilted back in descent
as if listening for the aftermath.
And later, the gardener’s lament
and the building’s exposed ribs,
light entering the eternal
orchard, nine children tied to a cincture.
Not even the earth could retain its bodies,
and the sea remanded those given to its care.
Self-Portrait with Knife
Lacking benefit of prayer or belief,
it slips through flesh,
praising its temerity. Or,
parting the onion’s core, reclaims
the right to weep.
How many nights have we shared
these pleasures? I smooth the blade
with steel, listening to the fine hum.
Chipotle
Sometimes it pauses and the light
translates what we’ve lost,
momentarily framing the taste
entering our bodies through
mouth and nose and eye,
the knowledge of dissolution
enhanced. One bite
and it all returns: fire, peat,
water, the retracted
flesh become another’s
endeavor, as if giving form
to the world of air.
Without remorse,
we steal its most intimate self.
Japanese Gardens
how natural the
lines falling so
purely as if
with a single
stroke we walk
through the opening
and see space
the white center
composed of sand
and gravel later
a gate opens
to another garden
its lantern and
stone so carelessly
arranged so deliberate
I’ve three poems appearing in The Blue Hour Magazine:
http://thebluehourmagazine.com/2014/12/28/3-poems-by-robert-okaji/
The sonnet was written a dozen years after the others, but seemed to mesh with them in some strange way…
