I am pleased to announce that Emily Hancock, extraordinary letter press printer and proprietor of St. Brigid Press, is hand-setting a small broadside of one of my Chinese adaptations.
It will be available in August as a fundraising premium for a non-profit press (more details about that later), and the remainder will be offered for sale in September.
The Trains I Know
The trains I know
seek solitude
in darkness,
they wear
wind and cold
with pride,
are never
lonely.
Sometimes they
sing too loud,
or mourn
harshly a
star’s fall, but
they never
deny their
purpose: to
draw between
and connect,
to witness and
serve, to bear
and endure
our unsought
burdens
to the end.
Forever
Our dogs hide under the bed,
escaping thunder.
But the sun shatters
a cloud and I know
we will live forever.
Each hour is the sky,
every day, another
star. Now the trees
join the wind
in rejoicing. This
is what we make,
they say. Only this.
The Brigit’s Flame Writing Community has an interview/chat with me on their site:
Feel free to post questions or comments there.
An excellent hangout for writers, Brigit’s Flame members offer tips, feedback, contests and best of all, support, to writers in all stages of their careers. Please visit!
Curtain
Adept at withdrawal, it retreats.
How appropriate, we think,
that its body curls
with the wind’s
tug, offering
only the
slightest
resistance. Then
it returns,
bringing to mind
the habitual offender
whose discomfiture
lies in choice,
the fear
of enclosure
removed. The
forward glance.
And back again,
whispering its
edict: concede, reclaim.
Give and take. We are as one.
Giving Time
The supplicant’s desire:
mornings sliced into perfect pieces, afternoons
dipped in honey, evenings freed.
A gift of absence.
To gather and bear, shaping
the resultant minutes,
she takes yeast from the air, adds
flour, water and salt.
Matched with the ripening
hour and the sweetened bitter taste,
I recall how blood
seeped through the towel, and
observe on the table the
cheese, plums, the harvested day.
* * *
This originally appeared on Bonnie Mcclellan’s International Poetry Month website. A recording is also available there: https://bonniemcclellan.wordpress.com/2015/02/17/giving-time-by-robert-okaji/
Moths
Small moths stir
in the darkness.
I feel their
wings brush my
face, my hands,
remembering the cry
of something unseen.
It is windy
again this morning.
Rice
Yesterday’s rain informs me I’m born of luck and blended
strands, of hope and words forged before a common tongue emerged.
Of my first two languages only one still breathes.
The other manifests in exile, in blurred images and hummed tunes.
Rice is my staple. I eat it without regarding its English etymology,
its transition from Sanskrit to Persian and Greek, to Latin, to French.
Flooding is not mandatory in cultivation, but requires less effort.
Rice contains arsenic, yet I crave its polished grains.
In my monolingual home we still call it gohan, literally cooked rice, or meal.
The kanji character, bei, also means America.
Representing a field, it symbolizes abundance, security, and fertility.
Three rice plants tied with a rope. Many. Life’s foundation.
To understand Japan, look to rice. To appreciate breadth, think gohan.
Humility exemplified: sake consists of rice, water and mold.
The words we shape predicate a communion of aesthetics.
Miscomprehension inhabits consequence.
* * *
This is one of five of my poems appearing in Heron Clan III, an anthology edited by Edward Lyons and Doug Stuber, and recently published by Katherine James Books, of Chapel Hill, NC. Containing 151 pages of poetry by more than 30 poets.
Available through Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Poems-Heron-Clan-poetry-anthology/dp/0967385555/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1435606564&sr=8-1&keywords=heron+clan+iii
Natural Numbers
One is the instant,
part and parcel of the original.
Look, your open hand
contains all; close it,
and find infinity. God created
the natural numbers, patterns
within patterns within patterns,
shaping order. Look closely
and see wheels spinning
in sequence, drafting through
each other’s space and wind,
star matter, numbers
inside numbers, within others.
Two is the breathing, the in
and out, the pulsing, our tides
responding, a kiss, the moon’s demise
and rebirth. What rings truer
than not knowing? The cycle of
sunrise, noon and sunset gives us
Three, ever continuing, for who
defines beginnings? But what
of tomorrow? I have heard your
reply though no words were voiced,
following, as always, no matter the
result, the end. We are the
seasons. The continuum. The natural.
This is in response to a challenge issued by my friend Ron Evans, who asked me to produce a poem using three paragraphs from Dan Rockmore’s Stalking the Riemann Hypothesis: The Quest to Find the Hidden Law of Prime Natural Numbers. A few of the phrases were lifted verbatim from the selected paragraphs. This is just a draft, and the finished product may be quite different, but hey, it’s a beginning.
Ritual
Placing the dead is seldom arbitrary.
The Marquis de Sade’s grave in the forest at Malmaison
was planted with acorns so that he might be consumed by
trees, but my wife desires a shady plot in rural Texas,
where no one will claim her. In old Christian
graveyards the unclean were buried at the gospel side for
sinners. When her best friend died, she and his former lover
split a bottle of Johnny Walker Black and listened to Puccini.
The Nuer of Sudan place deformed dead babies by the river,
returning them to their true fathers, the hippos. After the fog
crushed Stevie Ray’s helicopter, I played Texas Flood on the juke
box and quit my job. In China, bones channel feng shui, becoming
part of the active landscape. Though she wanted her ashes to drift
in the Pacific, my mother’s body lies in a national cemetery in
San Antonio. On the northwest coast of Canada, the Kwakiutl
left their dead to the ravens, and my father has proposed
on numerous occasions that we shove a hambone up his ass
and let the dogs drag him off. I do not believe we’ll follow his
suggestion. In old England, suicides were often interred at
crossroads, impaled, to impede their restless wandering spirits.
The Torajans sometimes keep bodies wrapped in layers of absorbent
cloth in their homes for years. I’d like my incinerated, pulverized
remains released in the jet stream, if only to escape economy class for
once. Jellyroll Morton’s grave is in Section N, Lot 347, #4, in the northwest
quadrant of Calvary Cemetery, but some villagers bury stillborn
near a dwelling’s outer wall. Hugh Hefner is rumored to have acquired
the spot next to Marilyn Monroe. Placing the dead is never arbitrary.
Originally published in Middle Gray in 2013, “Ritual” has just been reprinted in the anthology Heron Clan III.
For those who might be interested, a glimpse at the genesis of the poem is included in this interview conducted by Dariel Suarez, the editor of Middle Gray: http://www.themiddlegray.com/mgblog/2013/12/19/robert-okaji
O at the Edges 