Agave
It might deceive.
Or like a cruel
window, live its life
unopened,
offering a view
yet reserving the taste
for another’s
tongue, ignoring
even the wind.
The roots, as always, look down.
* * *
This first appeared in Ijagun Poetry Journal in December 2013, was featured in poems2go in April 2016, and is also included in my micro-chapbook, You Break What Falls, available for download from the Origami Poems Project: http://www.origamipoems.com/poets/236-robert-okaji
A Herd of Watermelon
My work tools include rubber boots, a hydraulic
jack and snake tongs. Prevention over cure, always.
A helicopter’s shadow crosses the yard.
I sweat in cold weather; today even the shade burns.
Ants swarm a dead bat on the gravel.
No keys for these locks, no fire for that place.
Stepping inside, the city welcomes me.
We drain coffers for this grass, and hope for rain.
This morning two deer jumped the east fence while I
updated software. The significance eludes us.
A dream of watermelons rising from their viny beds,
lumbering through the field to the creek. Rebellion!
How many have sat at this desk before me, plotting
murders and rumors or rhymes. Die, mosquito. Die!
“A Herd of Watermelon” was drafted during the August 2016 Tupelo Press 30-30 Challenge. Thank you to Plain Jane for sponsoring the poem and providing the title. Alas, my time at this very special place has ended. No longer in Texas, I seek work elsewhere. What will I find?
The Fog (after H.D.)
I am dead.
You avoid me.
I open like a shell.
You expose me with your breath.
What am I, heartless one?
This was an exercise in which I used H.D.’s poem “The Pool” as the launching point. It’s fun and occasionally illuminating to try these. “The Fog” first appeared on the blog in April 2016.
Ikebana (You without You)
Between frames, between presence and negation, authority.
If your body lies in the earth, why are you here?
Limits admired and sought: the way of the flower.
I pluck leaves from the lower half to achieve balance.
Shape and line detach, yet comprise the whole.
My father, awake in his chair, mourns quietly.
A naked twig forms one point of the scalene triangle.
Starkness implies silence, resonates depth.
Heaven, earth, man, sun and moon invoke your absence.
As you trickle through the interval’s night.
* * *
Ikebana is the art of Japanese flower arrangement.
This first appeared on the blog in March 2016, and is included in my mini-digital chapbook, Interval’s Night, published by Platypus Press in December 2016, and available via free download.
My poem “Self-Portrait as Blemish” is up at Tiny Wren Lit. I am grateful to editor Dana Knott for taking this piece.
The Sky Refutes East and West
Here, the horizon lingers.
The open eye, the mouth’s shape.
A hoop, the circle without iris.
Does the screech owl acknowledge latitude and hemisphere?
The Semitic alphabet contained no vowels, thus O
emerged as a consonant with a pupil, morphing into a dotted ring,
and later, with the Greeks, an unembellished circle (which of course
they cracked open and placed at the end). The female lays eggs
on the remnants of earlier meals lining the bottom of her den.
If you listen at night you might hear the purring of a feathered
cat (the Texas screech owl’s call varies from that of its eastern cousins).
The difference between sphere and ball.
To pronounce the Phoenician word for eye, sing the lowest note possible,
then drop two octaves. They usually carry prey back to their nests.
Screech owls are limited to the Americas.
Coincidence and error, the circumference of other.
***
“The Sky Refutes East and West” was first published in Prime Number Magazine, and also appears in my chapbook The Circumference of Other, included in Ides: A Collection of Poetry Chapbooks (Silver Birch Press, 2015). It made its first appearance here in May 2016.
Window Open, Closed
We enter daylight in the shape
of praise, little words
billowing through wire mesh. Across
the highway a busboy questions time
and the concept of never, while
someone plucks leaves from the bay
tree and plans her day. Roger Bacon
longed to manipulate the inner essence
of inanimate objects, to harness their force,
and a lonely man swallows prescription drugs
deliberately, releasing their attributes over time.
My eyes redden from juniper pollen as the moon
spins invisibly above our roofs, tugging at the
clouds. I once traced in a building of music
the organ’s sound to the woman I longed
to attract. Now, the window prevents the passage
of solids, but waves penetrate. I spread my fingers
across the glass, but feel no vibrations. Distant
sirens announce a procession of cause and intent,
of carelessness and indecision. Somewhere a voice rises.
* * *
This originally appeared during Bonnie McClellan’s 2015 International Poetry Month celebration, and is included in The Circumference of Other, my offering in the Silver Birch Press chapbook collection, IDES, available on Amazon. A recording of the poem may be found on Bonnie’s site.
“With These Nine Figures” is included in Purifying Wind (now available as an Ebook for $4.99, and in print for $12.00), an anthology of pieces about or mentioning vultures.
With These Nine Figures
… and with the sign 0…any number may be written.
Leonardo of Pisa (Fibonacci)
We attain from emptiness and the Sanskrit shoonya, from safira and sifr, zero.
As in unoccupied, as in void, as in what brims the homeland of null.
I once counted thirty-four black vultures orbiting my neighbor’s hill.
Despite appearing in Mayan codices, they neither sing nor cipher.
Fibonacci’s Book of the Abacus introduced the decimal system to Europe.
Regarding the tyranny of mathematics, is nothing something?
From alterity to belonging, its provenance assumes an absence of being.
Which is not to suggest xenophobia or superiority in order.
Whether depicted by empty space, wedges, or hooks, it held place.
Representation not of the object, but of its purpose, its path.
Black vultures do not smell carrion, but pillage from those that can.
Obliterative in the west wind, subtractive, unbound, they spiral.
Are the circlers in the sky symptomatic or merely symbolic?
Comparing negative infinity to its positive sister, I observe their way.
* * *
“With These Nine Figures” originally appeared, with a companion recording, in Clade Song in summer 2013. I had asked a friend for five or six words to use in a poem. She provided tyranny, emptiness, xenophobia, pillage and at least one other that I’ve forgotten. But it wasn’t nothing.
Kites
Will viewpoint shift with my spine’s slow
compression, or will this
window admit only true images
in the shortened days to come?
I pencil phrases on bone-shaped kites
and release them to the afternoon.
Call them prayers, name them moans.
Each string is a regret freed, a separate
skeleton, let go. My two selves shudder
in the attempt. I await the perfect breeze.
“Kites” first appeared here in July 2016.
End of the Road (2002)
Neither expected nor sought, truth arrives.
One phrase, a minute turn of the
wrist, and the beginning reverses itself, becomes
vessel versus point, illuminating
the reach: one sign, two paths. The agave.
How far we’ve come to affect this place.
Last season the flowers were gray and we knew nothing.
Even the stones quivered with laughter.
And then it rained. And the creeks rose, and the bedrock
appeared as if to say your efforts lack
substance. Look underfoot. There lies the truth.
Neither expected nor sought, it arrives.
O at the Edges 