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
The Box
Opened or closed, the mood
descends
with the pull of tooth and
tongue
and discarded sound in wet
grass,
its odor mingling with
cordite
by summer pavement under the
canopy,
six plastic flowers faded by the
sun,
and photographs scattered over scraped
earth,
where we stand bound and
apart,
I reach toward
you
and find only
air.
The Fullness That Precedes
it is not
the moon but
rain that attracts
me to this
place no faint
light no shadow
but the fullness
that precedes its
history that of
magic from nothing
to nothing by
which one may
discern perfection a
cloud the solitary
note of distraction
Mary Tang has graciously translated several of my poems and provided recordings of them in Cantonese. I cannot tell you how touched and pleased I am to see and hear her versions of my work. Thank you, Mary!
http://lifeisbutthis.com/2015/05/15/the-color-of-water/
http://lifeisbutthis.com/2015/05/02/the-echo-is-neither-sound-nor-hope/
http://lifeisbutthis.com/2015/04/24/translating-robert-okajis-bread-into-chinese/
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.
My failures often lead to success. I’ve never quite completed this one, and don’t know that I ever will. But the first draft (nearly three years ago) set me off on a new path, one that has served me well. What more can I ask?
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.
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
O at the Edges 