Tag Archives: poetry

Fortune

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How dark is dark? How wise is wise? --from a fortune cookie 9/18/15

Fortune

How wise is wise? A pretense on paper, a future memory
turned inside out, the container for who we actually

were when it mattered. Wisdom back then was swans
circling and your skin’s glow reinventing morning.

Barely visible in the dark was a fortune

we could spend before dawn. In the gray plague
of this decade, where we fear our own hearts

have slowed to the speed of anachronism
love is thrust upon me like a check at a buffet.

I will pay for everybody and yes I want a copy.

The moon tonight is a fortune cookie on a black plastic tray.
How dark is dark? Have you read in the predawn light the same fortune?

First Night in The New House, with Full Moon (#fullmoonsocial2015)

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August_moon

First Night in The New House, with Full Moon

The rising full moon fills in
a small cratered crack in the old window

where a stone or BB years ago must
have dug in before reflecting off its loss

As I sit with my son waiting for his breathing
to level into what I know will be dreams

of the many things he will make and be
the moon continues across the sky

and out of the window’s framing (though the moon
in the window cratered out bright and tiny

remains where it is
how like the past sometimes refuses to move)

On a Photograph of Sky on the Surface of a Pond Seen Through a Tree and Therefore, By Extension, On Magnetic Resonance Imaging

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On a Photograph of Sky on the Surface of a Pond Seen Through a Tree and Therefore, By Extension, On Magnetic Resonance Imaging 

The thinness of things

is real and holds itself like the only breath
an image can take.

The tree digs through the sky.
On the other side its heart

emerges upside down but still centered
between the branching out

and the taking root. Your life
plunges outward

like a branch occupying space

in a photograph showing neither
its beginning or end

the pond’s surface surely capturing it
somewhere outside the frame

where I cannot see what you see

only the empty sky beneath the tree line
and an image breathing out

to a moment it will never see: a leaf
rippling depth across the landscape

Kwakiutl

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Kwakiutl

On a long journey. The road darkened like glass
after the candle behind it has guttered.

I met the forest there like a corner rounding everywhere.
Birds who’d never heard themselves before were asking

for their names. Though we could hear the train beyond the ridge
we knew it was empty except for a woman anxious

she’d missed her stop as she dozed. We walked but I could not hear
your step behind me over the sound of the leaves growing.

I am tracking a number in the dark. It keeps changing typeface
to throw me off the trail but it is the only set of tracks ahead of me.

Even as I slow down I am accelerating. Your own footsteps
are catching up to me but I am afraid the number ahead will tire

at last and I will catch it, panting on a hip-high rock among the pine.
I should go back to the woods in the daytime, who ever thought

you were nocturnal, and in the light splaying
among the leaves I am not afraid of numbers.

leaf

In the Month of Your Birthday

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In the Month of Your Birthday

Mid-afternoon storm hours behind me, on the walk home.
Slight breeze triggers rain in the maple, cascading

leaf to leaf in the layers of small shadowed sky, not a memory
of rain but the actual rain, retained, in the vast shadows, actually

falling, and isn’t memory an actual thing moving in a real space,
and like the rain in this maple, not touching the ground.

Readings Recorded: Robert Okaji at Malvern Books in Austin TX

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If only Len had stopped by on his way from Turkey to pick me up in his private jet, I might have made it out to this reading in Austin a few days ago. Luckily, the poet was recorded sharing his work with a responsive crowd. There are too many great lines and great poems squeezed into fifteen minutes for me to quote, but there is talk of snail sex, love darts, spreadsheets, rain forest bridges, wind, trust, love, and the moon. Thanks to all the folks at Malvern Books who I will never meet for recording the reading and posting it here. Robert’s own website, O at the Edges, is also well worth traveling to. Enjoy!

On the Source of the River

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On the Source of the River

On the mountain rain falls, snow melts.

The source of the river is the sky.
So it is that the source of love is not within reach

But flows over me and carves my every direction.
The source of the river is the spring. So it is

That I can never go back to the source of love
but it spends itself constantly on my behalf;

So it is that the very earth is between us
but the very earth gives a way to us in the shape

of a river. The source of the river is a bog.
Like energy, love has no direction. It can be hidden

as potential until the porous ground can hold
no more and it breaks into acceleration

embanked by our lives, carrying us beyond
ourselves towards a wider body evaporating into the sky

Nine Things That Happened In Dreaming and Waking Within Twenty Four Hours of the Last Day of My Fiftieth Year

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Nine Things That Happened In Dreaming and Waking Within Twenty Four Hours of the Last Day of My Fiftieth Year

I left everything in a hotel room on my way to another
An eight year old boy rode his new bike with no training wheels

On the street I caught a blue pouch thrown by a stranger
I knew by how it settled into my palm it was a string of rosary beads

A butterfly fighting the gentle morning breeze on the hill again
and again to land on a dead squirrel and feed

Two early fireflies high in the ash tree’s night canopy
where earlier in the day hundreds of white flowers

Floated down, tiny parachutes onto new grass
The moon sparking off a tin roof like a match

My wife lay her head on my chest to listen to my heart
as I awoke from a dream of laughing

from Spring Songs (12)

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from Spring Songs (12)

12.

Midnight. In a corner of a room
a few days away, a half century crouches.

In the dark the corners of the years round up
certainty into the smooth black mast

against which direction flaps without words,
a trunk removed from its roots.

In the morning it is the maple and its shadow
unwinding along riverways of air and light.

The maple is old but the leaves always young,
the hours of the year, the half million

minutes through which we extend and end,
define the canopy of entirety itself by the shape

of what we miss. We shed time but are shaped by it;
wine on a quiet night, before crickets.

springsong12_2