if it is not a dream spirit level, to grey. sing. [ belief in sets of sonnets read from Eden ] in this poem, like in some country not far from where my head is a crown of jazz, the earth was a grain in the beginning, dark as pit, made visible by lovemaking then a kiss, & the brief history of the conversations. God speaks in that night & there was the sun & the first city appears from the mist, open, free. vogue. more like pulchritude built on land. or a ship on water. as if it is a house of lights on the sea that floats in my mind. but i could see the green language of the flowers outside; fertile, luminous, mute enormous meddles meaning blue in its own frame. an apple leaves its roots; it is Eve renaming her fall– watching over the argument that the purpose of my life is to write, eat, drink, commit sin, sleep. & make babies? there must be a place for understanding in the hills, in resignation. so after the printed hammers' fall, & the nails’ descent, i sit on my own paper paradise: a desk, a blank horizon, facing the private hunt of my umbered self, my uppercase labyrinth. under this chaos or that cloud, flows some kind of river: a star sign made blue by the multiplication of the keener lights, & everything is hidden in it except fear. how do i interpret this body of mine? my spirit & father lives in the heaven surrounded by islands because i do not have a boat. yet i reach out for my oars, these little hands made for a little life, to cross over the mystics to meet him, a loner, not at home with the two legends passed down from a thousand words away: a woman screaming a planet to be, a child persistently writing his future on a heap of sand the wind loves to erase. & with our shadows deep in the drift of the shores, i know there’s no end to a light that burned from that night & continued in the end where it is the love the dead call home. how dangerous it is to keep believing in things that have no shape: the Gods, the spirit & my father? then what? she still wears the leaves of the fallen apple tree, like her favorite gown. my mother, covered with folklore & fringes, keeps the Sunday i was born as clean as a drop of rainwater containing echoes. she is from the ribs, & i, from dust. whenever she sits under the tree, she extinguishes the brilliance of the garden next. the church, wild & nervous, becomes loud about the man who loved her abstinence from the manor. what does a woman want? ten thousand black violinists on her feet, but none could lift her into the music of the earth. i play by the River Niger, song of the beautiful people traced to a hundred different bright lights that will not shine, yet she holds her sunshine by its roots. Riverbank Framed Like A Piano For Bach If there is anything I could save, with music, from drowning, It would be your name; Pearl. Crown Jellyfish. Christmas Coral. Wasted Seductions. Enypniastes eximia. Flying gurnard. Brittle star. Orca whale. Titanic. Titanic. Names I called you in whispers behind your back, when you were not yet water. Not yet underwater. I will call you God, too, shape of a happy ending. Here’s a map of heaven. I am not driving in my utopia around the monuments. I am flying with wings spread out like independence, above the nations still trying to climb out of politics named after perdition. You are the entire city made entirely of glass, clear government. The Traffic is coralberry. The daylights are out. And somewhere a man is making coffee for his wife still in bed, dreaming of the first kiss soft as care. Elsewhere, a musician is dying in the way a violin string is struck; the note twitches to hold itself for a long time but stops abruptly. Welcome home, song, Says the audience. Then the applause becomes wild. Then the encore, the reincarnation. In the end, I saved your names, my piano, my endless love of the riverbank, facing the waters I call the music of my childhood and dreams, of becoming beautiful in the light of my hurt.
Tares Oburumu’s works have appeared in Connotation Press, Eunoia Review, Loch Review, Agonist, Bluepepper, Woven Tales Review and elsewhere.
