tree tunnel at daytime
Photo by Johannes Plenio on Pexels.com
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.

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