Two Poems: Chisom Okafor
Some places become homes by habit
When the thousands of mysterious Sumerian tablets were translated,
they were thought to be business records, but what if they were poems or psalms:
My love is the same as twelve Ethiopian goats standing silent in the morning light
Shiploads of thuya are what my body wants to say to your body.
— Jack Gilbert, The Forgotten Dialect of the Heart
.
I know, by science, the exact time it takes to row from one end of this river to
the point where it meets the Atlantic, somewhere off the distant islands of São Tomé.
I know, provided the energy exerted between two equal strokes of the paddle
remains constant, what it takes to sail across vast swathes of water, unmarked
except by seals of light in the dying sun. One day, bathed in sun-spill and a
shade of orange like the yolk of an egg, I rowed with my lover to a place
where none but the river hawks could find us ─ as they journeyed home in
formation, after the day’s labour ─ where you could see the pebbles, brown
and slippery, nestled closely underneath the clear body of water. Here, we stopped
to wait for deep into nightfall, when we’d let ourselves be struck by the gold
plummet of the moon, while the reverberations overpowered us in a
nocturnal symphony, and the damp smell of decaying timber rose like a thousand voices
from the body of our fisherman’s boat. My lover had thrown little stones into
the river, to see the ripples spread apart and dissolve within a circumference,
then in-between strokes of the paddle, I heard him whisper to the evening air:
in this place of waters, every gay man is a gambler, throwing a random dice
with his own life as wager, after which he disappeared through a trapdoor
and would never be seen again. But tonight, as I look up to the full moon
in its bright elegance, it seems as though he’s back to lean again, against the
hairy chambers of my chest, drawing imaginary vignettes with the tips of his fingers,
as we let the canoe navigate itself away from questioning eyes, as again, we return
home, to a familiar smell, but also to a new aching and begin again,
the simple rites of floatation.
i gift you a miracle of pills
a coin for every prescribed
medication
two point five milligrams bisoprolol fumarate
to be taken once daily
five milligrams amlodipine besilate once daily
to induce blood flow
seventy-five milligram clopidogrel bisulphate once
in the event of a cerebro-vascular accident
a daily dose of diuretics
to keep your feet from surrendering
to an infiltration of a plague of floods
but then take a body as water
and a body of water as life
take a pooled water body
as peritoneal oedema
take oedema as a fourteenth century word
for oidein to swell to rise
or to give rise to another life
through a miracle of arteries
dying every day and
rising to life again and again
it’s cold again tonight baby
my lover sings
cold.again.tonight.baby
and the wind is heavy again
on the borderline baby
heavy.again.tonight.baby
as he shouts the acorns loose
from their oak
and time after time
drowning neil diamond’s sweet caroline
on the stereo.
Chisom Okafor, Nigerian poet and clinical nutritionist, has received nominations for the Gerald Kraak Prize, the Stephen A. Dibiase Poetry Prize and a pushcart prize. His debut full-length poetry manuscript was a finalist for the Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poets.
Image (c) Joshua Hoehne/Unsplash
