Flame Oozing Out Of A Boulder Poem by Felix Bongjoh

(i)

On rock, spin a rock. On tree spin a tree.
You're rock and tree.
Tree climbs rock, branches its ladder steps.

Rock climbs tree, flips out round wheels,
the fat-headed stone climbing
only slowly - like the snail stuck to it.

Rock gale-hurled from a slope climbs tree,
flying feathers of sun the branch
with rock waving back light and splashed petals
of a sun still in its mid-day gown.

Rock on rock. Tree on tree.
And life's ladder to the crown, a flame
at a cedar waxwing's tail.

Climb on, grab roots of a new rock.
Perched on big stone in the air,
we see only flowers of sky,

the hummingbird still stuck to its nectar
with a flaming beak floating
on a cloud of cobwebs and lost mantis legs.

(ii)

Hang on to the unwoven ropes of a slippery vines.
Hang onto white and silver threads
from a broken shredded air, only edges left

After the creeping interwoven day
had hung onto threads of wrinkles
with which I wove a firm patch of courage,

I grabbed hay from a humming grunting
horse's feet stuck in mud, threshed out
every filament for the new fabric of my strides
through thorny shrubs and spiky stems.

(iii)

I washed my face with streams
from my beaming face. They wriggled
down my cheeks, left me with a tapered chin.

Silver chains hung down its edge,
a trail of hair-clenched mud flipping out
comb teeth stretched out into old fingers
of a cakey beard dropping with no hand.

After the day had dumped and pumped
deltas onto my dry body, silver streets of water
flew across the expanded field
of land on my face I would traverse, a bag
hanging from my back loaded with one stone.

I carried a boulder from the battlefront,
trudged with it between hilly bumps
on my face to the promontory's edge, a frown

scooping out a furrow for a ridge
stretching to the snaky slope down a river.
What boulder flipped me over,
Into a muddy swamp, I do not know.
I see only sky's tailed boulder
hanging down a ceiling of love.

I settle down, a boulder's pastes of mud
the khaki, on which badges
of weevilled and worm-eaten leaves
grow the mud-brittle flower of a man,

whose petals shine brighter than flames
from a volcano's bleeding mouth.