stasis // or the epic of uzzah
[during a Tightrope mock drill at a military orientation camp] "May God have a photograph of this!" Ilya Kaminsky
i. camera obscura 101
we heaped for a shoot by the testament that we could stop the clock, trap time forever from moving in that cuboid of light. we fed machine to machine until the clock -hands split: two fangs gnawing at the beast we built. this is how time feeds, conquers every thing. we dismembered what's left of the card board box. years later, i'm on a tightrope which seems lowered from a sky, numb from camera flashlight. i stare down at my fall many feet below. the instructor says that fear is a language filled with many pauses and my body is fluent
ii. kinesis
when i torque my feet are heavy on the string like a strong arm creaking a bow; my head, an arrowhead advanced at God. i am afraid of missing targets, of going away like this. my life is just one arrow left in the quiver. the rope twists & squirms under my feet: a snake that does not want to be trampled on again.
iii. bystander syndrome: abstract
we hide quarantined outside our foreign body
iv. camera lucida
for centuries (as this) we've labored to keep time in a hourglass, a pinhole chamber & cozy family albums. we are always this close to civilisation, to complete the tower. we shall clog the old clock-work [End Page 193] of tongues & the moon cycle with glyphs carved from the stone age & big bang shrapnel & bolt every loose ball-and-socket joint kicking —as the car skids like a horse with its two front legs raised above the curb which i fail to catch
v. the mummy
i tarry static and tethered as a shadow, a pack of silhouettes ghosting behind . the cameras wet my body with light as if embalming it
vi. the viscosity of time
too much truth hurts the ear the way too much salt hurts a tongue the way too much light traps a body so we wrap the word in flesh, the flesh of a tongue. ask the woman grieving. ask my dead uncle now jaundiced in our memory. the kids sit in turquoise silence. time rusts away like his liver rot from swallowed pesticide. they gave him a cup of palm oil to shade his liver life-red, the oil thick as a clot to trap the ghost that was loose inside his vein. he perished months later
vii. the constriction
the sun appears with a surprise. the snake had coiled all night on the twig of the tree to choke the taboo & its old language before swallowing what they ate to pulp. crossed lights cast a mesh of ray to trap it. the scales glow inside. in Eden, raffiapalm: the endangered raphia rhegalis lobed like a studio umbrella as we pose for a session
viii. martyrdom
the instructor suffers me to move may be others too can move. he says that the rope is innocent until tangled into a noose for Saro Wiwa. and now i can only pray the ropes not pry them away
ix. fusion
i am so sorry if i don't feel anything these days unless it is my own face selfied in shock in the [End Page 194] broken rearview mirror. he tells us that the rope is failsafe unless broken midair like two fangs split in an open mouth. my mother opens the scar on her neck. she touches it, calling it death's love mark. "nothing good comes," she says, "from the consummation" i ask her what of me. what of me?
x. stasis
the man in that wounded car gasps again. i close close my eyelids shut like small shields upon my brittle body of clay and scales. [End Page 195]
O-Jeremiah Agbaakin holds an LL. B degree from the University of Ibadan, Nigeria. His poems are recently published or forthcoming in Palette, Poet Lore, Guernica, North Dakota Quarterly, Cordite, The Malahat Review, RATTLE, South Dakota Review, The South Carolina Review, West Branch, Poetry Northwest, Notre Dame Review, among others. He has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net, and was a finalist for the 2020 Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poets. He has served as editor/reader for Africa in Dialogue, PANK Magazine, and Jalada Africa.
