Three Poems by Peter Akinlabi

Night

I have thought

these importunate ruins

painting your face brighter

as something sinuous,

 

something that is capable

of rousing a broken ghost

to the will of flesh

 

Looking in the mirror,

I often wind a reel of wounds

from my own face as if

from a damaged mask,

 

a contagion of forms

that snarls my meaning darker

on the day, like an ambivalent sign

 

I trace your face into

the process of the night

that we consume as mere consolation

for the unwieldy ways our bodies

flow apart

 

I have thought night is adept

at wiring such fictive love

at a sad pace of shadows

disembarking.

 

*****

 

A Brief History of my Stutter

I imagine my birth as under

an ancient tree on the twenty sixth day

of the month of the masquerades

 

I hear the rasp first,

between the first gutturals and

the hums of late afternoon

 

The day is stifling, duct-taped

into sunspots under the Odan tree. A mermaid moon

climbs her face, scattering

the darkness of the leafage for where

to take an aim

 

A tear walks the interstice

between two throats, a conniving correspondence

the sun would pledge to the denouement

of red…

 

What eyes part my head, peering as

into a familiar augury, speaking of locks

that travelled a legend

to fetch a kinship

 

I remember the browning husks

in my subsequent trance, the texture

of which I bring unto you,

 

a ventriloquist’s most weaving act

 

*****

 

A Laying on of Hands

 

I remember my father

in small voices, the tortoise’s;

a trickster, un-translated

in his own tale, lost in the haze

of his own metaphor

 

He brought tales, with ardour

of a tinker  – small creations

of a fetish loom –

 

I remember his name as a ginger mane,

from the other world to which

he was surely no pilgrim

 

The night was his invention,

a moving space of his altar-cry,

where all could recline in the psalm

of his mimicry, or in the moist machinations

of his self-gathering

 

Puzzles must begin as a prayer­­,

he said, mystifying call-and-response

movements, setting children out

on stilted ledges, forest of forms and cowries…

We had started with such inventiveness:

He, pulling the mask beyond the face,

I, fitting the face into the imperfection

of an unrevealing rite

____________

Peter Akinlabi was shortlisted for the 2013 Brunel Poetry Prize. He writes from Ilorin, Nigeria.