Bolted Boulder Poem by Felix Bongjoh

(i)

Boulder, big elephant bird
without wings. Or are your
arms stitched and woven
into your ribs and bulging thighs?

Are you a fat cocoon
harboring locked shells
and glued pebbles? Are you just
a sealed closed cage,

the calaboose trapping fairy flies
of air and melted grains of dust?

(ii)

How many prisoners
of silver and cream air have
you chained and bound

to the round spherical mass
of your legless seat,

every angle a crab-handed
gripping foot hooked
to the ground that carries you?
Planting you on your buttocks?

How many compacted lumps
of clay spin your ship
seated on a mountain mass

rooted to earth, with which you're
one heavy trunk, stitched
air and sky the fat stem linking

layers of spaced air to air
and air and rivers of air to canoe
the world into your closed
jammed wagons of still train?

(iii)

No station for you, your
arrival your departure spinning
on an axis of you.

Time frozen into a stony ball
on a mountain head,
as you rise and fall on you
sitting on your thighs,

you're the spread of a banyan tree
squeezed into you, a knotted night,
stretched into you,

the dome of clouds woven
and embroidered into you,

your only door, this crack
on your lips
choking you, folding you up
into your chest
only a hammer can open bleeding.

A nightfall of you
prances in bleeding
with a sledge-hammer to drive
me to sleep outside
your closed rooted fortress.