Hoe Blade And Eagle-Hawk's Wing Poem by Felix Bongjoh

(i)

What does an abandoned hoe by a taupe
ridge of mulched earth look like?
The hoe stands, blade flipped out on earth floor
from a protruding wooden backside
sticking out hoe's handle curved like a spine.

A woman grabs her spine with a hoe's handle
to feed a battalion of a family, toddlers
lined up behind men wearing tassels of goatees
beards dropping like threads of cotton rags.

Wind wears hairs, breeze spiraling brushes.
The brushing zephyr numbs and warms up
an old woman to slouch and snore,
freeze into a leafy slate over a gong-driven
speck of a speck, a dot of dust swooshing her out.

(ii)

Wind, glide through. Zephyr's quiet sigh, blow her out.
Breeze, slide off your snail skin palm.
Let you hand balm sleep's rough crocodile skin
into dawn's lake fern skin of unawareness.

The gong struck with a far-flung lulling
thunder's voice carrying sticks to roll off
and rattle on a gong's narrowly open mouth.

Under a hat's splashed brim, a burning sun,
rays curved out on a baked skull.
The brim of sun, a safari hat, the mushroom cap
blowing out an oven's lungs
with fish-lipped gills from the silver sea of sky.

Spraying a mat for her to stretch
herself out on a gravelly carpet of unclothed earth.
She sinks into a dropping tunnel,
an abyss of sleep devouring her. Compacting her
into a nerveless floor of earth,

ants' nibbling crawling hands massaging her
into nirvana, sky's emerald blade of lightning
the string on which she hangs for a trip
to Eris and the excavated bottom of an extinct volcano.

How sleep drives a woman-sun into Neptune's
hearth, where sleep seizes her
to wander in a flat world outside herself.

(iii)

In her sleep, as steep and stiff as the bowels
of history's far-flung volcano,
an eagle-hawk lands, grabs her graphite headgear
and flies off with it, as the woman

wakes up groaning with piercing arrows
of pain and biting scissoring hands of wasps.
In her fright, an oval-shaped bowl like a canoe,
she paddles her down her river of fear
to peek at the sky, where the bird sails off,
its wings the color of her hoe's stropped blade.

Where's my puppy screams the woman.
Where's that taupe and brown gem
that yelps all day with death's alto rising
like a sloped gust of wind?

In a cave sinking her into a volcano
in a pitch chamber of night, she's tossed
back into daylight,
when her daughter calls from home:

"Our puppy has just had lunch
and is flying about in the room, a stretched-out sky."