TWO POEMS by Tobi Kassim
Ars Liturgica
For the food on the other side of grace I sputtered shortwinded prayers. My father said “slow down; pray like this.” He said always start with gratitude. Even for another day. I scoured scripture for the blueprint. But even pater noster has no lines of thanksgiving. Only give us this day– Still I hear the braid of his voice in mine, trying to fit thank yous between the breaths. When he took the five loaves and two fishes it wasn’t quite a request, but he gave thanks and broke the bread and broke it and broke it. The way when you first love something your hands keep reshaping to receive it. I might be hijacking my memory again, veering off from my father’s lessons. I’m asking my hands what I’ve been given again. The past weighed a little in my palm. Then it became more than I can hold. How will I redistribute? Seasons repeat to reflect my difference between them. When I get deep in springwork my hands crack like my dad’s after a day at the granite shop. I dig up the crushed rocks of the soil up north, and some still solid ones. The loud shroud of the leaves is liturgical. Thank god our hands are jagged, rough enough to polish stone, to thread a needle through the stem of a flower like a pin in time, to capture the winter’s workings in calluses. Thank god soon this skin will be friable enough to accept the roots of a small tree. I stay dirty so my veins can feed on midden. As it is in heaven. I hope my flesh is feeding something in its long coming apart. I almost feel ready to pray but there are no words to remember. I come to the table like bread for grace. To break down again.
Natal Chart
The last time I saw my sister in Nigeria, she looked
like my American sister, 8 years younger, their sixth
birthday.
*
Resemblance runs
so strong in our blood they forced an ocean
between us to impose a difference.
*
My eyes sweat over the false
logic of replacement.
Simi is a growing echo across
the distance everything Dotun
does travels to reach us.
Nigeria is a living
sacrifice amplified
in thickening time.
Remember to call home
displacement, delay.
*
Zoom in again. Everything in my mom’s house is
a metaphor for the cosmos. Plates with holes
in them, ovens open for sun, low hum under
pictures growing apart.
*
“When two universes are in phase, they are coherent.”
Rooms are full of frequencies we can’t isolate.
Inner ear scratchy
for voice
in American vacuum.
*
If the band that expands to keep
the universe contained had a name it would be
called the universe.
*
Kassim; Qasem: from the Arabic, one who divides, one
who distributes
*
I intended to shear
widely, to turn severance into a house.
We moved for my father
to fill in the ellipse
of his brother’s affairs.
*
Josef Albers: To distribute material gifts
is to divide them; to distribute
spiritual gifts is to multiply.
*
Me and my brothers had an airplane
in the cabinet, we let
our coordinates drift in the dark.
*
If a divided body makes our heart stronger
air another vein
to push blood through.
Distance a wound blood could suture.
*
I touch night windows and join
the dots in widening rings
To retrace your orbit
I curve the line
keeping time apart.
