Off-Key Sippi Love Song - Poem

Literary Review, Wntr, 2004 by Jeffery Renard Allen

   Stone in the shine
   Blue fire on curves
   Firsthand pulsed in a knot
   The carved bowel of sacrifice must move
   steady
   the lifetime of a vulture
   There on short water
   a flotilla of flapping briefs
   captain's staff braided from cane
   Stone breaks suddenly without bleeding
   I keep hearing its name
   Iboru, Oboye, Ibosise
   I keep hearing its name
   Night pastel with fading moon growth
   (A waning head does not swell up
   bald staff more deadly than any other)
   Clusters of aligned rows white in furious season
   Seed in shape of planter's rubber bootprints
   Set to
   Weigh heavens through a waterglass
   Big Eye
   something must drop
   for the finger of God presses everything

Jeffery Renard Allen is the author of Harbor and Spirits, a collection of poems, and Rails Under My Back, a novel. He is a recent winner of a Whiting Writer's Award and a Charles Angoff Award from The Literary Review.