Robert Okaji: Scarecrow Believes

What is a ghost if not misplaced energy,

an apprehension or the sum of invisible integers

and the properties they possess? I preside over

this sea of maize, tracking clouds, noting patterns

up high and among the flowing stalks, absorbing

minutiae, assigning connections, piecing together bits,

moment to thought, soil to trickle, flutter to gain.

Energy. Inertia. Waves, converted. If I had a bed

I would not neglect to look under it. The closet door

would remain open, a nightlight positioned nearby

with perhaps a mirror or two angled to offer clarity,

and the radio tuned always to jazz, providing little

purchase to any ill-intentioned spirit. The power of

beauty transfixes, even as it carries me far from my

station, from hilltop to plains to glowering moon.

If neither place nor reason, what consumes

our spiritual remnants, what directs our currents

to the next, and each successive, landing? Crows

have long been considered conduits to the afterlife,

but they exist here, in the now. I do not perspire but

fix my gaze on numbers and their tales, on zero and

the history of nothing, on unseen fingers walking up

my spine, shedding a residue of snow, of mercury

and latent images and dormant seeds in the world

underfoot, acknowledging the wonders of what

can’t be proven, what won’t be held or seen. Still, I

add and subtract, unclench my fingers and accept the

quiet, caught forever within the limits of the boundless,

under the sky, in space, within the improbable.

Copyright 2018 Robert Okaji.

First published in GFT Presents: One in Four. Included in Vox Populi by permission of the author.