Colorado Lève Tôt Lyrics
Of shallow dreams, grubbing blitz
At melatonin's spell (flimsy Maginot!)
The white-washed-blue, cloud-bald vista stands off
Silver spider-work of chill-dip moisture
On grateful scrub as I pseudopod my toe
Into this cleansing shock, this gashed reveille,
Ice bath of Colorado lève tôt.
Numbness buzzes my tottering column
But fastens at my plantar pressure points
As Styx wicks up my pores in throbbing flow.
I shake loose my dream-caught load, fish-egged
Fitfully on finger-thicket reefs from
White-out dream-ink of kraken love below.
I snatch these wrigglers for my scrap-pad hook—
Ice bath of Colorado lève tôt.
Watch the sun at these drastic angles
Burn the fringe of tin-filing-thin needles
And sparse broadleaf in tale's end fireplace glow,
With what seems a mere nod buffering this crack
Of story-court muezzin call as words
Burst their black, silk sac, gems reclaimed from escrow,
Spread on my skin from night-blind plunge into
Ice bath of Colorado lève tôt.
About
This poem is from Ogbuji’s short volume of poetry Ndewo, Colorado (Aldrich Press, 2013), which is a winner of the 2014 Colorado Book Award. The poems are from the point of view of an immigrant born and educated in Nigeria, who moved around Africa, Europe and America, never living anywhere more than three years until he settled in Colorado.
This poem is in a form invented by Ogbuji, called the dialette. A dialette has 3 8-line stanzas, each ending with the same refrain line. The rhyme scheme is abcdecfc, which given the repeated refrain means that the c rhyme is carried throughout the poem. Five of the poems in the book are in this form: “Colorado Lève Tôt,” “Wayfaring Mysteries,” “Transit of Venus,” “Tele Flame” and “Catamount.”
Listen to the author perform this poem over a backing track of “Humpty Dumpty” by Placebo.
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