Poems by Derek Otsuji

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To the Eyeless Wolf Spider of Kauai’s Lava Tubes

by Derek Otsuji

From Canary Summer 2024

Derek lives between the Ko‘olau Mountains and Kewalo Harbor on the southern shore of Oahu.

An age ago you traded in the sky
For a roof of stone and the changing light
Of days and hours for one unbroken night,
Scorning the bright pageantries of the eye;
Grew tactile hairs by which to amplify
Sound, so the slightest movement will excite
Your senses, quicken the appetite
To home in on and seize your prey thereby.
To know the world by touch by taste by smell.
To map by memory the blank terrain.
To measure time by droplets, like a bell
Tolling sunless hours of your dank domain
Through which you move unhaltingly, though blind.
Dark caves lit by the deep eye of the mind.




To the Hawaiian Goby

by Derek Otsuji

From Canary Summer 2024

Little goby fish, wholly admirable
for endurance, agility and sheer
gumption, among the finned folk without peer,
famed for a feat scarcely imaginable,
proving even waterfalls navigable
—evolution’s trick, by which you adhere
to the rock face, inching up, until you clear
the vertical drop, that unfathomable
sky-deep hurdle, and arrive in clear streams
that were the stuff of your prenatal dreams.
What unseen mind or hand guides this migration,
whose only end and final explanation
must be, however far we stray or roam,
that instinct never fails to brings us home?




White Tango

by Derek Otsuji

From Canary Summer 2017

Nature selects from auditions of vast
variety and kind, whittles down the motley
ragbag while paradoxically adding
to beauty, strangeness, till the elegant
oddity be achieved, the fit performance
suited not for survival merely, but
pageantry—queer couplings, entanglements
of mutual cunning, desire twined
in tango to a music of its own
making. How many eons before that
choreography achieved a shapely
dance, life’s swift movement through its fecund forms?
The desert flower of the Suguaro cactus
blooms for one night under a desert moon,
for one night, secretes its seductions of
nectar and scent, honing the fine hunger
of the lesser long-nosed bat who plunges
his muzzle into the floral tube (that
fragrant envelope), guzzling his fill, till
his furry head, dusted with pollen, lifts
back into air, shaking the gold spores
in a downward float fall like a blessing
to blush cold flesh of that moon-blanched flower
for one night lit beneath a flowering moon.





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