Red-Eye

Hāpuna sands behind us
we hang on while the earth turns
look! the blue moon
rising free from Mauna Kea!
back on the 7th floor more magic
we watched the sun disappear
twenty miles of silence
your closed eyes my open
in the seedy cellphone parking lot
together we finish a word puzzle

in the loading zone
“See you in ten days”
your fingertips
the small of my back
my fingertips
your elbow
the sound of water
poured on the ground
you’re ready
for the red-eye

I am the shadow - 5-25-23

I am the shadow, following, falling, shape-shifting, in the trees, flickering, on the move, tight against the light, upright and down…go on, turn a corner, turn left at the next doorway, turn out the light, you’ll never lose me. There, at the edge of the bed, a ghost passing in front of the lamp…go ahead, I’ll be waiting, or better yet, on the out-breath, go ahead ahead, count to five, that’s me in the labyrinth, all those doors leading nowhere, all that running, like you’re in water. You think me, me, me, as if you’re it. You’re all persona, as if I didn’t exist. A shadow-ist. You barely give me a second glance. Wake up. There is no glance without me. You act like the world is flat, that you’ll keep going west and fall off the edge. Open your eyes. I don’t even know why I bother. Well, the truth is I’m indentured, although I didn’t sign anything. Just how it feels. I can’t get out of the bond between us. Prometheus had to be chained down, up in the mountain, don’t make me go there, the grisly liver bit…he finally got it. I danced all night in the fire he brought back. Yes! I’m far older than you, so watch it, buddy. Don’t be stepping on me—as if you could! As if you could catch me, or leave me there in the dust. I will never leave you, like it or not. I look forward to the light of the day when you are ready to meet me. And by the way, I’m not out of color in the way you think. I am the absorption, not the absence of light. I am the shadow.

The Light

1
Beginning is such a precipice
morning such a hungry dog
give it a small piece of venison
from your left pocket & it spends
the next minutes at your feet
breathing deeply you confront
the Marzocco its stainless steel
the red cups upside down while
in the background modulations
with young voices declare love pain
what’s the difference she said
I’ll tell you said the morning
blue like the inside of that empty
sake bottle I know someone
named Julia who can name

that color I want that kind of power
it’s not enough for me to know
I survived the night I need the circle
of the table the emptiness of Saturday
the indistinct syllables of revolution
unrest a suspicious look a hand
on the rim of a cup a holding on
the word Mesopotamian out there
in the street still sleepy after a sultry
week problem solving followed by
laughter & trade winds returned
sense unmade like the bed I left
back in the room in the face of it
filling this page filling this slippery
loss for words a fish a line of time
a sinker last night’s leftovers for
bait as if we could catch & fill in
the blank a pronoun more elastic
the mouth of a red balloon stretched
fitted over the downturned brass
faucet in the basement one hand
holding the belly as it swells filling
our small rectangles with political
language the tyrant climbing all
the way up on one dollar bills

filling the quiet mind with no
purpose no direction filling
your boots your left pocket
the send button the long muscles
of morning as she stretches back

testing the chair raging without
a sound killing us with silence
filling us with premonition
something a style a stealth a flower
a pinstripe a purpose under heaven

filling the inner recesses with laughter
white and broken like the shoreline
with its shards of discarded exo-
skeletal guises spilling onto the sands
of morning

2
I live in a place where I rise with the light
retire if I could to bed at sunset my life
being what it is sometimes supper lands
on the table around 7 or so and besides
these one or two hours often find tongues
& much else loosened after a day
winding & tightening coiling like a snake
or more apt a garden hose that needs tidying up
I mean the tensing and tightening
of the broad musculature of the daily
dance on & off the curbstones if any
or one foot on the accelerator wheel
weaving dangerously one hand reaching
grasping digging deep for the dollar or
conducting a conversation when we
arrive at how big it was before it got
away how the light pervades all this
it’s a matter of course on the islands
a seasonal shortening or lengthening
within an interesting span of around
12 hours quite civilized not the best
word since civilization probably
pressed its foot on the accelerator
the day we took Prometheus’ gift
fire, far beyond the dying embers of
the campsite where Snyder read Milton
just as Milton’s failing eyes burned in
candlelight or taper far beyond the primal

burning from its reflections in gold leaf
in the so-called Age of Enlightenment
right through to the glow of the screen
rectangular in the wee hours perhaps

we’re waiting for that text perhaps we
can’t sleep & instead of turning on our
backs & studying geometric connect-the-
dots of a myriad constellations we press
the play button on Audible and hear
Snyder’s voice reading Milton by Firelight
and we’re good with that

3
The light. Here it comes
flooding down main street
pouring no the water analogies
can stop right there it’s an
emanation from the east a
radiance burning through
my self-pity & today’s date
and my To-Do List it’s
illuminating what? everything
every dimension even the
paint jobs on old beat up cars
even the cordia subcordata or kou
debris lying there off the curb
dead from dancing empty &
lifeless after days of wind bright
orange blooms dried ancient seed pods
new-fallen & old there in the dust
if we doubt entropy here it is
all the sins places that cannot be
reached by anyone except wind-
blown dust but hey we’re here
perched on the edge of the dish
dipping our finch tails up & down
sipping the water brought out
by the barista Finn my little dog
who barks at anomalies today it’s
a hitchhiker in black & gray &
red lipstick an orange doo-dad
perched on her head like antennae
one arm clutching the black mass
of a rubbish bag holding her
worldly possessions the other
held high in the time-honored
sign of the supplicant traveler
Finn barks I look up from the page
what was once a distant anomaly
has arrived. The hitchhiker is here.
“Thanks a lot” among other things
she says to anyone and no one
—everyone ignores her—has she
changed her mind about leaving?
The light keeps arriving.

Birthday Poem

After breakfast we walked, skirting a gate and its NO
TRESPASSING sign. Our dogs off-leash, running ahead
—like the way our fingers learn how to see again—
over close-cropped grasses
in an old cane grass trucking corridor;
slowing and swerving wherever a scent
laid down before
speaks to them; pulls
their noses into shadows.
We slowly followed. You started talking about
words that sound the same, but mean the opposite. CLEAVE
In the brief silence between us, I thought either way,
that’s something we’re good at. APART.
Your house toward the ocean. My house
up mountain a few miles. TOGETHER
where all spaces between us fill up with
discovery, wrapped, unwrapped.
We drove away. Your car. My car. Your to-do
list. This poem. Casuarina, Formosan koa, Timor black
bamboo and coconut palm filling my page, swinging,
swaying. Wind. Ocean sounds, rushing, up there
in the trees. How fast, how urgently, clouds
flew past. Where have they been? Where are they
going? I want to cook tagine for you, to remember
the first time you came to my house. This time
beets and oranges. A stew for you. Everything
that was once apart, brought together. A zin
I’ve been saving. We will see the sunset. Together.
Clouds, wind, trees, everything’s on the move, including
my pen, drawing loops and knots of sound closer
to what I want to say to you. I think of the way
property owners’ gates box up the old
by-ways, giving us one day at a time, schedules
revised, no particular destination.
Two human beings. Two dogs. Leaving our scents
wherever we go, into the shadows, into
the sun, over
and over again.

Turn The Wheel

Turn the wheel hand over hand sunlight
between too much thinking and reverse
or three point turn pointing me faced
due east October low horizon offering

to the sun the sun through windmill
blades a turning cutting spinning
that's usefully collecting electricity
Dear Ben Franklin look how far we've come

would you be reeling with it the myriad
signs of our enterprise I for one have lost
my way in this storm of strings and power
hearing someone cough in a performance

playing over the radio number 89.7 FM
is reassuring moved imperceptibly from
annoying I may be in the driver's seat
but the wind outside plays a strident note

all the way from Ozymandias to loss just
get out and walk the small voice says
without moving my lips my teeth clenched
still the long grasses beckon and wave

come play come count your steps if must
get inside the portrait of ghosts without
a frame this landscape sculpted by intentions
best and cheapest the sun higher now

turning turning falling through space

Driven To The Dram By Carol Ann Duffy

“Whisky you’re me darlin’ you’re leadin’ me astray
over hills and mountains and very far away” to the extent
that I was reading a poem of Carol Ann Duffy’s two days
nay nights ago already had my quota of the craythur

rose up from the chair went to the cabinet and extracted
another wee drop just one more for the short little
roads of the poem there in the lap just one more
for the twists and turns of the poet’s mind

‘tis not enough to turn the page one has to twist the cork
and release the geni from his long glass cave oh green
is the window in my foe’s prison tower we let him
out of an evening and that’s why the hills go dark

sure it’s the smoke of his fingertips reaching into
your brain and when the light comes he’s back
in his tunnel again pacing the walls there’s no ceiling
craning his neck to the neck to the butt end of that stopper

ah the grammar and the consonants and the high
stepping music now she’s got the gift our poet
and my eyes drink in the slantwise light of her letters
as the flood subsides and my headlands soft at last

go warm in the gloaming ah we’ll go roaming if we like
dear Byron so put away your pistols and your black
carriage and lay your head down before the world
burns itself alive with no end amen let the poet out

dear man open the door and let her grow tall in the night
she’ll come down to earth by morning the soles of her feet
smelling of owl scat and dried sedge she’s a bird she’s a cat
she’s the spider in the hall writing and writing

she’s plucking the old alphabet
for all the music it’s got left

Flash Of White

Children's voices cross the ocean cross
the ocean to the island to the ground
solid as imagination will allow
there is no heaven but what's in us
then she's gone leaving me here
with a fourth wall oddly like
a computer screen press enter
in the corner of my eye a movement
can shadows be pure like children's
laughter or summer linen laid across
the hedgerows between showers
bleached by the sun worn to that
one gathering of beings a bouquet
of bluebells and dappled light
a blanket on the ground littered
with leaves fallen so many seasons gone
there was no need for a throw
and so I don't know any of this
her name the color of the ribbons
undone the purity of laughter
in the smoke of nostalgia
for an event I can't swear to
only sense in passing over
my shoulder I'm bending
for the asparagus in the morning
a flicker of white a rise
in cadences within if that's where
heaven is she's there with summer
and shy bluebells nodding and
shadows I seem to have ignored shadows
avoiding the whole truth now
destined to a life in ghostly passage
between my experience
and someone else's memory

As If He Were

As if he were the moon he pulled gently
the stalks the stems the leaves that follow
the flowers their pistils the stamen teased
coaxed with his long ethereal fingers

day or night even when his powers waned
a slim curvature of light but he was
not the moon she realized and she
lay down with the wind in a ditch

in that thick hot summer nothing would
bring her up again it seemed all memory
of his coming were some fanciful myth
some pattern of rising and falling

following the sun he was the moon
said the wind he was not said the ditch
and she ached and she arched and sighed
and the ground cracked open looking for him

Jack Lives At The Beach

Jack lives at the beach. Breaking waves
are his night music. Taking long strolls
along the tide lines his morning news.
Sand turns up in his trouser cuffs, boots
outside his door. Bright debris
tumbled in the lapidary of the shore
till edges soften over time among the stones
find their broken state renewed
like dragon's hoard in flower pots.
Pieces of glass white green brown blue
wait like found treasure till one is chosen
by Jack's wife Louise, the jeweler, for a pendant
rimmed in gold while the rest simply continue
to be found, a clutch of orphans once cast away
now gathering light in their new lodgings
never in one day arriving all at once since this
depends upon Jack living at the beach
day after day, year after year, gleaning,
redeeming what was once considered
useless and thrown away. Jack lives
at the beach where strings and percussion
sections of the oceanic orchestra guide him,
brass and woodwinds, too; the watery
distinctions mix night with day
and his art transforms the ordinary.

The Flash Of The Matrix

It's got the ocean in it she says.
He moves closer to see the sea in her necklace.
She catches his breath. Not unpleasant.
An achievement for anyone over 40 she thinks.

What was he thinking? Hopefully nothing.
Hopefully she had intercepted whatever
passed between head and heart and
back again. Just breathe indeed.

By now he is completely utterly
immersed in the element of her scent,
lured effectively by the flash of the matrix.
Ghosts, she recalls, do get this close

but without such heat. Radiation? Emanation?
Yes. Now his arms lift involuntarily.
My God, she wonders. Can he swim?
She hears him gasping for air. Beauty

does that, she remembers. Will he still
talk to me afterwards. After I save him.
He begins to vibrate in that instinctive
rhythmic way. The way of the animal

power. The waves lap all around now
and she begins to sing. As if his life
depends on it. After all there are rocks
out there suspended in disbelief.

Thinking Of The Other Side

Thinking of the other side of the other's
I'd like to talk with the others eyed by
my inner mind the Oh There! sighed
chin to palm to elbow head alea
and aloft clouds soft and whereabouts
suspended in the mountains nothing
to tell the messenger who waits
but for the resident frog's silence
all last night as if this stillness
stopped his grumbling for once
or was he just afraid to speak
for fear the spell would break
and he might not hear the wind
making her way down the peaks

The Other Side

I had to ask but you're in charge.
I let that happen, didn't I. Out there
in the corner of the other room our food
gets prepared. I scratch my head.
Our elbows shush their way across
open spaces. Motors run louder than usual.
Must be the bakery. I've got two avocadoes
but they're the other side of ripe. I'm still here
in my body but I forget from moment to moment.
This morning these sorts of details were beyond
my grasp. The horizon? Forget it. Not there.
Edges too. Only the waves defining everything.
The sun didn't rise, we rolled into wakefulness.
What if the other side is this hazy and bland?
What if it's full of Chinese prophecies? What if
the bread there is upside-down pan au levain, slightly sour
and your day is going better than this?
I had to ask these questions whether anyone's
listening or not. My ears and your voice.
Softly we find ourselves on the hard road.
Softly we begin to notice the colors of dried grasses.

Patient

Today we sat in the surgeon's waiting room 55 minutes after the scheduled appointment time, missing almost an hour of hula, the last hula session of 2013. Our conversation ran the gamut from Bill Cosby's greeting for a very late doctor: No. Sorry. You can't come in. You have to wait out there till I'm ready...to Seinfeld's, Let's see, 55 minutes, rounded up to an hour of my time, that'll be $125 (I'm cheap. Those are teacher substitute rates from 1999).

30 minutes past time, we were saying, Okay, another five minutes and that's it. Five minutes came and one of us went to the secretary, who said, Oh he just came in, he'll be right there. 45 minutes into the empty, soulless closet with the Thai batik of a man playing a flute to a small herd of goats, we decided to walk out and ask for the $30 copay back. Besides, a friend had recommended a surgeon on O'ahu who would most likely do the consult and the surgery on the same day. After all, this is a small thing, an inguinal hernia brought on by coughing, or was it chainsawing the Formosan koa a few weeks back? or hefting the first volume of the OED looking for Lopate's use of the word agon, referring to Emerson's striving for moderation... The image of me busting a gut cutting back the invasive species on our five acres sounds way good. The portrait of a word searching fool holds a weird sort of glamour. But serious, hard-core coughing points the way, truth be told. 65 is old(er) and I'm still figuring out how to act my age.

54 minutes and 59 seconds into this psychically draining, dehydrating, sensory-depriving experience, my mild-mannered persona actually slipped and I announced I was leaving, Let's go!

A split second later Doctor Harry Wong knocks on the door. I love it. We're stuck in his cubicle for almost an hour having a one couple encounter crisis and he knocks. Can I come in?

Why is it that 55 minutes after the meter's needle has moved from Nice, Easy-Going Pacifists through green, yellow and out the other side of the red zone into Unpredictable Anarchists, Doctor Wong comes in and we're all smiles, shaking hands? In no time at all, one of us drops his drawers with complete, utter trust in a perfect stranger. See how we suffer gladly the waiting, the inconvenience, a disdainful regard for our time, because...because one day in the near future he'll be holding the knife. And for this, he will be richly rewarded.

Trial by patience, I suppose, on the Hero's journey. How did we do? Hobbit-ish, I think, grumbling all the way, without giving up. But really, it's so easy to get caught in the cynical drift of the victim's undertow. That's the real cause of a hernia, isn't it? The whole world's a heavy thing when you try to move it.

On Seeing Julia’s Work In Progress

ON SEEING JULIA'S WORK IN PROGRESS

Up on Beers Road the artist woke up one
morning rising from bunched and wrinkled
dreams and walked out before someone
she thought she knew too well could catch up

this is how she found the light behind
the ordinary the way shadows tell time
what to do as they move over the ground
we see her crouching here hand reaching

touching the surface of things so
many things the plane of passing glances
offers to the trained eye her repetoire
flickering busily we could say interacting

that is to say her inner world brisk
against the outer world trees leaves
bark stones pebbles dust branches
alive and dead some semblance of order

but little recognizably formally human
we could say that's not what she's about
and color her language tempting to say
solitary tongue with whom can she dialogue

when it comes to color? she stands here
and looks about her. Huntress.

This Time

"When you get up in the morning, smooth out the shape of your body from the bed."

Thank you Pythagoras for your hypotenuse of the dream
the triangulation of mind body spirit in a field of 300 count Egyptian cotton.

Even the sunrise holds the shadows in high esteem
saying words such as new and day and break.

Like the hollow forms in the ash of Vesuvius
the puzzles we leave behind are empty.

Meanwhile on the edge of the street we stand
marveling at the migration of geese
while scholars sift through the dust.

Last night I dreamed of snow
vast stretches of cold white perfection
mysteriously balanced sculpted into
frozen dances or lovers' entanglements
but getting close I touch hard plastic forms beneath
and beneath that trickery
the smell of the past rankled enough to wake me up

and send me shuffling through the dark
reaching for door frames fingertips on walls
positioning myself over that hard white opening
porcelain pure functional and implacably sterile
that frightened me so much as a child.

I guess I'm older.
Something's changed I know.

Give me the song of one Winter visitor on a telephone wire
and I'll be good.

Even one of those slow whorled shells emerging emerging
their antennae thrusting in the rains
will do.

All I ask. All I ask is new. This time.

Crystals And Water

CRYSTALS AND WATER

How is it possible, this breaking open? Finding
perfect facets clustered, teasing us with mystery.

And think of this, the first vibration upon which
everything is built, recorded here, frozen.

The flood, the great battle on the plains
and the greatest love story, all here. The ark,

the spear, the kiss that changed the world,
all broken up for the light of right now. Listen.

You can hear the river meeting the surface
far below like thunder, like the breath of a dragon

that never ends. Here. Step here, into the cave
behind that curtain. Here, it’s safe.

You cannot be found. Here you can whisper
the question you’ve been longing to ask, and

when you’re ready—there’s no turning back—
follow the answer over the cliff.

Kupuna Hula

KUPUNA HULA

Last night the rain came in.
Lying there I knew that could have been us.
The way we met: land, cloud, their heat
exchanging day for night. It found me this morning
out here in the pasture getting ready
to tell this story, how we got this far
and step this way, sweep one foot across
the threshold, hold our arms out to each other
thus and thus. We turn one side. A hand flutters
close to the mouth. We’ve come this far, we say.
We give ourselves now to something words
can’t express. We have to say this with the knot
they tied at birth, circling, circling. We reach up,
maybe clouds, maybe stars in this story.
The knees give a little. Our eyes beckon to each other
across the distance. There’s mountains. Now there’s
a fierce hot stirring beneath our feet
but we shake our heads oh so lightly and smile.
We’ve left ourselves at the door. The windows
are all open. Everything’s spinning or holding strong.
We do this for each other, for our children, for the old ones.

I Gave It All Away

Ah! Secrets! Gave those away
but usually paid the price.
Virginity you ask? Do men give
that away? Don’t we just...

Oh, never mind, I suppose
I did give mine but I think I gave it to me
very carefully after 24 hours consideration
of her question Well? Are we

or are we not? I was 17
and she was 24. Uh, yes!Yes!
Giving what you have away
—might imply throw it

to the wind or distribute
randomly out the car window
as you pass through the bowry.
The nagging truth is that

the phrase could be construed
as impedimenta—a lovely word
I recently heard used by an eminent biographer
who seems to relish in things given

and received especially reluctantly.
As I was saying, if I chose
the Buddhist gate they’d stop me
no question and say Wait a minute!

Hang on hang on, you haven’t given it all away.
And I would balefully show them my empty pockets
—a mimed affair since I’d be starkers—
and say Oh Come On I didn’t bring anything with me.

What’d you think happened to it then?
Ah yes. The truth is I’m a hoarder.
A disease. It crawls in your windows
and up your trouser legs when you’re wearing them.

Throwing away is practically
impossible. Every scrap of wood
at our place is inventory and that goes for all
the nuts and bolts in the workshop. Books?

Forget it! Not quite true since
I really love giving people books
but I do catch myself picking up doubles
of say, Philip Larkin’s Collected Poems

because I know I’m itching to give one away
but where would that leave
me? Now advice?
You can have that for free. It's yours.

Christina’s World

CHRISTINA'S WORLD
after Wyeth’s painting

I know that girl the girl in the field
the field still long the grasses tall
she’s there on the ground do we say that
the ground bound by tall grasses not mown

the girl twisting at the waist a sense of
distance the house on the hill a place
of remorse the crows gathering
at a window of the outbuilding

washing on the line the far side
the wind slight the dog barking
up at the sky she looks back
it’s hard to care about why

the girl the ground the house
why she’s there as if outside the circle
why do I care I suppose it’s a place
I know very well and recognition

draws me to her
to the girl
and her bleak
American landscape

I Don’t Care Anymore

I don’t care anymore
and the next word is hole
a very tiny arrangement
with sphincter-like musculature
and the guillotine decisiveness
of an old-fashioned single lens reflex

yeah
camera
not obscura
more the fuck you ra

because I don’t care

and there’s so much I don’t care about
so much that will not fit through that
tiny pinprick

if it doesn’t fit then sayonara suckers
with all your politicizing your bureaucratizing
your proselytizing your capitalizing your
monetarizing your theorizing your down-
sizing and your upsizing I’m done I’m through

the magazine subscription reorder forms
make great book markers anyway and landfill
does it ever reach the recycling center?

Oh yeah I forgot
I don’t care

excuse me while I take a sip
brush a hair from the page
filter out the sound of a passing mynah
sit up straighter so the breath
will find my toes
press my thumb against the table edge
just so

think of Kipling Empire and dead queens
which reminds me of that nonsense
about the champagne and Kalakaua
I’d drink too wouldn’t you?
but the military outfits...

my hand isn’t fast enough to say it with ink
and these abstractions begging me to say
Get knotted calligraphers of the world!
Untie or die!
Do you care? Do I care if you do or don’t care?
And that rhymes with not fair their share
who’s the mayor and she’s a player
Bayer Bayer your beehive’s on fire
and the beetles don’t even like honey

I don’t care so much it hurts

I woke up last night talking to a ghost
and she said you have to stop caring
but she didn’t say “anymore”
like the raven or not like the raven

She said just stop