Leave It Open

LEAVE IT OPEN

We start the day early each with our list
my wife taking hers down the coast in her
fist calls me saying Maui’s unusually clear
maybe I’d take my walk where I could see

but I set about loading the cuttings one
more thing on my list leading to another
until a change in the weather reminds me
I’d better head makai to find Haleakala

gigantic on the horizon a floating blue
mountain drawing all the sky's shadows down
to the dark bowl of sea into the forbidding
channel called Alenuihaha where clouds

shrink and fall laughing into whitecaps
but in a scientifically plausible reversal
night begins to inch its sapphire way
upward to heaven—connecting under

to upper world with Maui’s sleeping
heart beating against what’s reasonable.
I park in long cane grass and thread my
arms through a gate’s galvanized frame

swung open expecting and desiring
more than beauty can give me when I
notice one fencepost leaning away from
the long barbed lines of wire nothing

standing still not even my joy as it
happens not on my list when a tractor
bucks down the field’s hard-packed
edge toward me and I draw a circle

in the air signing Shut the Gate? but
the farmer smiles and shakes his head No
so I follow him out till I’m in my truck
—and I picture my wife returning home
her list the long road map of her day
her hand finding my own list still clean
on the kitchen counter
and I imagine her beauty
laughing against what’s reasonable