The Rose

There is a secret in those folds
where conversation's scent withholds
its pastels and silks — where memory
lifts its blooms, each small glory
reaching and reaching from its wood
through the bracken, bad or good,
planted or forsworn—
up and up the thorns
our best intentions climb
the deadly scimitars of time
while drops of blood fall now and then
to find forgotten ground and start again.

A World Without Bacon

As soon as the words leave my pen I see the creatures massing on the horizon. The sniffling, snorting, grunting, ground-churning, bamboo shoot-eating, blueberry uprooting, dahlia tuber decimating, thick-skinned, long snouted hordes. Can you imagine them thundering across the dark land through our dreams, forever after to be called nightsows. It's too late now. There's no turning back. We've opened that box, the one that reeks of pig shit, and our worst nightsow has been released into the field of play where two armies meet, all because we stopped eating them. Oh I can hear you say, I only meant MY world without bacon, but as my father liked to say, that doesn't work at all...if you do that, everybody'll want to do it. Then what would the world be like. And you started it. And so on. It was a little retort that would pop up of a Saturday, the day my mother worked at the department store in our local shopping center and the two of us men were left to our own devices, the rashers, as he used to call them, sizzling away on the stove top, and the open tin of Heinz pork and beans neatly stripped of its cylindrical label there in all its glory on another electric burner heating up for the waiting toast. It was a great lesson in leading the hobo life in case the world ever went to hell in a handbasket — a very curious image and difficult for my ten year old mind to hold onto, but never mind, we were saving on dishes, a rare opportunity for my father, on his one day in charge of the kitchen and my education.

And that's the thread of the story — the pig has been with us, with my entire family, through thick and thin slices, rumps, roasts, ribs, legs, even the trotters pickled for the delight of a — I'm stuck for the phrase that contains a pubful of Guinness drinkers — a dark phrase...

It's in our blood, as they say, a veritable marriage of man and beast though I regret saying that. I didn't mean it for a second. We'll keep the work 'relationship' out of this as well. Suffice it to say we had to do it, legions of us, with all the devious and sundry methods to hand, we had to overcome our pigs and eat them too. That takes care of that, doesn't it?

Oh we could talk on about the pigs for pages, how their intelligence and ours have danced a merry dance through the millennia, each of us moving the bar a little higher before breakfast. Of course this is all hogwash and I'd be a poor observer if I didn't note here how disadvantaged the poor pig in the face of it. For one thing, they never had to go to mass, get on their knees and pray for forgiveness. After all, what have they ever done wrong? They're just sniffing for any old morsel with their extraordinary snouts — the poor things — have pity on them. I remember well the rainy afternoon in Kerry, a gray day indeed, the color of pig slurry, and a pig in my uncle's care hung up unseen by me in the outbuilding, screaming his blood-curdling scream. I will never forget it. But what's worse was the week after at Tommy Maher's the butchers, when we went in for our rashers and my uncle saying we're only now gettin' back the creature who sang out on that rainy afternoon, as he took up the package, and I put two and two together and thought hard, for the very first time, of a world without bacon.

She Did Not Lie

Yes and she did not lie. She did not fabricate, prevaricate or implicate. She was a good soul in her way — still is, for all we know. Everything she touched, every face, every flower, book, skirt and blouse, led to this, this resting point where what's been accrued slows down into recognizable mass. And we give her a name that she will recognize before she resumes her electric journey. She's a swarm of neurons and particles moving en masse, pulsing, forming and re-forming — though, does she ever really reform her Scorpio ways? After all she merely refines who she is and begins teaching herself to others — she called it 'sex therapy' over the phone in the middle of the night, her voice reaching all the way from Down Under to the 45th Parallel where it was so dark and I was so fresh from dreaming I could hardly talk, leaving her to say her piece, leave her number, which I never called. Some, some of her dazed or numbed by the expenditure of energy landing here and there, in the hair, where I brushed them off before they could sting.

Garinìon

Now Garinìon, they're going to tease you for dawdling and taking short cuts...the same ones who'll be leaving the keys to the kingdom in any old cafe or on a park bench when here you'll come jingling what once was lost, behind them. You see, Garinìon, we're all a bit lost, really, so it's a good thing, you're arrival, on this day the 18th of June and only two days after the notorious Bloomsday! It's the 'after' we're examining here. As I was saying, don't pay any attention to that lot. They don't meant it. They'll be taking good care of you, that's for certain, but there will be so much they will never understand about your progress, my Garinìon's progress, let's call it, as you move through the world. Your one and only Auntie has some notion about your entrance onstage so to speak, but you're on your own, really, and then again you're not, that's the contradiction and the paradox rolled into one but here's the thing: you're a great risk-taker in your first hour cut loose and that's a splendid way to begin because without taking a chance there's little meaning in anything...

so here's to your first hours...

me when I heard you were here — the news came to me out of the mouth of your own Seanmathair — I put on my favorite lauhala hat with the chukar partridge feather band and went to the navigational heiau at Nishimura where I looked hard into the clear water, caught a flash of yellow tang, and laughed when I saw the offshore wind skipping and glittering over a field of quick little waves as I stood there with my back to the big rocks that stopped here so long ago when they first caught sight of the ocean. I sang He Halia Ia three times and Kau Mai Kala for you, my Garinìon...

Dumbass

Or is it Dumass? No. That's an author. French. Son writes too.

The thing is, I remember being addressed by this term and I thought, I'm not dumb, so maybe it's my behavior, something I was doing...

The cool thing about adolescence is that you just observed it. Though you were in it, you weren't in it. Was this an out of body experience? Holy...

Enough of that...I was trying to say something really wise about the oil spill and this came out, just bubbled up to the surface. That's why I wear a hat.

A Cut In The Land

A cut in the land, she said. They've wounded her, made their incisions with their machines and their breakdown to buildup theories, with their 80 dollars an hour to the smell of diesel as they push and pull their big little levers with their telling black shiny knobs. They cut the land, she said, and she called the land a woman, saying She doesn't want this, doesn't want these stones revealed, these stories made bare for all to see...

As if the rest of us could somehow diminish the magic and power of the world by merely casting a glance. No, she denounced all this, the cutting and rending, the peeling back, the uprooting, the exposing of layers, the digging and delving regardless of that first chapter where Adam was sent out to do just that...and Eve with her furrow.

I wanted to say to her, Who or what made THAT cut? Are we not natural ourselves? Are we otherworldly then, that whatever we touch is a sinful act? Are we Jain monks then? Who's going to brush away the path for us as we make our way through the world? Is that it? An untouchable class? Is that your designation for these bulldozer operators?

I could see it if her objection was to the ensuing erosion, the brown stain in the reef, the damning flow of the creek bringing the dust of the city to the ocean...but this rabid, no, not rabid, more Kathleen Na Houlihan-breast-beating-woe-is-me, and all the while finger-pointing at the man caressing the machine, who might think of himself as a sculptor for all we know.

What can the collective consciousness bring to bear here? What CAN it bear, I suppose, is the real question. If the Gulf of Mexico spill originates a mile deep, one might ask Why are we there at all?

On the other hand, isn't the robot an extension of our hand, just as the shiny knobs, just as the computer button...where is the mind in all this? The heart? Where does her weeping and wailing take us? What does it do for us? Yes, sorry for your loss. Someone cried, no doubt, for Ozymandias long before the desert sands swept in on their own sculpting wind like extensions of our breath — from our first to our last — surely not lost in melancholy but keen-eyed we must wake up like the chaos in a fall of blossoms from the cassia tree at the end of a dry month like this May; we must wake up and hold her tight against the poet's dying of the light, hold her close while the lamp shatters in the dust, and when she turns her back on all this...blow her a kiss.

Cut In The Land. Version 1

The cut in the land finds me here with the AC on burning gasoline to stay cool. Now I've written it, I cannot continue without switching off the ignition — rolling, we say 'rolling' down the windows even though there is retraction, a descent of the glass into the door of the truck, no doubt mini-rollers with some purchase, some grip, able to spin when I engage the buttons near my left hand but we rarely roll our truck or car windows down anymore though we say 'roll' and press the button, just as we say 'hang up the phone,' when we push a button or set it back in the receiver — which is also in many cases a wireless transmitter — so I switch all this off this taking away from me my effort my mechanical my physiological opportunities to engage with my machine the black truck and voila the windows now being open I hear the wind in casuarina a phrase I have come to love for what it really means...it's a dance of limbs and leaves of course but really it's this performance of the wind, this orchestration, pulsing like the shoreline with its tidal ebb and flow, that shooshing sound, and then calm and we are pulled along, inside this calm, pulled from our centers as our senses give way, surrender to its charm...the wind in the trees can do this. Hearing ceases to be a matter for the ears. The skin prickles with its listening. The eyes recover themselves, having been lost in thought since arriving at this junction. It's a cut in the land. I mean a cut deep and long enough for a train. But there are no tracks and rails only the hard scrabble, hard-packed back roads of Kohala.

A man's name, Pratt Road, intersecting the road down from the school which runs into Lisa's place — or so I'm told. Three gates mark this place. 12 foot gates forcing all and sundry to park in the shade in the junction for there is no going down Pratt Road. And Lisa's gate. That's open though you wouldn't go there unless you had business. But the windows open down in this intersection of cuts in the land, this blurring of the senses and this dance of the wind in the trees mighty like the ocean, like an empty shoreline, we can say, well, what?

What can we say? Walk away from the truck? Leave it here in the cut. Leave it switched off. Walk.

Chocolate

Dear, dear, chocolate, I have searched for your essence in Manhattan at Christmastime, there by the ice rink, carried you away like the precious body of a new savior come down in small dark mouthfuls. Yes, dear chocolate, I have taken my fingertips to your nightdress with the golden lining there in Antwerp outside Peter Paul Rubens' house and learned how to spell the word 'exotic' in twelve languages and I don't know what to say, really without blushing...I couldn't wait and I'm sorry for that...I live for you...you call to me, London or Paris, San Francisco or Tokyo and no matter how they say 'hello' I am struck dumb with your taste on my tongue, slow, slow taste, a crass word there, my love, more the realm of buds or the sensation of melting or closing my eyes whilst listening for the footsteps of the half-naked warriors who passed you from hand to hand more than a thousand miles from the jungle to the icy slopes until you reached the Aztec king...

To A Rock

I look towards you, oh rock, with words on the tip of my tongue, a song, a vibration to you, I suppose. I see you there. I pass your way. I pick you up and wonder what you've seen. If you could speak what heat would come out of your mouth. What depths you could reach. What extremes before one of our kind ever stepped foot on you and instantly regretted it.

Your pockmarked skin tells me how your story will go from here, shadows and curvature for an ant to explore, defying measurement and our smug science...

You will outlast me, that's certain but I'm not envious. Your world's so invested with my own imagination, bringing to you the concepts of journey and narrative but it's ridiculous, don't you think?

You don't, do you? Think, that is.

Perhaps you think that makes you superior but here I go again investing you with my own ways like Walt Disney making the mice talk to each other in squeaky human kid voices. What if I called you a stone, oh rock? What would you do then, eh?

Dirt

Dirt. To really appreciate it you have to be sleek and wriggly just about as non-anthropomorphic as the animal world comes. I remember dissecting earth people in biology. Was it five hearts or three? There's profound significance in those hearts but I just haven't figured it out. Like the mortician who signed his letters "eventually mine" the dirt people have a kind of hold over us—but they don't ask for much. Moisture, darkness and last night's foodscraps. Vegan only, please. Oh and last Sunday's newspaper. The news that's fit for real dirt.

What is it. The dirt. We want it when we have had enough smooth talking banter about the weather and other small nothings. Martha could tell you all about the real dirt over the fence. Or sitting at the mahogany shoreline of the local bar. Or one ear pressed to her wireless ATT receiver.

We seem to need it like those wrigglers. It breaks us down.

Blank Bulletin Board

For the unforeseeable future and the forgettable past there will be nothing happening of any note. Thumb tacks brass and plastic-headed will remain like unnamed constellations in a cosmic void made of black construction paper but of one thing you may be certain, this space is saved. Watch it. Watch this space. Where the general announcement is that there are no announcements whatsoever, no births, deaths, parties, sorties, camping trips, country western blue grass reggae island music bands this Saturday or next Tuesday, no massage sessions, nor yoga, nor selling of imitation Balinese artifacts or refrigerators or '53 Chevy pickups with wraparound windows, or great deals on nutrimax vitamin suppositories, or dog stories, or worm casting — none of it — though this these those though they be not here nor there will however for the benefit of all and sundry — these shall in their absence be framed. Stalwart as a ship's cabin and permanent as a wine stain on mother's dress, this frame is heretofore hung for our community's pleasure and everlasting plethora of inactivity.

Everything Happens At Night

For one thing your feet grow.
Toenails faster than that.
Armpit hair — it goes, or rather, grows, without saying.
Nose hair. Yikes. At night. It happens. Somewhere at night a toilet flushes, a fart resounds in the porcelain bowl of night's intermission. All in the night. Poets dream whole entire poems in the night and then only reach line 56 when the postman knocks in the morning. Cats, this is a fact, grow big as houses each night. Just ask a rat. It happens at night, of that there is little doubt! All the news that's fit to print? At night. And don't forget: night wears long slinky dresses and no underwear, blue tuxedos and string ties, pleated shirts and laundry tickets in its hatband. Night gets drunk, drives on the wrong side of the white line because there are no lines in the night, that's why bird don't sleep on telephone wires—Night will not stop to spare you or forgive you—will not answer your pathetic question about guardian angels and swords of fire. Night is black fire. It is breathing in, without end. It is the dark felt dryer lint in God's navel and he's going to pick through it after a cold one.

LS Lowry In New York

Out there on the streets the children stand about the dirty town. Above them factories belch their smoke, their exhalations — what am I trying to say? Their filthy breath pours out the chimneys making, making, and the fathers came in from the fields decades ago. They're locked up in bricks and mortar now, making, making. Nowhere to be seen, the fathers. They went to war and then they went to work and all the little people, not children, you see, that gift was denied them, the little grey people hunched and sticklike, a few brave souls wearing red, a brighter red, a poppy red, against the red brick school house where they turn the pages of their books, pick up their pencils, put them down again, hunch down into their desks and practice making, making.

And he watches all this. The watcher averts his eyes for the camera — he does not wish to be the subject matter of this tired story. A couple of days now he hasn't shaved. His hair tousled since time began. He tries not to judge the living and the dead, the factory owner, the mothers standing like stunted trees in January in the street with the youngest attached at one hand, the heavy coat, the faceless hat, heavy with melancholy. He looks down and away, unshaven and unkempt. He doesn't care about anymore. He hears footsteps in the hallway outside his studio. Like a church all quiet otherwise. He keeps his lips together in prayer, without judgment. His face begins to show the lines of the city, the lanes, the avenues, the alleyways and side streets, the dark places like crooked scars where you could go hungry.

It is a day like no other. And yet it is the only day there is. There is no way out of this day, this hour. In his hand he holds the brush and touches the canvas lightly — another child, this time, movement.

Across the river the ferry boats and tug boats break through this scene. Beyond this scene there is no time for contemplation, the guardian rises out of the foundation the first foundation. High above the trees she rises, holding aloft the torch that brought so many to the gates of the city. And the ships come in by night and day. And the people dream of making, making.

I’m Only Flabbergasted…

Minding my own business gets more unattainable with age. Our young friends had their child on Thursday and I saw him back at work on Sunday. I take exception to this flagrant abuse of hard-won paternal rights. It's a perfect example of how the State steps in with common sense in the rule of the law after centuries of dismantling both the commons and the sensible. And it's hard-won, damnit. I want to say, get your ass back home where it belongs, I don't care how tough and capable she says she is. "There's nothing I can do" is a pathetic statement that makes me ashamed for the male of the species. I used to be one. Now I can claim general membership in the human race but there are moments, sometimes more than one a day, when I do revert to that shameful state by asking too many questions and/or allowing Her to attend to the basics of our survival while I simply stand there and watch. So you can see that membership in humanity — I am loathe to call it civilization anymore — is renewable daily.

Back to our young man, the first-time father. What is he? Out hunting? Dragging the boar home by its heels to the pit fire? She looks up at him as he enters the cave and smiles and the babe's mouth falls from the tit. They are agog at his return.

Or is it that he can't wait to share that cigar? What is he? Part rooster? People line up to shake his hand and congratulate him. Meanwhile the miles of separation between him and his new family are palpable.

Am I being a bit harsh? His co-workers response to my questioning and bafflement was quick: women have been popping out babies since time began. Vietnamese women gave birth in the rice paddies and kept on working [someone actually said this]. Now that's the shameful sort of reaction that wipes out all our extra credit as males. What's wrong here? Mind my own business? This is where I step in and say with a slight tremble in my voice, When I was a young man...like the character of Aubrey in 'Brief Lives'. The point is, some of us worked hard to win the right to stay home with our newborn. We don't want to throw that away, even if it means cleaning out the garage or digging in the garden if we can't think of what to do. We must not leave the sphere of new life. If we follow that hard-won rule, we might discover something profound. We might actually get to live outside our own heads, even for an hour. Wow! Think of it! Just stick to the home territory and accept one basic tenet of the Secret Oral Teachings of Being a Better Human Being: If you stand still long enough, you'll learn something. Okay, you can sit down if you need to. Knuckle the sleepers out of your eyes so you can see the world around you better. How many hours were you missing in action? What's that? Two hours' worth of driving? Cool. That's some serious interaction there, you know, traffic, the right radio station, finding the cup holder. And how many hours total? Eight? Ten? Twelve? I'm only guessing here. I'm only flabbergasted.

Oh let's see, my son's three days old and you're saying I have a choice? On the one hand, hang out with the woman in my life who just did this extraordinary thing called giving birth to a little person...oh my God, it's a miracle! A person who's going to grow up and continue the species wearing my genes and following my noble example, oh my God! Think of all the things we're going to do together. Wow! I just want to see him and be around him because he's changing so fast I don't want to miss anything or...

...on the other hand, get in my truck, twist that key in the ignition, find the right side of the road 'cause this is America, land of opportunity! I'm going back to work! Do my part! Everything's under control now. She doesn't need me. I'm not superfluous, you understand, I'm doing my bit. This is what guys do, right? Head off down the road like a rubber toad and back by sunset...if you're lucky, honey. God! I'm tired of superwomen. Why don't they just keep their mouths shut and keep chopping those vegetables? Get the laundry done? Take out the garbage — oh, well, I'll do that one, that's cool. Pay the bills! And change his shitty nappy (diaper)!

Okay, okay. I've said my bit. I accept that paternal leave is there in case you need it and in your case you don't. Nope, sorry. It's (I'm) like a dog with a bone. Can't seem to give it up without a little snarl, even when my best friend takes it away. It's that New Life thing, see. He's just a little guy. And you're not there.

That would be a good place to shut up and leave you alone but I need to add that you have to take the long view sometimes. Sometimes there will be separation and it will be painful and difficult — Go on, tell me You gotta think positive, here, Uncle. Tell me you're just going with the flow. I'm just saying intimacy is where it's at. It's the point of contact. The little one is teaching you now. "The child is father to the man," as the poet Wordsworth said. This is the first, the original textbook and the pages are made of skin and the chapter headings say things like mother, father, and child. There will be a test.

Go make a peanut butter sandwich.

Water: A Cinquain

Water

She bathes the soil
her wet kiss
heaven sent
comes down
we drink
we sing for joy
each time she comes

Ella Was Running Late

Ella was running late. When was she ever running early? Not to put too fine an analytical spin on life with Ella, suffice it to say she had programmed her life in such a way that trains would always be just leaving the station. In a fit of pique she'd look at her watch and, madly cornered, like a snared ferret, look sharply and rapidly at the station clock—she couldn't accept the rock-solid validity of The Station Clock, that institution of Time itself, without which New York, Chicago and San Francisco would each be a gargantuan, metropolitan version of Ella... Was that it? She refused convention when and where her own internal world was concerned. Was that it? Isn't it a marvel how one human being can progress day to day, Mitty-like, convinced of nothing other than their own credo, bill of rights and United Nations charter. The fact is, Ella was a nation unto herself and despite her disarming smile and whimsical generosity, she quite easily torpedoed innocent passersby with little more than a look, a glance. For all her innocence she was indeed a wounded animal and she would destroy you for a penny. Never for your thoughts.

Crosswalk

Crosswalk. All the signs are there. Silhouette of hominid, handless, footless with a perfect dark circle floating just a ways from the body. Below that, an arrow points at road's margin. Faded, broad white stripes show us where the hapless pedestrian crosses the road. Between the restaurant and the coffee shop, a logical place to direct foot traffic, a painted bridge over troubled tarmac, the highway department's list complete, a check by our town's name, all is safe, the agreement has been made, rest assured, mere mortals may move with confidence once out of their four-wheel boxes, once they have reverted to their natural state, upright and aware of their surroundings. Lo, the deep-set eyes in that floating head can see all 'round, up and down the streets and byways, surely, surely, all is well, the painted bridge has saved the day. And yet, and yet, I hear you say, they will not stop, not now, next week, nor yesterday. Onward traffic flows, onward the diesel 250s, the cute little hatchbacks, the silent half-breeds, the single cabs, double cabs, canopies, jeeps, no matter how long you wait, how carefully you creep. Fast ones, slow ones, people you know, they've somewhere to be, miles to go. No matter that minutes ago you were a driver too. You're invisible now, with no secrets, you're a sitting duck in the land of the goose, you're vulnerable, you're a target, you're the lowest of the low. What is this? Footism? Our civil rights at the crossroads? Our human dignity in the gutter? How, how, how, we ask ourselves, do they not see the signs? Fair enough, the painted bridge fades. The parked cars obscure our intentions. So how did the chicken cross the road? We sure as hell cannot! Have mercy on them drivers Lord, they know not what they do. Oh heavens, I've heard that one, too. Cell phones, car radios, CD players or MP3s, could be a slight adjustment somewhere in the jeans, could be a to-do list or simply a heavy foot, too much to raise from the the accelerator to the brake and oh, the brakes, mustn't wear them out! Damned if that isn't Uncle Fred that almost ran me down, raising his coffee cup high as he drives by—he's got his. I can't get mine.

Oh wait. Oh wait. Miracle of miracles! I've been standing here at the foot of the painted bridge how long now and who should happen by? A girl! A girl! In shorts that shrunk and everything else moving...but the traffic, the busiest time of the morning, too, it's, it's coming to a standstill. She's got one foot on the painted bridge—and another—oh my God she's going to cross the road—she's half way there, she's—wouldn't you know it! By the time she reaches the other side, all eyes turned her way, the traffic flow uncorks, gates thrown wide, leaving me standing here on the wrong side, the invisible man.

Hoea Road Bees

I often walk past what I call The Goat Place as I head up Hoea Road shaded from the morning sun on my 45 minute circuit connecting Leikolu, Hawi Road makai and Akoni Pule. The last stretch leads to my morning reward, the coffee shop... But now I understand what the big nubian was trying to say, jogging right up to me on the road one time, but all she got was a patronizing retort: What are you doing? You'll get run over, momma goat! Now go on back home!

She was really saying, There's bees in there! Help! There's bees in there! Help!

That's how come Bee Friend, Golden Maverick and I found ourselves in a rickety, teetering, hanging-by-a-toenail outbuilding at The Goat Place, with the wind lifting and banging down the corrugated aluminum roofing like a soundtrack for a seedy motel, and a flock of kids bleating and crying like the Big Bad Wolf was standing right there in the shadows of that old monkey pod tree filing his nails, whistling a preprandial tune, and the three of us looking hard at a dark mass of honey bees shaped like North America up in the far corner.

We cleared the stack of fluorescent light tubes, passing seven or eight at a time man to man until we could stand right under the bees.

In our first experience with this, at the house above the hardware store, we saw only little pukas in the outside wall cladding where those bees entered and left. Here, the interior wall was eaten away in that shape and that shape was a mass of bees fixated on comb. When we pulled more cladding away from the wall we saw comb structure floor to ceiling in length.

Just like a tree, said BF. That was his passion, seeing bees in their natural setting, left to their own devices, not cooped up in precisely measured frames at the mercy of the honey merchant.

We were here to help the Goat Lady whose grandfather fell and hurt himself working out here amongst three generations’ worth of jobs left undone and calamitous disarray. The only pure things left in the mess were the Goat Lady’s heart and all those goats. Beautiful, soft, curious, frisky and at the moment, petrified, bawling, squalling goats of all ages. Actually, we were here to save the bees. Who knows how long they’d been nesting here in the wall’s cavity, so long their combs started at the door and worked their way under the cladding across every stud. Long, grey, papery, and dried-out by the door, the combs had reached the corner where we found ourselves staring and wondering outloud, There’s a lot of bees!

BF reached into the corner with his improvised bee collector made from a dustbuster, some duct tape and a couple of cutaway plastic water bottles. He’d reach through a cloud of angry bees and I wondered how this adventure was going to do down, because I couldn’t see any turning point, any progress. It seemed overwhelming. I saw plundered combs laid out on a piece of wall off to one side. Combs still heavy with pollen or brood. Some stained dark, a dull, uncomfortable, old smokers’ fingers kind of stain, not pleasing to the eye like the amber-colored combs we knew and loved. That’s why we thought there’d been some poisoning here, but now I don’t know.

Once BF brought a piece of comb over and said, Honey! Look at this honey! and dropped it in the Top Bar Hive box we’d set in the midst of the rubble. Countless creatures all abuzz clouded around BF’s head, going for his breath. Some succeeded in crawling up inside his veil, driving him outside to regroup. One stung him right on the tip of his nose. For all that commotion in BF’s corner, there was an alarming number of bees amassed on the discarded combs. They were gorging themselves on honey or pollen, we supposed, or tending to brood.

The plan was to get the bees in BF’s hive he’d made over the weekend. It was a handsome, cedar TBH, complete with viewing window and room for a dozen top bars.

GM held the cut comb sections while I stitched them onto top bars using dental floss and a length of wire looped at one end for a needle. The Goat Lady had loaned us first a cane knife when we’d asked for a machete, and later a six inch kitchen knife. We used one or the other to slice through comb we wanted to keep, to put in the hive. We went for comb covered in bees. We’d brush them aside but some got pinched by our fingers or pierced by the needle. Sometimes we exposed a flank of white interiors in those antique-looking cells. It upset me to cut through brood but at least I knew this was “keeper comb.”

After two or three bars had been stitched and placed in the hive, I looked out at our scene of chaos, bees now filling the shack’s airspace, shards of glass crunching underfoot as we tiptoed through a disarray of tackle, electrical innards and corroded casings and coverings for who knows what, and in that moment I confess a little doubt crept into my brain...so I reached for another top bar and picked at the dental floss with my sticky, goatskin-covered fingers...

GM was a stalwart. His hands got stung so bad through his gloves they were swollen for days after. But he kept coming back with variations on duct tape around his jacket cuffs and gloves. He was quietly determined. Without that we couldn’t have done it.

BF finally got the vacuum to work right and started collecting bee clusters the size of grapefruit. We got into a rhythm at last. GM and I had a top bar stitched and ready with more good comb around the same time BF was opening a dense jumble of bees from between the two water bottles. We’d slide back the flat rectangle covering the growing hive and snug a top bar in place while BF shook a new group into the depths of the box with a strange, small thwack.

BF’s earlier collections were insignificant and as he shook them into the hive, sometimes while I had only one side of a comb stitched, I despaired to see the bees once captured now rise up and back into the angry cloud. But eventually the bees had good reason to stay in the hive. They had pollen. They had brood comb. And they had honey. Honey drips signed themselves on every surface of the hive, attracting bees, calming them down. And I attribute some of the hive’s settling down vibe to BF’s earlier introduction of that chunk of glistening, oozing comb.

So we were getting somewhere! Each time we slid back the cover, the mass of bees stayed inside. I noticed bees fanning on the hive’s perimeters, no doubt their pheromone signalling to the rest that this is the place. We had turned a corner.

GM took a turn vacuuming bees and I kept stitching. BF cut the remaining comb free from the studs. Eventually there were no more top bars. No more room in the hive. For the last cupful I moved one of the followers, or end-plates back and then pushed it gently in place, imagining all those legs and eyes and bodies getting gently squeezed further under the comb sections we hoped would make the beginnings of a new hive.

We left the hive overnight, with the three entry/exit holes open. BF said if the queen was in the box, the stragglers would find their way into the hive to join her.

At sunset that same day, I went by with a buddy of BF’s to check on the hive. I wanted to take pictures but couldn’t bring myself to get too close without the protective clothing. The angry cloud was gone but the memory of it was fresh. He was great. He said How’s your camera work? And in swim trunks and tee-shirt got up close, opened the viewing door and got a pretty good picture of the full hive.

When BF, MM and I went back Tuesday, we were concerned to see a fair cluster of bees right up hard in the corner again. BF was convinced the queen was still up there. But we had come to take the hive away so we loaded it up in my truck and took it up to a willing place off Kinnersley, right on the ditch. Let’s hope there’s a queen in there.

Hens Lay Eggs

Preceded by much fanfare and trumpeting on the part of the rooster and his young accomplice whose notes sound like a banshee gargling. These arias of the demented stitch the darkest hour to the dawn with admirable though exceedingly irrational regularity or should I say determination. These outpourings are full-throated expressions of a tribe convinced it is their clarion calls that bring back the light. No light, no hen's arse visible and therefore no egg, no life, no omelet with salsa, a kind of sunrise I have enjoyed over the years. That perfect ovoid so strong and yet so fragile at the same time has its own dawn of course. From nesting box to wheel barrow, or recently my neighbor's fishing boat, the egg appears to the garrulous satisfaction of the hen. My neighbor's hens cluck and cackle between ungodly hiccups for long stretches upon producing their prize. Where is the rooster at these moments? Off smoking a cigar with a smug twisted beak of a smile or scratching the compost for a fat wriggler with his terrible claws? Not likely. He is mute, silenced and humbled by the hen's industry but more than that he is struck dumb by her scratchy acapella. He recognizes the voice of creation when he hears it. "I did it! I did it! Whee! Look at ME! I did it! I did it! Look at ME! Heh, heh, heh..." or words to that effect. He stands in the shadows agog at this because in his dark heart he knows he only believes he turned on the light, that it's all an act of faith, one of pure conviction, and nothing more... Why else would he call out so hideously at 4AM? 4:22AM? 5:09AM? 5:17AM? The sun don't come through those trees in the east till near 6AM this time of year. He has no idea. It's all hit or miss with our fanatic chanticleer. He's only good for the red speck in the egg, which frankly I can do without, or the roar of gambling maniacs who throw two of the humiliated creatures together in gladiatoral combat to duke it out, sometimes to the death. Talk of channeling the cock's aggression! Now that's something to crow about. Why even Shakespeare himself and all his glorious poetry started out in a cockpit did he not? Meanwhile our beloved hen has waited shifty eyed on tree branch or roost all night for the decent hour. She it is who wins a place in fable, myth and humor. When she waddled about lickety-split screaming The sky is falling, most of the world believed her...who wouldn't? One listens to such a creature. Who did Jack steal as the giant snored? Not the rooster! Come the break of day it's the illustrious egg we're after, not the announcement that it MIGHT be dawn in say, two hours and 17 minutes from now, again and again, with all the humans abed in the radius counting the interminable seconds thinking there might be at least a chance of a pattern in this madness, but no, the bastard pierces our peace at random. He has no mercy. His news has no substance. She, on the other hand, gives us a sun we can taste, poached, boiled, fried, baked, scrambled, oh, the countless preparations given over to the lovely hen's presentations. She's a gift. He can go to hell and stand at those gates, not mine. He can jolly well scream his gizzard out for the rest of eternity. "I think we got a sinner! Yes I think we got another sinner! [Annoying random pause.] Hey! I think we got a sinner." Meantime, here in heaven, I'll have mine over easy, please.

The Singing Wires

Parked under the singing wires above Upolu Airport. Driver's side window open. It's a deep plaintive song that continues and continues like a bass lullaby, like a long bow drawn on a cello in a tunnel, like a god come down to earth as a busker...a song moving west until west becomes east. A steady procession of clouds carries this theme across the horizon obscuring our neighbor island of Maui from view, but there are variations in the foreground of this composition worth considering. For example, grass blades dance in tight ensembles in adjacent fields. Tall, dried weeds spared by the mower, looking good against scrappy haole koa bushes showing naught but their dried seed casings all flourish along the margins of the one-lane road. Then there's the low sweep of a single pigeon across the grain of the wind, disappearing in a tuft, in a hillock. More striking is the sudden flash of white as a cattle egret makes a break for the heights but gets buffeted down like a lost shirt on a 19th century Parisian picnic, one woman hunkered down undressed on the spills of her own careless blue skirts amidst the pines, another femme fatale stooped over the surface of the shallow stream while a turbaned man twists a stout stick down the neck of a questionable claret bottle. Another man talks incessantly about his bad luck with kites. Or the cattle themselves, black and white yearlings tearing and tearing at the green ground. Covered in mute flies on their leeward hides are the cows. Or another egret's sudden rise from the margin, its specialized short sword beak pointing into the wind, a pose held for more than a second over the barbed wire that stitches the main road to the ocean a couple of miles away, a threshold photograph, were I an opportunistic sort of bloke and if the cattle people didn't hold the bird in such low esteem. I notice my heavy double-cab, Japanese-made truck moves gently side to side as the song's pitch climbs inside the wind for an unpredictable ride. All this can be quantified by a qualified scientist of course, even described accurately by a qualified naturalist, even dispassionately and without the emotional baggage of the late 19th century by a certified poet, say an Imagist, certainly not one confused by the Georgian period, and finally, even juxtaposed out of all recognition, as an entirely new composition by a Postmodernist, but really, really, it's about as Zen as it gets, the odd flash of a picnic on the Seine coming in, a meditation on clouds, illusion, islands and songs the wind makes in electric cables and telephone lines, meantime trucks peopled with engineers, dairy men and construction workers who insert their eight cylinder doppler sound bytes into this performance, as do cars rented and driven by tourists, also those larger, more familiar signatures, local Toyotas and Chevrolets, the occasional Ford...a part-time barista from the town coffee shop walks by incognito, swinging her arms, hair braided and tucked into her baseball cap but she's nowhere in sight now and the mysteries of orchestrating silent passages like that escape me. Here I keep writing for some reason, making small decisions at various points of hesitation in my linear progression across this page. I feel that old familiar aching which runs from my throat down the length of my chest. Maybe a ribcage injury that day in Paris. Maybe indigestion, you know, the concoction called mocha making itself felt, all those exotic places in one blend, the cow's milk, a rumination on a field of green gone white, the Colombian espresso, bandido's with their toenails painted red hiding in coffee plantations, and the chocolate...I think of Montezuma, how such a powerful fellow treasured his morning chocolate, how quickly his kingdom came to pass with the coming of the Spanish, how long and mournful this deep chord sustained by the wind as it heads west across the white-flecked expanse of ocean, how enough is enough and the moment has arrived when I must pocket my pen and go for my morning walk. I'll cut across the grain of the wind with my white shirt flapping like a kite strung across my ribcage and keep listening to the song of the wires all the way to the ocean. And back to my truck.