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.

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.

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?

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.

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...

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...

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 —

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...

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...

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.

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 —

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.

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.

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.

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. 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?

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.

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!

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.

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.