I. Island With People
Without the
earth’s dropped tears, where would we be?
Banana
leaves know how to dream, catching the one like rain.
The guardian
faces with their stillness hold the flow intact,
Keep the
water like saber-toothed stalactites before it falls again
Like a
serpent across the sand, where vines offer flowers
Like lines
of communication from the forest.
The sound is
joyful, the constant deafening chime of what is
And always
will be, a truth that’s so elusive it must be
Said, and
heard, equally: What living seems like to the alive.
The rain
draws blood from the bark. The water they call clouds
Moves in
non-linear ways, south, then east, as in a dream,
Before it
stops and pulls back, for a mad dash west.
Nene and ant
don’t exactly wait for the rain to decide
When to come.
It’s in the voice of the sky that speaks
Through
their tongues, to share with the clouds as they pass.
And we, who
sit in beach chairs, feel it’s a conspiracy,
What goes on
without us knowing, this assurance of dove,
Machination
of crab, quivers of lizards on boughs;
It’s all
destined to make us look bad: red, fat and bad,
The denizens
of Haoleland, who drive 4-wheel trucks into the sand
Because we
can, but do not understand
What the aura
round the leaves is saying,
Or why the
birds go quiet at certain times,
Or how the
driftwood finds the perfect spot to be,
Without a
reason we can see, how it seems to be
Smiling at
all this, what we are supposed to know
And voice,
but don’t, so silent are the loud ones
As skies
move across the surface of things,
Counting the
breaths of the ocean as if it’s not
Our breath,
as if it’s not a breath at all,
But a
pattern built into time,
An equation
required to balance the random,
One that
denies the birds a mind and the rocks a will,
Just forces
colliding at some distance from us,
Sparking
coincidence thunderbolts
Across a
dead and desolate space
Where the
bodies huddle on the beach in the rain
Not obeying
these dictates even, as they chase
Imaginary
vistas, converse with impossible voices
And sit in
an uncompromising dream
Where rock
is not domesticated
And birds
come ‘cos they ask them to
As if they
never were
The promised
blocks of granite
To fill the
horizon with forms.
II. Beyond the Roosters
What words
are in the spruce,
So
articulate in sun, who even fallen
Leaves
quills and redolent cones?
Still the
bird at the top struggles to convey
What its
waverings might say
— A spray
of orange needles on the clay,
The berries
turned so blue beneath its shade.
III. In Honeysuckle Season
Rainbow
weather
The wind
across the canyon
Like
cast-adrift light
IV. Behind the Oil Refinery
At the old
Buddhist cemetery
On the trash
heap by the sea’s edge
The stones are
knocked around,
Tombs broken
off like trees.
The migrant
families who survived have moved on.
Seventy feet
below, trash continues to ooze out
To
eventually become things of beauty:
Radiator
rocks, rubber stones, uranium glass.
The green
lichen on all the graves, too,
At the
moment of sunset
Glows above
the red, as evergreens swerve.
V. Rain Forest Politics
The trees
that give the jungle life
Bow before
the stream
That rushes
ahead
Refusing to
be more
Than alien
It throws
off a reflection
The forest
sees itself in
VI. In Nohomalu Valley
There are no
Hawaiians beyond Kekeha,
Only the
Department of Defense
To guard us
from Polihale’s ghosts.
They float
across the Mana Plains
And rest in
these grey bushes, gaining
From black
boulders whatever comfort they possess.
They have
stayed so long beyond corporeal
There is no
form, even, to their cry, only
The buzzing
of a thousand flies near spectral carcasses.
They want me
to sit there in a vague way
And in a
vague way want me to stay.
The newer ones
hide in the straw like cats.
The only
other man out there at the end of the line
Knows
nothing of the spirit world
But he knows
drainage ditches,
How the
fallow sugar fields have served
Their
purpose, and how the water must
Now be
preserved for endangered birds.
Faces rise
above the crackling grasses.
Every town
has disappeared without a story
— There was
never any hope
“Just leave
us here, ye lovers of
Desolation
and waste,
There’s no
salve that you can render
“As you
wander round in circles
And try to
form the words we might have said.
What life
was, you know less than us.
“The wind
knows more, and will speak if nothing
Resists it.
Maybe our voice will one day,
When our
work is done, be in that sound.”
VII. Goodbye Kauai
As the first
earphones have been lifted into place,
The first
motivational speech put on the blank sheets
Of creation,
the books, the games, the disputations,
What you
called a bloom seems already non-existent,
A tacky
kitschy tchotchke at best, what was only
In the
dreams we carried in with us, an innocence.
The waves
murmur forever, like the moonlit lips of lovers,
And the cane
sways as if nothing has to happen anyway
Such an
Elysium sleep for the hardened immortals,
To float on
a raft of endless peace in safety.
The woman
led him to the cave inside the jungle
Of
waterfalls and parrots and passion fruit raptures
It seemed so
much a part of them, a laurel for their oneness.
What rides
with their mind is something different:
An objection
to what is, a nod to what can’t be,
A myth that
can be framed or dealt like cards.
The island,
whatever presence it once had,
Becomes the
strumming of a tune on a summer afternoon
And all the
blues gets in there too — how the sunlit palms
Still wave
so far away, unfathomable, with the lilt of
How easily
the real became illusion, because it had to be,
A sacrifice
to the jealous gods of surveillance and portability,
As the most
precious were once given to volcanoes,
An act of
faith, somehow necessary.
