The ashes were in the filing cabinet
With the dated contracts that could get me in trouble.
I've tried not to think about my disappeared life,
To give due cause to the wizard inside
Who removed everything just so, as if it
Was never really there, for all the void that is
So heavy still. And all the inklings of music
From every voiced eye tattoo that yearning.
It could be from you, your small still voice
Still imploring with a smile, for the birds to finally
Be understood, a bridge you offer to the other world
I am only recently not a part of.
But Grandmother Mimosa understood
At the birthing stone for the whole earth
By the lava faces in green Polihale
How deeply I feel grief's soft offices.
My wand adds by subtraction, then multiplies
By incidents, many of them here, where finally
I floated your bones on a round koa raft
With one freshly fallen plumeria blossom
Where the water finally flows down from the top
Along the red Waimea clay, though you finally nodded
After letting me, as you always claimed to do, decide,
That you would have preferred -- I almost knew -- Secret Beach
As beautiful as the ending was, the release to end
All releases, what never really was
The way one had remembered, and so
Can't ever be said -- wistfully -- to go away.
The secrets you loved to keep were in the end
A way of keeping us alive, beyond the best by date,
Of keeping what must be nudged away now,
For what was held led to transcendence,
A job well done, that finally can be laid to rest
As the entire past must also be
Put on oblivion's life raft, as offering to the birth canal;
Aren't I qualified to be born another time?
