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.

Itchy palms

Have you ever experienced itchiness so drop-everything and get-down-to-it you end up biting your palm? Not drawing blood, mind you. None of your kinky middle school settings in a dark, dank wood with corn starch makeup and extended eye teeth sensuously pulsing against the ever-so-closed lips... Nope, just downright primitive cat and dog to hell with scratching that damned itch, I'm going to bite it to death. Will that cancel out the chance money is coming my way? What a strange association, as if playing the palm of one's hand like a flamenco guitarist suggests to the observer a certain money-lender in Venice by the name of Shylock who dwelleth in the country of Shakespeare's imagination. It's a profound sensation, itchy palms. What could it be? You won't or most likely won't be receiving mosquito bites on that toughened epidermal region with its Mound of Venus, plains and deltas, not to mention the life line and all those cross-hatchings representing children. I remember well the full-bearded chiromancer, Karl Marx come back as a gypsy, up three steps inside his caravan, okay, the image is coming in stronger now, I'm seeing Portabello Road on a Saturday during that market of elbows and musty books among the vegetables. He took my palm and suddenly, disarmingly, took on a rather paternal, caring tone. He gave me assurances that my time had not yet come and that I would likely excel at some unspecified sport much to my own surprise. I'm still waiting. But it's enough that he was on my side. He actually got the number of children right, if you count a miscarriage and an abortion, two memories which sadden me instantly and deeply with their memory. My two beautiful daughters bring me back right away to the light. How we tuck those painful experiences away and grow thick skin overall, as if each wound, each splinter of fate will eventually get swallowed up by that first point of contact we call our skin. No wonder it presents us with insatiable itches from time to time. I'm afraid the money explanation goes empty handed. I'm here gnawing like an animal on my own hand, tasting and attempting to devour some small demon who works his or her way from inside out. After a small frenzy where nothing like a protein or a carbohydrate materializes, I stare at my outstretched palm, a bit reddened beneath my Line of Intuition. I'm looking at a map of my destiny as if it's day one. So many lines and no signs to go by. How am I ever going to find my way?

Wounds too fresh for panache

Re-reading March 11 NYT review of "Scottsboro Boys" came across the critic's bottom line for why the musical doesn't quite click, that the racial issues are still "too raw," too close, even though events date to 1930s...all that time past and wounds too fresh for "panache"—Realizing how self-indulgent my reflection here...I can see how the "Much Ado" chapter I'm stuck on brings me up short in the same way, though personally and most idiosyncratically—allowing (somehow choice comes into this) a kind of [Altan's Moll Dubh A'Ghleanna plays while I write this] contrived reluctance to leave the edges where they are—now thinking of my precious "immediate" audience especially Jack W who would be interested in the structural "factoids" as TF described them but also the work world the way it was for me back then and how it changed...TF, sitting in that Stinson place we rented, put me onto Bill Bryson's style of writing "what's in front of him" and later on dropping in those interesting factoids...how "Much Ado" is about so much spinning of wheels and the betrayal with too quick endorsement is my own somehow and poor theatre history, a beautiful woman told to hide her calloused hands, for surely she has worked hard and with every conceivable medium all these millennia...the set onstage in "M.A." becomes the book imagined, the book I cannot access because I have screened it out—cannot reach it, get to it, made it too precious, the elaborate construction overlaid on the original—wasn't that the root challenge of the RSC? Balancing interpretation w/the play's truth. I suppose the literati would say "presenting" that truth to this generation, the current mode, "making it accessible" and so on. Now it feels I'm really making a big deal out of nothing.

The nested dolls

When my oldest daughter was visiting a few months ago, I saw she had taken down the nested dolls from our library shelves. I said nothing. Gave her that moment happily, or rather, left her in peace. There she was in that cave of books, a kind of nourishing egg itself, with the grandmother doll opened and all the others in a row on the table. My daughter perched there utterly self-contained, absorbed. From where I stood briefly, passing through, it was a benign, far look. After all, there was childhood with its smooth, rosy and complete complexion split open before her, beings within beings, she herself growing a human being within herself, her own body a nurturing, soft cave now for the new life. It is a miracle, this opening and opening to the life within. And that's something rather peculiar or specific to my daughter, the act of opening. As a child there wasn't a door, a drawer, a box or container she hadn't explored. You could say she was our little Pandora, lifting lids and covers to peek beneath, curious, irresistibly so. Did she release ills into our world, our small world, to run rampant through the house as if we lived in that Greek story? I'd say not. I'd say there was a simple, matter-of-fact sense at the tips of her fingers. What's inside? I don't recall her hoarding like a magpie, no more than our other children with their secret caches and stashes under the stairs or in the too-small-to-bother-with crawl spaces. What's inside? Oh. That. And move on to the next. Perhaps its that cool, detached curiosity which allows her inside the medical profession where it is very useful to ask questions, take a look, satisfy curiosity, and move on to the next possibility. But I won't deny her a moment with her childhood Babushka, the nested Russian dolls. You can imagine the wood turner handling the light wood like egg shells, pinning, spinning, trimming, hollowing out and measuring within a hair's breadth, till the two halves fit and come apart with a squeak. It's quiet in the library now. She has them all undone, the story lined up, generation after generation. Next, the painter with her fine-tipped brushes, outlining arms and scarves, eyes and a distant look to be varnished, glossed up, durable. How long, how far she traveled with her precious cargo within? Mother. Daughter. Granddaughter. And that place held by the one solid piece of this curious puzzle, the newest story carved neat and never entered by the turner's knife. Still so shiny after all these years is the core of this assembly, this putting together and taking apart, this opening up and closing with a final squeak. This is my daughter's moment.

Bee Pollen Catcher

My bee friend called this morning asking for pollen. I togged up with da kine hat&veil over long sleeved shirt, trousers tucked in socks, long gloves. Interrupted a flurry of foragers when I took out the wedge holding open the pollen catcher door. Jiggled the drawer back in place. Shut the door and stood back a ways to see how they took to our second installment. We collected so much pollen our first attempt, two weeks back, that we left the drawer out until we finished off what we had. Turns out I'm sensitive to it...trying to figure out why...mango going off? I'm allergic to mango sap. Maybe that's it.

Wind's calmed down a bit yesterday and today after a week of what my wife calls a punishing wind. True enough, leaves are shredded in the path of the trade wind. Some big palms' new fronds have snapped. Branch down on the driveway. Ironwood tree fallen onto hau. We're due for more wind plus rain next week.