Upolu Airport Road Pastoral

I’ve always liked the view despite the clouds

the telephone poles their sagging lines

playing slack key up and down the straight road

the way the northeast winds suggest each turn

of the languid mobius windmill blades

the way the cattle people this scene fretting

into each other’s skins in these wide open spaces

or the egrets who rise up from their cross-eyed

meditations and hold steady their white

brush strokes against the lapis lazuli

the fierce channel where Maui heavily

weighs being an island against being

a mountain anyway what's in a name

that a search engine can't tell me

all I know is one foot in front of the other

and thoughts from forty years ago

looking to land—too much is never enough

we seem to say but now I wonder about

the mess we’re in how separate we feel

just because we can pick up our feet

or take pictures with our iPhone

see that cow over there the one who

attacked the backhoe back when this was just

a field you know before the windmills came

that was a sight the cow charging the digger

defending her turf her patch of earth

she knew something we were slow to get

the winds of change and the roots

of technology running deep right here

in mid-Pacific where the whitecaps

hide the latest splash of a whale from us

Paradise in Fourteen Lines

over the sea and far away

the seven sailing stars above

clouds encircle islands like a lei

and the whales still talk of love

some travelers stay awhile and leave

while some people find a home at last

some give back more than they receive

some say they used to move too fast

paradoxically this land called paradise

looks deceptively slow and easy at first

but life’s on the edge and a word to the wise

before your endless vacation bubbles burst

never turn your back on the ocean

and watch out for the goddess of lava in motion

The Generosity of Numbers

I like the generosity of numbers, the way they fill pages with their flourishes and tails, the way their eyes pop open or close tight, and their strict lines, too, their parallel bars at times, their intersections and severe cross-hatchings, as if they're saying All is precision. All may be counted. And indeed, they tally up the waves and wind, the barometric undulations of our elemental days. How thrilling! How generous indeed. And what if we'd lost them in a funk? Where would we be? Driving who knows how many miles per hour. Enduring how many or how few degrees F or C. We'd never measure up, now, would we? Or take the book, the best line, the quotation we savor with all our might, and now we cannot find the page which numbered would deliver us from the fate of the lost soul at sea—in a world without numbers. Oh yes, they are our boat, our craft, the leaping dolphin, too, or three, or twenty-seven. They are the days of the week, most thoughtful of them! The minutes and the years...