Leave It Open

LEAVE IT OPEN

We start the day early each with our list

my wife taking hers down the coast in her

fist calls me saying Maui’s unusually clear

maybe I’d take my walk where I could see 

but I set about loading the cuttings one

more thing on my list leading to another

until a change in the weather reminds me

I’d better head makai to find Haleakala 

gigantic on the horizon a floating blue

mountain drawing all the sky's shadows down

to the dark bowl of sea into the forbidding

channel called Alenuihaha where clouds

shrink and fall laughing into whitecaps

but in a scientifically plausible reversal

night begins to inch its sapphire way

upward to heaven—connecting under

to upper world with Maui’s sleeping

heart beating against what’s reasonable.

I park in long cane grass and thread my

arms through a gate’s galvanized frame

swung open expecting and desiring

more than beauty can give me when I

notice one fencepost leaning away from

the long barbed lines of wire nothing

standing still not even my joy as it

happens not on my list when a tractor

bucks down the field’s hard-packed

edge toward me and I draw a circle

in the air signing Shut the Gate? but

the farmer smiles and shakes his head No

so I follow him out till I’m in my truck

—and I picture my wife returning home

her list the long road map of her day

her hand finding my own list still clean

on the kitchen counter
and I imagine her beauty
laughing against what’s reasonable