Ten dollar Chevy

I lost my tape to a shuttle driver in Nashville and never got it back. Then there was that journal full of grandfather poems abandoned in a London taxi. But none of this comes close to the time Martha left her boyfriend waiting in a phone booth on the freeway outside Eureka as she sped away or should I say lurched in that ten dollar Chevy with no windshield and only second and third gears. She never knew how vital it could be to have reverse in the palm of your hand. No reverse gear. So she kept going all the way to the Okanagan Valley and blended in with the seasonal tribe of apple pickers. Left that Chevy in a ditch outside Spokane and hitched into the next stage of life wondering if George had ever figured out she wasn't going to make it back. Maybe he was still there smelling the salt sea air talking lobster pots and 19th century engravings with the local booksellers. Or maybe someone else turned up, someone with a windshield and reverse, to give George a warm bed and a BLT at midnight. Maybe George metamorphosed right there in that northern Californian phone booth like Superman flowering into an indestructible arrangement of blues and reds with flashes of yellow. Maybe a lightning bolt took George out. That sort of thing happens, thought Martha, as she kept moving forward, reaching for another apple and another, not caring when or how things get ripe, only filling the boxes, filling her pockets, filling her heart without remorse, filling her life with the Okanagan autumn before all the leaves would most certainly fall after the first frost.

Avocado

When I first heard avocado trees take eight

years to bear I reckoned I’d be sixty-plus if

I planted one right now a daunting notion

meantime a volunteer tree between our place

and the barn kept growing we puzzled

over its identity the first few years then knew

it to be an avocado maybe a seed started

by a child using a glass with toothpicks holding

aloft the fruit’s center thrown aside the long

root tailing into tap water while two dark

green leaves reached out of the crack long

before we arrived then say four years ago

flowers showed on what had become a shade

tree we’d pruned and shaped agreed to leave

in that corner thus when the first fruit arrived

delighted we opened it up but its watery

bitterness put us off too bad we said not

the good kind and now I’m sixty two lived

here nine full years resigned to another

decade before we’ll find the right variety

though this one bears so much our children

now grown bringing their children two born

this year and a third two years ago

walking between here and the barn over

numbers of fallen avocadoes opening them

up they tell us you have delicious avocadoes

you know and so we do we’re told they’re “goldens”

so many we have to give them away like

everything that comes like a gift without

waiting just as our life here started green

and promising while we planted not knowing

how time would keep us guessing before flowering

before setting the fruit down before us

The sober Capricorn moon

The sober Capricorn moon needs a little magic
in her life bent as she is like the bow of the
huntress at rest there in the small room her
arrows spent the night long pierced with
bright places where she pointed and aimed
now heaven itself strained across our minds
by her careful weighing and selecting all
however but her own fate perhaps surrendered
to a gin and tonic half way between five and
six at each day's end though never after
having dined. She served fruit cocktail
I remember, from an ornate Chinese bowl,
green, I recall, with intricate stories
suggesting themselves in the glaze
but then everything she reached into
seemed to have a pattern one never
noticed until she began and she usually
began far beyond the beginning as we
mortals know it. You know, I suppose,
of what I speak. I hope you do, because
the night is cold and she is far away
in her small room, and close enough
to the television screen to touch the captions
orchestrated by a deft touch of her remote.
I hope you do know what I mean. How the word
was in the beginning a sound so close
so intimate so akin and simultaneous its utterance
brought us and everything else into existence.
You know. That word. And the huntress
sober tonight, needing a little magic in her life.

Her soul came all this way

A baby is a baby is a baby till she
turns toward you as the two of you
lie there on Sarah's beautiful quilt
spread out on the floor of the big room
looks at you, she does, with a look
you don't understand, so close she
takes the back of her hand delicately
across your face, the corner of an eye,
the place where the nose rises up
and down until finally her fingers
turn touching your lips searching
inside that space that moved apart,
closed up, opened again, that time
you said something, that time your words
spoke a sound an articulation of
slow music she seems to remember as if
her soul came all this way from
somewhere deep inside and yet out there
somewhere all at the same time
just to touch you

Cello

I don't know what to say——your notes go deeper than my toes, your face with more curves than a ballerina juggling oranges. Yesterday the rain was only a thought. Today it is still a thought. Clouds descend in the night and take us in. I dream about you. You strike a chord. Your long neck dances in the shadows. One song after another thrusts itself across your bow. All across the planet we listen to your high rise harmonics, your castles in the air, your dungeons quiet with the mummified past in chains, your walls wet with thoughts of tomorrow——across the ocean your skittering flight catches white caps and your lips kiss the piano keys at such a rate there's no stopping you now, there's no resisting your zither lips...the vibrations are too much. I feel old in your presence. My heartbeat races after you but I can't keep up and it's still daytime, somewhere. How many minutes now, your hand has been holding my pulse. Yes, okay, I'm alive, but I've forgotten how to breathe. I'm on my knees still standing before your long low smile——everyone's head's turned and the staircase is spiral

Makana

Makes me smile thinking back on Makana's performance at the Kahilu Tuesday night. How masterful, yes, but how balanced, with a great deal of respect paid to Sonny Chillingsworth, his kumu. Makana sent out maybe four of Sonny's trademark songs, with a little talkstory explaining Sonny's other life as an opera singer and Sonny's nickname as The Waimea Cowboy, before giving us that extraordinary portrait of Sonny himself performing Kaula'ili with precise, clipped strumming and fretwork, whole-body waves, head-snaps, jerks, and the rhythm of the horse in the hammer thumb on the open bass string——and Sonny's heartfelt moralizing——this acknowledgment of Makana's own influences expressed with grace and humor, so Hawaiian... Meantime the rest of the concert filled to bursting——think of all those smile muscles and sprinkle in some tears of sheer joy——with songs like Pu'uanahulu, Hi'ilawe, Ku'ulei 'Awapuhi, Makee Ailana——how did he do it? Sometimes his head thrown back in song as his fingers danced like wave-chasing crabs, back and forth, up and down the shoreline of Evening Star, his guitar. Now his fingers fly over the frets——we know them now as the bones, the iwi——while his long, long notes rise up into the dark flying grid of the Kahilu.

Influences I

Introibo ad altare Dei...and if you recognize the antiphon which kicks off the Tridentine Mass, then you're showing your childhood religion and your age at the same time; or else you're a James Joyce fanatic. Hard to believe I served Mass as an altar boy before school, before the age of nine. Influence number one?

Well, I was already addressing my angel most nights, sensing his presence, too, whilst sensing a kind of bisexuality in that holy invisibility. After all, there was the long hair and the long dress-like apparel we saw the priest wearing. One of my earliest memories is lying in bed working out the sheer numbers of people, animals, not to mention the weather, all things God is charged with managing, well, creating, then, now, and in the future. I knew the direct line to God notion was rather tenuous, let's put it that way. So I addressed my angel.

So there's a lot there in that early influence, a plethora of Greek and Latin, the superstructure of Catholicism in our lives, the lives of the saints, the authority of the priest coinciding with the humanity of the priests whom I got to know and work with as an altar boy—by the way, never any hanky panky, mostly positive, only one cranky curmudgeon, with one devoted pastor in the old sense of one who looks after his sheep, taking us to Weston-super-Mare on field trips, rehearsing the various kinds of services with patience and wisdom—which brings me to the profound theatrical nature of the Church service.

The church in which I served, still there as far as I know, is called St. Mary's-on-the-Quay, Bristol. Right there you have an early grasp on hyphenation! Right there you have a sense of Bristol's own history, with the word "quay" weighed and qualified over and over till I understood Bristol's romance with ships. And in the architecture you have the Greek columns, Ionic in appearance, although the structure was built in 1840. Those columns loomed monumentally to my eight year old self. When I revisited the place years later, everything seemed smaller, though the echoing of single steps upon the wooden floor within still rang out. A Palladian symmetry one finds in theatre in no small way. Most of the theatres I've worked in were Palladian by design. The concept of the "fourth wall" that separates audience from players, that of the proscenium arch which frames the drama, was intimately familiar to me in form and function by the time I was five years old.

Backstage was the sacristy, where we got ready, put on our costumes, and on Sundays, for high Mass, readied our ceremonial candles.

I was fascinated and gratified to read George Bernard Shaw's comments in his "Our Theatre in the Nineties" regarding the origins of the Christian Church, "founded gaily with a pun...where you must not laugh...giving way to that older and greater Church to which I [Shaw] belong: the Church where the oftener you laugh the better, because by laughter only can you destroy evil without malice, and affirm good fellowship without mawkishness."

In that same essay comprising "The Author's Apology"——you can find it in Shaw's "Prefaces" 1906——one significant influence in my life dovetails beautifully into another when Shaw writes: "...if the theatre took itself seriously as a factory of thought, a prompter of conscience, an elucidator of social conduct, an armory against despair and dullness, and a temple of the Ascent of Man." The context of that manifesto-like statement is that Shaw notes how play-going in London may well have replaced church-going, which is fine, he says, if only the theatre took itself seriously. I took Shaw so seriously that I look back in wonder at how I left it, how many years it's been since I was a stage door regular, and what the devil——what the angel!——am I doing about it now. I could say I'm doing my best to chronicle the things I experienced while I did the work in the theatre. But somehow I know in my heart of hearts that's not enough. Once you've experience the power and possibility of the theatre, and you believe in it like I came to believe in it, there's not a day goes by when you don't say to yourself you owe it to the community in which you live to make it happen. That is another topic entirely.

Church and theatre as early influences come easily to the fore, that's the point here. And with that, a fascination with audience. What makes them work? In the I Ching one finds Thunder over Earth in the 16th hexagram, an arrangement of lines where one strong line makes its way into the fourth place, a shift in balance, so to speak, a shift heavenward... Wilhem writes "This begins a movement that meets with devotion and therefore inspires enthusiasm, carrying all with it. Of great importance...is the law of movement along the line of least resistance..." Wilhem goes on to describe the birth of theatre in his commentary on this hexagram. Finally, he quotes Confucius, "He who could wholly comprehend this sacrifice could rule the world as though it were spinning on his hand." For me, that's a sparkling jewel set in the ocean of book called the I Ching. "It is good to organize helpers and to set people in motion," writes our friend, Blythe in her version of the I Ching at this point, where "thunder comes resounding out of the earth."

I suppose I've come to this island in the Pacific to get as far away from theatre as possible, in order to "see it". That is a generous perspective written after the fact of moving here, but there's a truth in it that I recognize.

At a very early age I saw the activities in the church where I was a backstage regular produce an effect on the audience, though it ranged from season to season. Christmas Mass was a power to reckon with. Day in, day out, yes, yes, yes, we will go through the motions, speak the lines, carry the heavy book from one side of the altar to another at the given point, tinkle our small bells at the raising of the host, but the nature of worship seems to depend so much on props and a kind of duty to a trinity of powers, the higher power being worshiped, the medium power of the church mucky-mucks, and the low power voltage of the handful of worshipers who attend daily Mass. Come Christmas, all that changes. The colorful vestments come out. The number of acolytes is more than quadrupled. Four times that! Who are these guys? Never seen them before! And they're all bigger than me! And the congregation? No room at the inn. They're lining the streets, squeezed into the portico, pressed against the inner walls of the church itself where the Stations of the Cross threaten to knock them on the heads...where were you people last week? last month? This was a tremendous influence on me, to see this show of strength from both sides of the divide, coming together with intonations, concatenations, bells, books, candles, colors red and gold, incense for the divine, voices raised in glory...you just want to shout out, Oh My God! And I guess you do, at various points in the proceedings. And I'm just a pipsqueak in red and white, not the usual black and white of everyday Mass, but I'm "in it" and it's terribly powerful, this coming together, this Enthusiasm, as the I Ching rightly points out. Oh the collection baskets are full on Christmas Day!

Early influences...

Go far, dear book

and speak again of meteors and men, how the poet held a running grasp on life, catching it up and letting it go simultaneously free as a red robin in winter, yet rooted as the almond tree in spring come awake in pink blooms in full cloud on Tuesday, become carpet of petals underfoot by next Sunday night. The falling.

I knew him not as the musician, actor and playwright, but as a magician. I even met him in a blackout. His old cottage was ablaze with candlelight that first night. Where the flames grew between the elm logs in the inglenook fireplace, he carefully positioned lumps of coal, to extend the fire into the night. He listened and watched till the embers became muted and the silences grew apart. It was there he spoke carefully of Gogarty and Stephens, Plotinus and Steven McKenna's translations, Darwin's grandchildren at the zoo, Shelley's presence of mind filling a bathtub of ice for his child's fever, authors who simply cannot read their own work aloud, and worse, authors who return and tamper with earlier drafts, to "improve" today something they'd written a long time ago, or how some plants insist on blooming early, forsyth and almond being two examples. And did you know "glamour" and "grammar" are the same?

He reached for the matches, plucking one of the two wooden ends offering themselves to him from the shut box, poked around the bowl of his pipe for a bit and then touched the flame to its contents, curls and wafts of smoke now joining their counterparts in fire and candle till there was an almighty haze over the proceedings as each book became a doorway to another world. When he took down Coleridge, we all went to the Lakes and complained about the damned postman who knocked too soon. Blake took longer to get back from his long walks, maybe days. And Stephens calmed us all down again, got our breathing to follow the rhythm of goats on their path until we looked down and saw our own souls big as life right there in the room.

In the doorway

There is shelter on the threshold
an opening in the strange world
a word to be twisted out across
the page
a metaphor in the rain, say,
a difficult night in the city
a number
sometimes a slit, the mouth of the door,
a brass flap for letters
or a child's enquiries
too short for the rapper, the knocker,
the bell
Who's inside?
I hear them coming
Let me catch my breath up in the chest
and pretend I'm ready
a simple thing, really,
without which there would be no house
no entry, no room, no stairs
leading somewhere
What's on the other side?
In the this sacred belief we call
The Way of the Door
open yourself to my entreaties
Twist the doorknob left or right
and you will see me there
half in shadow
almost waiting
always poised
Anticipate my coming
without footsteps only heartbeats
Bring in the light from which I came
and break it like an egg
Beat it into tonight
so we can see our dreams
Take away your draftproof seal
and your deadbolts
Take away the cobwebs and
autumnal debris caught up
in the corner of your post
and lintel existence Take away
the frame and open up
to me

That's the catch

That's the catch, she said.

Martha was overcome with fumes of fatality. Or do I mean, fatalism. Yes, that's right, more of an -ism sort of day if you can believe that. Pinched shoes were just one more sign that her life was being squeezed out by sacrificial justifications: Oh it's all right, I'll just...or Nevermind, it's only a small sacrifice to make...

It's as if she was as they say always waiting, not for a bus that would take her somewhere fun or purposeful, but for the penny to drop, the catch to click shut and make another blood blister on Martha's fickle finger of fate. Everything but everything was a matter of fate for poor Martha——as if her childhood wounds and fears had become the roadmap for her life of superstition. She saw it in the mirror each morning and walked away from it quickly.

Giving up early

Some say don't. A sign of weakness. Come to find out, it's smart action, called listening to yourself. But what about the effort it takes?

You know, the effort, the work, the blood, sweat and tears, the little agro, the traffic jam on the way to the golden fleece, the major deal, the hassle, the fol-de-rol, the right old whatsit, the set-to, the pain-in-the-arse that's worth it at the end, you know, the end that never comes...

I mean, what about the time you really didn't want to but you did and then you became a better person——you know, win or lose it all, meaning, sleep, credibility, confidence, money and self-respect, just to become a better a person. Or would you rather be a couch potato? I suppose a famous memoir called Confessions of a Couch Potato would really sell at Barnes and Noble don't you think? Fast action there, all those bags of chips, maybe some ranch dip or to really spice things up, salsa, yeah! And then there's the world of the couch: all things must come to the couch, as Harry S. Freud once said. And there you are, giving it up for the cushions, the mites, the coulds, the TV remote, the crumbs and ancient raisins, once jewels from Cleopatra's famous barge——that's it, you're floating now——is it the Nile or the Zambezi? The Thames or the Mississippi?——Ah, just put your feet up and float away——or nowhere in particular.

More vivid than reality

Well sure. Absolutely. Certainly. Say no more. Or do I hear, Say more, Say more! Perhaps less is more. Perhaps less has an edge before which each unfolds their shoji screen willing it to be cut. There on the other side, something more acute, the shadow fled, the mother alarmed by all the signs, our hair stands to attention, our sense of smell takes over and leads our senses into the light, where we find pinks like secret mucous linings, a cave illuminated where only the foolish dared venture——outside, explosions, an engine revs up and then recedes, the other part of the equation come alive, shifting our focus like the dial of an antique microscope, back, back, till we see monstrous detail become intricate patterns, till the general shape of things gives way to a gathering of three, bent in silence over a table in a café, and then a crowd, a movement, handing the precious book from one to another, and then the coastline where ants all walk on the right, and then, the blue orb spinning, turning, cloud-hidden, as the philosopher warned us, and then, a speck of light, and the shadow returns.

This morning

This morning the waves are weaker than yesterday which is curious when you consider how the moon is waxing and perhaps even more telling, the entire population of the northern hemisphere is breathing out at regular intervals and you have to admit that is a gravitational force to reckon with. Personally I don't subscribe to the theory I saw written on a student locker at the U of W back in the late 60s, that there is no gravity, the earth sucks—but it did give me pause for thought. I mean if all the cow farts in the known world can add up to an overwhelming toxic accumulation of methane in the atmosphere around our planet, who will stand up and denigrate the theory of the effect of mass breathing on gravity? Not to mention the effect of fogging up the glasses of all who are wearing them—a spectacle indeed!

Where was I? This morning the waves are weaker but you know I can only speak for myself really and I have been eating more of everything of late, just to keep my feet on the ground—a sure sign I'm an air sign in great danger of getting sucked into a lunar gravitational pull at any moment.

the secret of life

Turning 62 has been fun. Take for example dinner at The Eagle in Cambridge where I had baked salmon on a bed of cous cous with a small green salad and two glasses of house merlot. By chance we sat at the table where Crick and Watson announced their DNA findings to the world. I say "by chance" because this was pointed out to us by a slim arcane creature in a sea blue shoulder to ankle outfit and finger-tipped magenta running from her hairline down her forehead. Was she really blonde? Does it matter? We established from across the room she wouldn't mind our joining her at the four top just vacated by six or was it twelve twenty-somethings.

"I only want a little bit of the table," she said. As we gathered our jackets and hats and daypacks to our newfound corner in the ancient, low-beamed and extremely busy pub, she said, "Are you geneticists?"

"What did you say?" I said.

"Are you geneticists?"

"Why do you ask? Something about our body language?"

She turned to look at the wall behind me and said, "This is where the geneticists always sit."

I followed her sightline and read:

The Eagle, Cambridge
Discovery of DNA

On this spot, in February 28, 1953, Francis Crick and James Watson made the first public announcement of the discovery of DNA with the words "We have discovered the secret of life..."

Oh my gosh. Good Lord. Or words to that effect, said I.

Meanwhile our dining neighbor poured forth on a series of topics from Isaac Newton, whom she was currently studying, to John Dee the Elizabethan whose extraordinary library is reckoned to have fed Shakespeare's wellsprings of creativity. The South Bank's Globe Theatre came up. They really should provide the whole Elizabethan experience, she said, wooden platters and Elizabethan fare. Like wild boar? I said. She laughed and said she was vegan, that wouldn't do. And serve the meals in Elizabethan costume, she said. Somehow God slipped in before we even had a chance to order our food, particulary the thought that God is really comprised of the entirety of human consciousness, a though I shared. She was a painter, one who was becoming jolly tired of stretching her own canvas, one who is currently reading a book on the saints besides the three works on Newton, who dislike unpleasantries, avoided them like the plague, which happily, I wanted to add, he also avoided.

I was well into my salmon by the time she left, putting her Isaac Newton Institute coffee mug in a plastic bag before secreting it in the voluminous folds of her cloth bag. She did manage to say she was quite fond of St Joseph of... who lived on air. I turned again to the plaque fixed up there over my left shoulder, this time reading the last sentence:

"Throughout their early partnership Watson and Crick dined in this room on six days every week."

Six days a week!

My mother once told me, Fly with the eagles, my son, but this put a whole new spin on her advice.

Have lunch in The Eagle every day of the week but one!

On the way back to my friends' house, I squeezed my rental between tight parallel lines of cars, made right hand turns by turning left on roundabouts, gave way to a double-decker bus coming head-on at us over a one-lane traffic "calming" speed bump, and I thought about the complexities of Cambridge, where one takes long, deviating detours around stretches of ancient buildings in a law-abiding negotiation of ornate one-way systems...I thought, Oh my gosh. Good Lord. Or words to that affect. No wonder Crick and Watson came up with the secret of life in spirals of DNA. They had to GET to The Eagle. And like all our mothers have told us, it's the journey itself that really counts, but I can't help thinking it must really help when there's a glass of house merlot waiting at the other end.

But it's more complicated than that. We sat across from each other, my old friend and I, having first met at a theatre called The New London on Drury Lane. He worked the flying system and I pushed scenery about down below. Several years later, he worked the Lyttleton and I worked the Olivier at the National Theatre on the South Bank. Then, as I embarked on my life as father of a family, and all my theatre mates faded from view, he rescued me with a job at The Comedy just off Leicester Square. I say all this because our lives have spiraled around each other, with long arcs of time and space separating our different realities, but we always seem to intersect, like that night at The Eagle, when we raised our glasses to The Journey and gave thanks for our parallel lives that sometimes bring us together.

Waking Up

"Why do we wake 'up'?" he said. He's the one at the coffee shop always skims through the West Hawaii Today and pops his head over the broadsheets to make an announcement or ask a question. That morning, the topic was 'up' and its usage.

The few in our corner happily generated instances of up's peculiarities. Yes, wake up. Also, shut up, put up, hang up, get it up——knowing smiles all 'round——and smarten up, or dress up. Show up, up and at 'em, up and leave, up country, up land...I can hardly do justice to the long list...

Later on my walk up mauka from Upolu, I thought of earlier times when lexicons were built upon incantations uttered across steaming cups of tea or coffee, and Dr Johnson came to mind. I'd always associated the great man of letters and his Club with tea shops but now I find I can't substantiate that myth, for they met at the Turk's Head around beer time. And then I thought of Newton, his preoccupation with what goes up must come down...I wanted to squeeze his calculus for a drop of common blood, the sort shed by those who nursed cups of tea or coffee shortly upon rising, the sort who mused upon the reason for all things, including the force of nature. But I find no evidence other than my own gut feeling that the ordinary mortal did indeed discuss the nature of 'up' if for no other reason than the nature of 'down' weighed so heavily upon them.

One only has to enter into the great rotunda of the room once called the British Reading Room to understand how 'up' holds infinite appeal. 'Up' is our legacy, though it requires a great deal of stretching or yoga, since standing up strains our frames, sitting up even more so, and looking up...just think of the weight of the head balanced by the organization of the skeleton, muscles, tendons, neural network, the miraculous lot that has been given us.

Think too, how the primitive syllable is formed by emitting a sound from the throat and then, sealing it with the lips as it escapes the mouth...it's a noble word, 'up', and I am heartened by its treatment at the coffee shop the other day.

Shelley

I look into the mirror this morning as I shave and wonder about Shelley. He was born 218 years ago today. I wondered if he watched his dad, Tim, take the open razor to his face over a steaming bowl of water straight from the hob. That's how my grandfather Tom started his day, only he carried the water from the bog himself the day before. I helped him do it, so I know. How quiet was the mouth of the shiny steel pail as it drank the surface water, careful to avoid bits of moss and peat. My grandfathers were born a hundred years after Shelley and I doubt they'd heard of him, but they would have liked him I feel, as long as we didn't bring up the atheism and a few essays written to the Irish people when the poet was 19, visiting the country.

Unless you're utterly focused on leprechauns and tweed jackets, it's hard not to notice how fresh the blood shed for Ireland's liberty. Right there in Dublin's Sráid Uí Chonaill, or O'Connell Street, one of the widest streets in all of Europe, you can see where the bullets chipped away at the columns of the GPO. From Parnell to Larkin, the politicos are well represented in granite or bronze. And the Nelson Pillar blown up by radicals 44 years ago? It was replaced with The Spire of Dublin, said to be the world's largest sculpture. When I visited Kilmainham Gaol at our youngest daughter's insistence a few years ago, we were both struck by the prison's sense of monument or memorial to Irish rebels.

Shelley was convinced you could do this without bloodshed. This is unusual. His friend Byron thought otherwise, which is why Byron's pistols now occupy a place of honor in Greece's Benaki Museum.

I was visiting my cousin Annette and her husband Rodney in Eastbourne, back in 1970, and came across Shelley for the first time. I liberated a 1907 Complete Poetical Works for 15 shillings or 75 pence. England's currency being in transition that year, both prices are still penciled inside the cover. When I first started researching at the British Museum's Reading Room, I was tickled to see some of the books delivered wore a ribbon to keep the book intact. Now there's a red ribbon holding my old Shelley together, the cover having come adrift who knows when, during one of our moves between England and Hawai'i. Only this morning does the ribbon's color leap out at me.

The thing is, my dear, dear Shelley, sometimes we cut ourselves shaving.

Even today, many people think of Shelley as a lyric poet, when he was in truth a radical thinker who was not afraid to speak out. He was suppressed, if anything. Poets like Matthew Arnold called him a minor poet with no influence. Meanwhile the list of devotees is long and formidable, among them Karl Marx, Bernard Shaw, Bertrand Russell and Krishnamurti. His behavior, the way he abandoned Harriet and kept Mary pregnant while apparently diddling Claire, etc., etc., is reprehensible but as my mentor once said, forgivable in a poet.

"Love is free; to promise for ever to love the same woman is not less absurd than to promise to believe the same creed; such a vow in both cases excludes us from all inquiry."

My compassion for those around him, especially his families, grows as I grow older. But I have no patience with those who would keep him a trivial fancifier of words. I find myself siding with those who feel Shelley was assassinated. He was dangerous.

"Government is an evil; it is only the thoughtlessness and vices of men that make it a necessary evil. When all men are good and wise, government will of itself decay."

"Poetry is a sword of lightning, ever unsheathed, which consumes the scabbard that would contain it."

His "Defence of Poetry" should be mandatory reading.

The fact that I'd forked out 15 bob for Shelley's poems, sacrificing a few meals in the process, made an early impression on my mentor. We had Shelley in common and decades of friendship were founded on Shelley's work. My mentor's favorite was "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty," particularly the fifth and sixth stanzas,

"V
...When musing deeply on the lot
Of life, at that sweet time when winds are wooing
All vital things that wake to bring
News of birds and blossoming,——
Sudden, thy shadow fell on me;
I shrieked, and clasped my hands in ecstasy!

VI
I vowed that I would dedicate my powers
To thee and thine——have I not kept the vow?
With beating heart and streaming eyes, even now
I call the phantoms of a thousand hours
Each from his voiceless grave: they have in visioned bowers
Of studious zeal or love's delight
Outwatched with me the envious night——
They know that never joy illumed my brow
Unlinked with hope that thou wouldst free
This world from its dark slavery,
That thou——O awful LOVELINESS,
Wouldst give whate'er these words cannot express."

August

Named for an emperor, these days have a round, plump, dry summer taste in the mouth. Sun shifts its course more clearly overhead, bearing down with its arc. I note our tendergreen snap beans crane their necks into it, into the arc of the sun, into the emperor days. In the next room, ukelele strums, words with half our alphabet missing, a voice reaching through the walls with stories of Hualalai, Kawaihae, Kona, wind, flowers and sweethearts. Soon other sounds come in from New York. They've been up a while. The world feels like a boxing match to them. The crowd cheers and boos for this cause or that cause, truth vs evil, weighing in at 800 million barrels of crude, it's slick, it's bad for jobs, great for the military, Pakistan Taliban Floodwaters Islam, not to mention cohabitating politicos in Australia explaining what goes on behind closed doors, privacy no longer personal property, take Niger they're too hungry and beat up to care, somebody's down, somebody's up, the ref's on his knees, slapping the canvas with his left hand while the talking heads discuss how it's going to go, how it went last time, how the statistics managed to leak out before the truth had a chance, how the national discussion revolves around disclosure...then all that is muted, the wind comes in, the ukelele rings out, the walls feel more how shall I say? calm. Time for breakfast on this third day of August.

Icarus Risen

Breughel was not a cynic. Anyone can see the man painted inclusively. Everyone, everything counted. Today. What we can say is that the painter stayed true to the timeless myth as he knew it, ala Ovid's Metamorphoses. Ovid too, stays the course, doesn't stray from the essential story. For that matter, centuries and centuries later, Auden and Williams make the same decision. They work with what's been given.

I have heard people, students in particular, wonder if Icarus swam to shore and spent a life avoiding crazy inventors like his father. He grew a beard, they say, and dropped out for a few years. Maybe he experienced sexual enlightenment with the farmer's daughter. Did he learn how to butcher lamb under the careful watch of the shepherd? These men, and few others, really understood forgiveness, patience and the power of staying. They knew Icarus——he went by the name Sky, kind of trendy in those days after the fall——they knew he would keep moving. But for now, they were happy to be his anchor, make sure he got fed. They nurtured him like they would any creature or plant, silently acknowledging his rate of growth, his nightmares, his fear of heights and water. They encouraged him to find his own way in the world, a world with different sorts of risks, the kind you read about in the paper or watch on the six o'clock news.

They never took it personally, either, when they came across his crazy journal entries, his sketches, his plans for escape.

Somewhere out there was Daedalus. Nobody talks about that.

Certain landscapes

I don't know what it is about certain landscapes that pulls me in——I mean that sort of portrait without people, with space and time intersected in such a way that leaves one hesitating: will the darkness overtake, overcome the light, after all? That is a question that could haunt us if we allowed. It is very dark outside our ken, what we think we know, what our senses are given to understand. "The Darkness Around Us Is Deep," as William Stafford says. So it is these still places, where the clouds lock into a freeze-frame of indecision, whether to turn horsetail and lift us into light or plunge us into cumulo-darkness for the rest of eternity. It is the open space, the open question.

Brueghel's farmer

Breughel’s farmer lays his sword there
on a rock, cracks a whip and steadies
the plough. The horse’s head is down
too, as the inventor’s son falls to earth,
an early UFO, spewing feathers heavy-
ended with beeswax. Just another teen
who won’t listen to reason. His father
forgets to mention the middle path
was something made up, a metaphor,
for traveling between extremes. Meanwhile,
the farmer cuts through a telephone line
aesthetically laid to rest in a shallow grave
so the inventor’s web isn’t in our face.
No one looks up so we don’t see our children
falling, all our tips, advice and words of wisdom
mostly sticky now and useless. The phone’s
dead. Can’t get word in or out.

The Rose

There is a secret in those folds
where conversation's scent withholds
its pastels and silks——where memory
lifts its blooms, each small glory
reaching and reaching from its wood
through the bracken, bad or good,
planted or forsworn——
up and up the thorns
our best intentions climb
the deadly scimitars of time
while drops of blood fall now and then
to find forgotten ground and start again.

A World Without Bacon

As soon as the words leave my pen I see the creatures massing on the horizon. The sniffling, snorting, grunting, ground-churning, bamboo shoot-eating, blueberry uprooting, dahlia tuber decimating, thick-skinned, long snouted hordes. Can you imagine them thundering across the dark land through our dreams, forever after to be called nightsows. It's too late now. There's no turning back. We've opened that box, the one that reeks of pig shit, and our worst nightsow has been released into the field of play where two armies meet, all because we stopped eating them. Oh I can hear you say, I only meant MY world without bacon, but as my father liked to say, that doesn't work at all...if you do that, everybody'll want to do it. Then what would the world be like. And you started it. And so on. It was a little retort that would pop up of a Saturday, the day my mother worked at the department store in our local shopping center and the two of us men were left to our own devices, the rashers, as he used to call them, sizzling away on the stove top, and the open tin of Heinz pork and beans neatly stripped of its cylindrical label there in all its glory on another electric burner heating up for the waiting toast. It was a great lesson in leading the hobo life in case the world ever went to hell in a handbasket——a very curious image and difficult for my ten year old mind to hold onto, but never mind, we were saving on dishes, a rare opportunity for my father, on his one day in charge of the kitchen and my education.

And that's the thread of the story——the pig has been with us, with my entire family, through thick and thin slices, rumps, roasts, ribs, legs, even the trotters pickled for the delight of a —— I'm stuck for the phrase that contains a pubful of Guinness drinkers——a dark phrase...

It's in our blood, as they say, a veritable marriage of man and beast though I regret saying that. I didn't mean it for a second. We'll keep the work 'relationship' out of this as well. Suffice it to say we had to do it, legions of us, with all the devious and sundry methods to hand, we had to overcome our pigs and eat them too. That takes care of that, doesn't it?

Oh we could talk on about the pigs for pages, how their intelligence and ours have danced a merry dance through the millennia, each of us moving the bar a little higher before breakfast. Of course this is all hogwash and I'd be a poor observer if I didn't note here how disadvantaged the poor pig in the face of it. For one thing, they never had to go to mass, get on their knees and pray for forgiveness. After all, what have they ever done wrong? They're just sniffing for any old morsel with their extraordinary snouts——the poor things——have pity on them. I remember well the rainy afternoon in Kerry, a gray day indeed, the color of pig slurry, and a pig in my uncle's care hung up unseen by me in the outbuilding, screaming his blood-curdling scream. I will never forget it. But what's worse was the week after at Tommy Maher's the butchers, when we went in for our rashers and my uncle saying we're only now gettin' back the creature who sang out on that rainy afternoon, as he took up the package, and I put two and two together and thought hard, for the very first time, of a world without bacon.

She did not lie

Yes and she did not lie. She did not fabricate, prevaricate or implicate. She was a good soul in her way—-still is, for all we know. Everything she touched, every face, every flower, book, skirt and blouse, led to this, this resting point where what's been accrued slows down into recognizable mass. And we give her a name that she will recognize before she resumes her electric journey. She's a swarm of neurons and particles moving en masse, pulsing, forming and re-forming——though, does she ever really reform her Scorpio ways? After all she merely refines who she is and begins teaching herself to others——she called it 'sex therapy' over the phone in the middle of the night, her voice reaching all the way from Down Under to the 45th Parallel where it was so dark and I was so fresh from dreaming I could hardly talk, leaving her to say her piece, leave her number, which I never called. Some, some of her dazed or numbed by the expenditure of energy landing here and there, in the hair, where I brushed them off before they could sting.

Garinìon

Now Garinìon, they're going to tease you for dawdling and taking short cuts...the same ones who'll be leaving the keys to the kingdom in any old cafe or on a park bench when here you'll come jingling what once was lost, behind them. You see, Garinìon, we're all a bit lost, really, so it's a good thing, you're arrival, on this day the 18th of June and only two days after the notorious Bloomsday! It's the 'after' we're examining here. As I was saying, don't pay any attention to that lot. They don't meant it. They'll be taking good care of you, that's for certain, but there will be so much they will never understand about your progress, my Garinìon's progress, let's call it, as you move through the world. Your one and only Auntie has some notion about your entrance onstage so to speak, but you're on your own, really, and then again you're not, that's the contradiction and the paradox rolled into one but here's the thing: you're a great risk-taker in your first hour cut loose and that's a splendid way to begin because without taking a chance there's little meaning in anything...

so here's to your first hours...

me when I heard you were here--the news came to me out of the mouth of your own Seanmathair--I put on my favorite lauhala hat with the chukar partridge feather band and went to the navigational heiau at Nishimura where I looked hard into the clear water, caught a flash of yellow tang, and laughed when I saw the offshore wind skipping and glittering over a field of quick little waves as I stood there with my back to the big rocks that stopped here so long ago when they first caught sight of the ocean. I sang He Halia Ia three times and Kau Mai Kala for you, my Garinìon...

Dumbass

Or is it Dumass? No. That's an author. French. Son writes too.
The thing is, I remember being addressed by this term and I thought, I'm not dumb, so maybe it's my behavior, something I was doing...

The cool thing about adolescence is that you just observed it. Though you were in it, you weren't in it. Was this an out of body experience? Holy...

Enough of that...I was trying to say something really wise about the oil spill and this came out, just bubbled up to the surface. That's why I wear a hat.

A cut in the land

A cut in the land, she said. They've wounded her, made their incisions with their machines and their breakdown to buildup theories, with their 80 dollars an hour to the smell of diesel as they push and pull their big little levers with their telling black shiny knobs. They cut the land, she said, and she called the land a woman, saying She doesn't want this, doesn't want these stones revealed, these stories made bare for all to see...

As if the rest of us could somehow diminish the magic and power of the world by merely casting a glance. No, she denounced all this, the cutting and rending, the peeling back, the uprooting, the exposing of layers, the digging and delving regardless of that first chapter where Adam was sent out to do just that...and Eve with her furrow.

I wanted to say to her, Who or what made THAT cut? Are we not natural ourselves? Are we otherworldly then, that whatever we touch is a sinful act? Are we Jain monks then? Who's going to brush away the path for us as we make our way through the world? Is that it? An untouchable class? Is that your designation for these bulldozer operators?

I could see it if her objection was to the ensuing erosion, the brown stain in the reef, the damning flow of the creek bringing the dust of the city to the ocean...but this rabid, no, not rabid, more Kathleen Na Houlihan-breast-beating-woe-is-me, and all the while finger-pointing at the man caressing the machine, who might think of himself as a sculptor for all we know.

What can the collective consciousness bring to bear here? What CAN it bear, I suppose, is the real question. If the Gulf of Mexico spill originates a mile deep, one might ask Why are we there at all?

On the other hand, isn't the robot an extension of our hand, just as the shiny knobs, just as the computer button...where is the mind in all this? The heart? Where does her weeping and wailing take us? What does it do for us? Yes, sorry for your loss. Someone cried, no doubt, for Ozymandias long before the desert sands swept in on their own sculpting wind like extensions of our breath—from our first to our last—surely not lost in melancholy but keen-eyed we must wake up like the chaos in a fall of blossoms from the cassia tree at the end of a dry month like this May; we must wake up and hold her tight against the poet's dying of the light, hold her close while the lamp shatters in the dust, and when she turns her back on all this...blow her a kiss.

Cut in the land.version 1

The cut in the land finds me here with the AC on burning gasoline to stay cool. Now I've written it, I cannot continue without switching off the ignition--rolling, we say 'rolling' down the windows even though there is retraction, a descent of the glass into the door of the truck, no doubt mini-rollers with some purchase, some grip, able to spin when I engage the buttons near my left hand but we rarely roll our truck or car windows down anymore though we say 'roll' and press the button, just as we say 'hang up the phone,' when we push a button or set it back in the receiver—-which is also in many cases a wireless transmitter—-so I switch all this off this taking away from me my effort my mechanical my physiological opportunities to engage with my machine the black truck and voila the windows now being open I hear the wind in casuarina a phrase I have come to love for what it really means...it's a dance of limbs and leaves of course but really it's this performance of the wind, this orchestration, pulsing like the shoreline with its tidal ebb and flow, that shooshing sound, and then calm and we are pulled along, inside this calm, pulled from our centers as our senses give way, surrender to its charm...the wind in the trees can do this. Hearing ceases to be a matter for the ears. The skin prickles with its listening. The eyes recover themselves, having been lost in thought since arriving at this junction. It's a cut in the land. I mean a cut deep and long enough for a train. But there are no tracks and rails only the hard scrabble, hard-packed back roads of Kohala.

A man's name, Pratt Road, intersecting the road down from the school which runs into Lisa's place——or so I'm told. Three gates mark this place. 12 foot gates forcing all and sundry to park in the shade in the junction for there is no going down Pratt Road. And Lisa's gate. That's open though you wouldn't go there unless you had business. But the windows open down in this intersection of cuts in the land, this blurring of the senses and this dance of the wind in the trees mighty like the ocean, like an empty shoreline, we can say, well, what?

What can we say? Walk away from the truck? Leave it here in the cut. Leave it switched off. Walk.

Chocolate

Dear, dear, chocolate, I have searched for your essence in Manhattan at Christmastime, there by the ice rink, carried you away like the precious body of a new savior come down in small dark mouthfuls. Yes, dear chocolate, I have taken my fingertips to your nightdress with the golden lining there in Antwerp outside Peter Paul Rubens' house and learned how to spell the word 'exotic' in twelve languages and I don't know what to say, really without blushing...I couldn't wait and I'm sorry for that...I live for you...you call to me, London or Paris, San Francisco or Tokyo and no matter how they say 'hello' I am struck dumb with your taste on my tongue, slow, slow taste, a crass word there, my love, more the realm of buds or the sensation of melting or closing my eyes whilst listening for the footsteps of the half-naked warriors who passed you from hand to hand more than a thousand miles from the jungle to the icy slopes until you reached the Aztec king...

To a rock

I look towards you, oh rock, with words on the tip of my tongue, a song, a vibration to you, I suppose. I see you there. I pass your way. I pick you up and wonder what you've seen. If you could speak what heat would come out of your mouth. What depths you could reach. What extremes before one of our kind ever stepped foot on you and instantly regretted it.

Your pockmarked skin tells me how your story will go from here, shadows and curvature for an ant to explore, defying measurement and our smug science...

You will outlast me, that's certain but I'm not envious. Your world's so invested with my own imagination, bringing to you the concepts of journey and narrative but it's ridiculous, don't you think?

You don't, do you? Think, that is.

Perhaps you think that makes you superior but here I go again investing you with my own ways like Walt Disney making the mice talk to each other in squeaky human kid voices. What if I called you a stone, oh rock? What would you do then, eh?

Dirt

Dirt. To really appreciate it you have to be sleek and wriggly just about as non-anthropomorphic as the animal world comes. I remember dissecting earth people in biology. Was it five hearts or three? There's profound significance in those hearts but I just haven't figured it out. Like the mortician who signed his letters "eventually mine" the dirt people have a kind of hold over us—but they don't ask for much. Moisture, darkness and last night's foodscraps. Vegan only, please. Oh and last Sunday's newspaper. The news that's fit for real dirt.

What is it. The dirt. We want it when we have had enough smooth talking banter about the weather and other small nothings. Martha could tell you all about the real dirt over the fence. Or sitting at the mahogany shoreline of the local bar. Or one ear pressed to her wireless ATT receiver.

We seem to need it like those wrigglers. It breaks us down.

Blank bulletin board

For the unforeseeable future and the forgettable past there will be nothing happening of any note. Thumb tacks brass and plastic-headed will remain like unnamed constellations in a cosmic void made of black construction paper but of one thing you may be certain, this space is saved. Watch it. Watch this space. Where the general announcement is that there are no announcements whatsoever, no births, deaths, parties, sorties, camping trips, country western blue grass reggae island music bands this Saturday or next Tuesday, no massage sessions, nor yoga, nor selling of imitation Balinese artifacts or refrigerators or '53 Chevy pickups with wraparound windows, or great deals on nutrimax vitamin suppositories, or dog stories, or worm casting—none of it—though this these those though they be not here nor there will however for the benefit of all and sundry—these shall in their absence be framed. Stalwart as a ship's cabin and permanent as a wine stain on mother's dress, this frame is heretofore hung for our community's pleasure and everlasting plethora of inactivity.

Everything happens at night

For one thing your feet grow.
Toenails faster than that.
Armpit hair—it goes, or rather, grows, without saying.
Nose hair. Yikes. At night. It happens. Somewhere at night a toilet flushes, a fart resounds in the porcelain bowl of night's intermission. All in the night. Poets dream whole entire poems in the night and then only reach line 56 when the postman knocks in the morning. Cats, this is a fact, grow big as houses each night. Just ask a rat. It happens at night, of that there is little doubt! All the news that's fit to print? At night. And don't forget: night wears long slinky dresses and no underwear, blue tuxedos and string ties, pleated shirts and laundry tickets in its hatband. Night gets drunk, drives on the wrong side of the white line because there are no lines in the night, that's why bird don't sleep on telephone wires—Night will not stop to spare you or forgive you—will not answer your pathetic question about guardian angels and swords of fire. Night is black fire. It is breathing in, without end. It is the dark felt dryer lint in God's navel and he's going to pick through it after a cold one.

LS Lowry in New York

Out there on the streets the children stand about the dirty town. Above them factories belch their smoke, their exhalations——what am I trying to say? Their filthy breath pours out the chimneys making, making, and the fathers came in from the fields decades ago. They're locked up in bricks and mortar now, making, making. Nowhere to be seen, the fathers. They went to war and then they went to work and all the little people, not children, you see, that gift was denied them, the little grey people hunched and sticklike, a few brave souls wearing red, a brighter red, a poppy red, against the red brick school house where they turn the pages of their books, pick up their pencils, put them down again, hunch down into their desks and practice making, making.

And he watches all this. The watcher averts his eyes for the camera——he does not wish to be the subject matter of this tired story. A couple of days now he hasn't shaved. His hair tousled since time began. He tries not to judge the living and the dead, the factory owner, the mothers standing like stunted trees in January in the street with the youngest attached at one hand, the heavy coat, the faceless hat, heavy with melancholy. He looks down and away, unshaven and unkempt. He doesn't care about anymore. He hears footsteps in the hallway outside his studio. Like a church all quiet otherwise. He keeps his lips together in prayer, without judgment. His face begins to show the lines of the city, the lanes, the avenues, the alleyways and side streets, the dark places like crooked scars where you could go hungry.

It is a day like no other. And yet it is the only day there is. There is no way out of this day, this hour. In his hand he holds the brush and touches the canvas lightly——another child, this time, movement.

Across the river the ferry boats and tug boats break through this scene. Beyond this scene there is no time for contemplation, the guardian rises out of the foundation the first foundation. High above the trees she rises, holding aloft the torch that brought so many to the gates of the city. And the ships come in by night and day. And the people dream of making, making.

I'm only flabbergasted...

Minding my own business gets more unattainable with age. Our young friends had their child on Thursday and I saw him back at work on Sunday. I take exception to this flagrant abuse of hard-won paternal rights. It's a perfect example of how the State steps in with common sense in the rule of the law after centuries of dismantling both the commons and the sensible. And it's hard-won, damnit. I want to say, get your ass back home where it belongs, I don't care how tough and capable she says she is. "There's nothing I can do" is a pathetic statement that makes me ashamed for the male of the species. I used to be one. Now I can claim general membership in the human race but there are moments, sometimes more than one a day, when I do revert to that shameful state by asking too many questions and/or allowing Her to attend to the basics of our survival while I simply stand there and watch. So you can see that membership in humanity——I am loathe to call it civilization anymore——is renewable daily.

Back to our young man, the first-time father. What is he? Out hunting? Dragging the boar home by its heels to the pit fire? She looks up at him as he enters the cave and smiles and the babe's mouth falls from the tit. They are agog at his return.

Or is it that he can't wait to share that cigar? What is he? Part rooster? People line up to shake his hand and congratulate him. Meanwhile the miles of separation between him and his new family are palpable.

Am I being a bit harsh? His co-workers response to my questioning and bafflement was quick: women have been popping out babies since time began. Vietnamese women gave birth in the rice paddies and kept on working [someone actually said this]. Now that's the shameful sort of reaction that wipes out all our extra credit as males. What's wrong here? Mind my own business? This is where I step in and say with a slight tremble in my voice, When I was a young man...like the character of Aubrey in 'Brief Lives'. The point is, some of us worked hard to win the right to stay home with our newborn. We don't want to throw that away, even if it means cleaning out the garage or digging in the garden if we can't think of what to do. We must not leave the sphere of new life. If we follow that hard-won rule, we might discover something profound. We might actually get to live outside our own heads, even for an hour. Wow! Think of it! Just stick to the home territory and accept one basic tenet of the Secret Oral Teachings of Being a Better Human Being: If you stand still long enough, you'll learn something. Okay, you can sit down if you need to. Knuckle the sleepers out of your eyes so you can see the world around you better. How many hours were you missing in action? What's that? Two hours' worth of driving? Cool. That's some serious interaction there, you know, traffic, the right radio station, finding the cup holder. And how many hours total? Eight? Ten? Twelve? I'm only guessing here. I'm only flabbergasted.

Oh let's see, my son's three days old and you're saying I have a choice? On the one hand, hang out with the woman in my life who just did this extraordinary thing called giving birth to a little person...oh my God, it's a miracle! A person who's going to grow up and continue the species wearing my genes and following my noble example, oh my God! Think of all the things we're going to do together. Wow! I just want to see him and be around him because he's changing so fast I don't want to miss anything or...

...on the other hand, get in my truck, twist that key in the ignition, find the right side of the road 'cause this is America, land of opportunity! I'm going back to work! Do my part! Everything's under control now. She doesn't need me. I'm not superfluous, you understand, I'm doing my bit. This is what guys do, right? Head off down the road like a rubber toad and back by sunset...if you're lucky, honey. God! I'm tired of superwomen. Why don't they just keep their mouths shut and keep chopping those vegetables? Get the laundry done? Take out the garbage——oh, well, I'll do that one, that's cool. Pay the bills! And change his shitty nappy (diaper)!

Okay, okay. I've said my bit. I accept that paternal leave is there in case you need it and in your case you don't. Nope, sorry. It's (I'm) like a dog with a bone. Can't seem to give it up without a little snarl, even when my best friend takes it away. It's that New Life thing, see. He's just a little guy. And you're not there.

That would be a good place to shut up and leave you alone but I need to add that you have to take the long view sometimes. Sometimes there will be separation and it will be painful and difficult——Go on, tell me You gotta think positive, here, Uncle. Tell me you're just going with the flow. I'm just saying intimacy is where it's at. It's the point of contact. The little one is teaching you now. "The child is father to the man," as the poet Wordsworth said. This is the first, the original textbook and the pages are made of skin and the chapter headings say things like mother, father, and child. There will be a test.

Go make a peanut butter sandwich.

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.