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.