Flash of White

Children's voices cross the ocean cross
the ocean to the island to the ground
solid as imagination will allow
there is no heaven but what's in us
then she's gone leaving me here
with a fourth wall oddly like
a computer screen press enter
in the corner of my eye a movement
can shadows be pure like children's
laughter or summer linen laid across
the hedgerows between showers
bleached by the sun worn to that
one gathering of beings a bouquet
of bluebells and dappled light
a blanket on the ground littered
with leaves fallen so many seasons gone
there was no need for a throw
and so I don't know any of this
her name the color of the ribbons
undone the purity of laughter
in the smoke of nostalgia
for an event I can't swear to
only sense in passing over
my shoulder I'm bending
for the asparagus in the morning
a flicker of white a rise
in cadences within if that's where
heaven is she's there with summer
and shy bluebells nodding and
shadows I seem to have ignored shadows
avoiding the whole truth now
destined to a life in ghostly passage
between my experience
and someone else's memory

AS IF HE WERE

As if he were the moon he pulled gently
the stalks the stems the leaves that follow
the flowers their pistils the stamen teased
coaxed with his long ethereal fingers

day or night even when his powers waned
a slim curvature of light but he was
not the moon she realized and she
lay down with the wind in a ditch

in that thick hot summer nothing would
bring her up again it seemed all memory
of his coming were some fanciful myth
some pattern of rising and falling

following the sun he was the moon
said the wind he was not said the ditch
and she ached and she arched and sighed
and the ground cracked open looking for him

Jack Lives at the Beach

Jack lives at the beach. Breaking waves
are his night music. Taking long strolls
along the tide lines his morning news.
Sand turns up in his trouser cuffs, boots
outside his door. Bright debris
tumbled in the lapidary of the shore
till edges soften over time among the stones
find their broken state renewed
like dragon's hoard in flower pots.
Pieces of glass white green brown blue
wait like found treasure till one is chosen
by Jack's wife Louise, the jeweler, for a pendant
rimmed in gold while the rest simply continue
to be found, a clutch of orphans once cast away
now gathering light in their new lodgings
never in one day arriving all at once since this
depends upon Jack living at the beach
day after day, year after year, gleaning,
redeeming what was once considered
useless and thrown away. Jack lives
at the beach where strings and percussion
sections of the oceanic orchestra guide him,
brass and woodwinds, too; the watery
distinctions mix night with day
and his art transforms the ordinary.

The Flash of the Matrix

It's got the ocean in it she says.
He moves closer to see the sea in her necklace.
She catches his breath. Not unpleasant.
An achievement for anyone over 40 she thinks.

What was he thinking? Hopefully nothing.
Hopefully she had intercepted whatever
passed between head and heart and
back again. Just breathe indeed.

By now he is completely utterly
immersed in the element of her scent,
lured effectively by the flash of the matrix.
Ghosts, she recalls, do get this close

but without such heat. Radiation? Emanation?
Yes. Now his arms lift involuntarily.
My God, she wonders. Can he swim?
She hears him gasping for air. Beauty

does that, she remembers. Will he still
talk to me afterwards. After I save him.
He begins to vibrate in that instinctive
rhythmic way. The way of the animal

power. The waves lap all around now
and she begins to sing. As if his life
depends on it. After all there are rocks
out there suspended in disbelief.

Thinking of the Other Side

Thinking of the other side of the other's
I'd like to talk with the others eyed by
my inner mind the Oh There! sighed
chin to palm to elbow head alea
and aloft clouds soft and whereabouts
suspended in the mountains nothing
to tell the messenger who waits
but for the resident frog's silence
all last night as if this stillness
stopped his grumbling for once
or was he just afraid to speak
for fear the spell would break
and he might not hear the wind
making her way down the peaks

The Other Side

I had to ask but you're in charge.
I let that happen, didn't I. Out there
in the corner of the other room our food
gets prepared. I scratch my head.
Our elbows shush their way across
open spaces. Motors run louder than usual.
Must be the bakery. I've got two avocadoes
but they're the other side of ripe. I'm still here
in my body but I forget from moment to moment.
This morning these sorts of details were beyond
my grasp. The horizon? Forget it. Not there.
Edges too. Only the waves defining everything.
The sun didn't rise, we rolled into wakefulness.
What if the other side is this hazy and bland?
What if it's full of Chinese prophecies? What if
the bread there is upside-down pan au levain, slightly sour
and your day is going better than this?
I had to ask these questions whether anyone's
listening or not. My ears and your voice.
Softly we find ourselves on the hard road.
Softly we begin to notice the colors of dried grasses.

Patient

Today we sat in the surgeon's waiting room 55 minutes after the scheduled appointment time, missing almost an hour of hula, the last hula session of 2013. Our conversation ran the gamut from Bill Cosby's greeting for a very late doctor: No. Sorry. You can't come in. You have to wait out there till I'm ready...to Seinfeld's, Let's see, 55 minutes, rounded up to an hour of my time, that'll be $125 (I'm cheap. Those are teacher substitute rates from 1999).

30 minutes past time, we were saying, Okay, another five minutes and that's it. Five minutes came and one of us went to the secretary, who said, Oh he just came in, he'll be right there. 45 minutes into the empty, soulless closet with the Thai batik of a man playing a flute to a small herd of goats, we decided to walk out and ask for the $30 copay back. Besides, a friend had recommended a surgeon on O'ahu who would most likely do the consult and the surgery on the same day. After all, this is a small thing, an inguinal hernia brought on by coughing, or was it chainsawing the Formosan koa a few weeks back? or hefting the first volume of the OED looking for Lopate's use of the word agon, referring to Emerson's striving for moderation... The image of me busting a gut cutting back the invasive species on our five acres sounds way good. The portrait of a word searching fool holds a weird sort of glamour. But serious, hard-core coughing points the way, truth be told. 65 is old(er) and I'm still figuring out how to act my age.

54 minutes and 59 seconds into this psychically draining, dehydrating, sensory-depriving experience, my mild-mannered persona actually slipped and I announced I was leaving, Let's go!

A split second later Doctor Harry Wong knocks on the door. I love it. We're stuck in his cubicle for almost an hour having a one couple encounter crisis and he knocks. Can I come in?

Why is it that 55 minutes after the meter's needle has moved from Nice, Easy-Going Pacifists through green, yellow and out the other side of the red zone into Unpredictable Anarchists, Doctor Wong comes in and we're all smiles, shaking hands? In no time at all, one of us drops his drawers with complete, utter trust in a perfect stranger. See how we suffer gladly the waiting, the inconvenience, a disdainful regard for our time, because...because one day in the near future he'll be holding the knife. And for this, he will be richly rewarded.

Trial by patience, I suppose, on the Hero's journey. How did we do? Hobbit-ish, I think, grumbling all the way, without giving up. But really, it's so easy to get caught in the cynical drift of the victim's undertow. That's the real cause of a hernia, isn't it? The whole world's a heavy thing when you try to move it.