Pe‘ahi Light

Half-filled with sand, a Karatsu tea bowl

placed on a writing desk: no incense

smokes the air; above, on a wall, heart,

brushed in three strokes, where the black

ends of each stroke flare into the void.

We zigzagged across a dry streambed;

that night, a breeze surged like incoming surf—

waves of rain crashed, subsided, plunged;

now, in Pe‘ahi light, rain patters the fronds,

glistens the fishtail palms, the stilt root palms,

the white elephant palm, butterfly palm,

a palm, twenty inches tall, risen out

of a split coconut. Drizzle, rain, downpour—

I have no words for these kinds of rain;

I mark a conch shell doorstop, a dictionary

of etymology: rain, from Old English,

regn—a frond emerges out of the dark—

rain stops, water beads at the tips of ferns.

2

Geckos click and squiggle up a windowpane;

crisscrossing palm fronds and blades

of sunlight block lines of sight; when a frond

sways, you sway, tingling in yellow light,

arched forty feet above ground; when

a frond stills, you still, mark a spray of red ginger.

On another continent, a man lays strapped

to a hospital bed and can’t rampage

across a room he no longer recognizes.

Before opening a window, you pause

at desiccated geckos caught between a screen

and windowpane. Are we ensnared

by hazards we cannot comprehend?

A feral chicken clucks below the house.

You spy a Tahitian lime on a branch, another

yellowing farther up. On a far shore,

two women shriek as one reels in a silver

fish that bounces along the surface of lake water.

3

Sitting on a round blue cushion in a room

with three white walls, where a fourth

has screened glass doors that open

onto a lanai, I focus on the spackled

ceiling and, finding contours of mesas

and arroyos from the air, know I overlay

these shapes onto emptiness. As warm air

flows in, I smell clusters of white ginger

flowering below; earlier, we walked

a trail down a bluff to where Papalua Stream

empties into Pilale Bay and saw divers

out among white-capping waves. Did they

dive for reef triggerfish? Octopi? In the space

of not-knowing, I float joy when

the body mind unfolds and tolls flowers

from inside the bell gong of silence,

and I spark when language love—1457,

sudden unexpected attack or capture—surprises.

4

Facing east, blue lions flank the front door—

a machete, hat, compass, splintered

ukulele mounted on a wall quiet

this room; on a desk, a globe maps

the world known to Europeans in 1745;

today we can map the fractal

contours of a coastline, but what’s

never obsolete is the unappeasable urge

to speak. A couple hikes a switchback

trail down to the bay; sitting in the shade,

we overhear, “Fuck this, fuck that,”

some stomping, then they disappear.

An impoverishment of language’s

an impoverishment of life; we want

to see the empty sky fly into pieces,

to incorporate three systoles

in writing heart and bloom

through lifetimes within a single lifetime.

5

Carols an ‘amakihi in the forest after a shower—

the pendant lobster claws of a heliconia

gleam in sunlight amid a green thicket of leaves.

This morning we bobbed in ocean waves,

swam in sight of an island with a single palm

at the summit, observed flat-bottomed,

cumulus-topped, steel-blue clouds sail

low over water, listened to surf break

over black lava rock, over black lava rock;

scanning the horizon’s curving rim,

I yearned to see a pod of humpback whales,

but, through binoculars, saw an endless

shimmer of wave crests that stung my eyes.

Now, as a gecko darts across eucalyptus flooring,

as I strive to make a poem that scintillates

in the dark, scintillates in the dark,

we do not stagger, zombie zapped,

but spark in our bodies glistening in misting rain.