from Startles

 

Startles

Upside down tee shirts hang on the line under an overhang, dripping from the head space below. Half moon on white shirt or window whose translucence wrinkles. Clothes pins turn to the right; palm fronds hang down. Wallace Stevens is not my type, a poet announces on social media; and if he were? What would dangle down?

Farther trees lumber in moist wind under a clotted gray sky. My teacher corrected me to “skies,” but I see only one, smeared like chalk on cement. Small boy hands brightly colored drawing to monks; one receives it, hands held out, palms up. The new mayor prays with open palms, gloved ones. The palm outside drops dead fronds beside the laundry.

Era of objective falsehoods, like fictions about facts, or facts without invention’s anchor. To tell the truth is to look outside of us, as through a camera, not to dance inside among the crazy synapses. Under tyranny, we see, not think, at least not feelingly. Nothing’s traced inside the diagram of depth, where feeling used to lie like the monks’ dog. Only if introspection orbits over black lines can it operate at all.

Where’s the manual for this time? If space and time are invented by us, we’ve made two big problems! The spaces of time constrict, like blood vessels, while the time of our constructions dissolves like water on salt. That leaves us on a flat surface, flailing to launch. My dog killed a bird the other day; in the family story that followed, bird became two chicks, and death a couple of snacks.

The monk calls our phones our lovers. Hundreds pointed at him, who is coming to be loved through them, set on silent to honor pilgrimage. He urges us not to worry about the world, but to be present to ourselves. “Selves” is not the right word, but will take the place of emptiness for now. At the turn of the year we cling to the high rope with bare toes, bare life meeting the asphalt of a Georgia road, our blisters the size of saucers.

Not flying ones, but those that hit the hard ground. If I cannot find myself inside, I will look for “it” on the road, treasure each pothole as an internal incident. It or thou, no matter. The difference is in our being taker or receiver of the photograph. One monk runs ahead, holding out his phone to record the other monks walking. The phone contains a sacred space, but compresses it for social media.

“I’ve never before seen anyone act Christ-like,” a woman tells her phone. “You give me reason to stay alive,” another tells a monk. She and he are sitting on asphalt. Compassion is also hard. As is this present.

Published photos, now and then

 The expansive new issue of Laura Hinton's journal, Chant de la Sirene, is on-line now. My photographs and writing are among the features, along with Laura's kind, perceptive critique of my abstract photographs. See here: https://www.chantdelasirenejournal.com/issue-5-ontyranny-poetry-protest-art

 

Because I no longer keep my cv updated (it's also retired!), I'm going to post two other journal issues, these from 2023 and edited by Zhang Er, that include my photographs. Here: https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/6DEEqCKEFw4umhBfSrE8ug

and here: https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/yQL9HiX4r4dJG0UfdJDIEA 

The poems in this journal are in Chinese, but there's a translation button, too. 

Me in my Obama shirt, Lilith on her new leash

 

Lilith was quite literally dogging it up Kahekili (although I gather I'm using "literally" figuratively) when Don came jogging behind us. Lilith stopped to greet him. We (sans Lilith, of course) had watched the 2008 election returns together, his family and mine. Having exchanged disbelieving happy new years to each other, he said he'd been sent to spend four months this past year on Maui, post-Lahaina fire. Lee Zeldin, head of the EPA, had come to visit, and so Don had practiced his spiels so as not to anger him. No mention of cost, for example. Zeldin never once asked about health or environmental issues, which didn't surprise Don, but what did was how interested he was in the people working there. He seemed genuinely to want to know about them and their lives. 

 

This was a week after he'd summarily fired 300 scientists, and he did worse later. I suggested it might have been because he didn't fire them face to face. "That makes it even worse!" I brought up the film about German families who lived just the other side of the walls at Auschwitz, leading their normal lives, their children playing in the gardens. "Terrible," Don said, "that such an analogy makes sense now, isn't it?" 

 

I asked if he'd seen news of the Buddhist monks walking across the South. He had not, so I showed him a photograph of them on my phone. They're on the same route as the Freedom Riders, I told him. Don was impressed, but not overly. "It's a step," he said.

Lilith sees Uncle John after a long interval

Lilith and I took a late afternoon walk, ran into Uncle John and a friend of his at the cemetery. Uncle John started singing his Lilith song. I couldn't take a photo of his friend, because he'd signed three NDAs for his contract. Sounds like getting married to Trump, I said, and sure enough we started talking politics. I was inclined to argue, but a voice in my head said that my job was to listen. The friend (who declared himself working class) thought Trump the lesser of two evils because he doesn't like the Green New Deal: solar farms kill native birds, coal plants were regulated and clean. Who dug the oil wells in Venezuela? But yes, the USA has done horrible things in central and south America, he averred. As for ICE, he'd gotten pulled over in Arizona in 2008 and asked for his green card. He's Hawaiian. He had to take a phone call. Uncle J said there's much worse than Epstein . . . and talked about how BLM had been taken over by bad elements . . . its leader was killed . . . Black folks vote for Dems because their parents tell them to, and the real problem in the Black community is the high rate of abortion. He grew up on the North Shore; he's half-Black but looked Black, and suffered a lot of racism. "Hawai`i is the most racist place on earth," he said.

 

Lilith in the rain

Lilith and I sought cover from the rain at the administrative building of Valley of the Temples cemetery. At the front desk was the woman whose son's name I had placed on a memory tree at the walk against suicide a few months ago, the woman whose knees need replacing but who has no time or money for such an operation. She'd had Christmas Eve with her children (now in their 50s) and myriad grandchildren. The next day they'd gone to her ex-husband's place; they sent her prime rib! Nice to have children in their 50s, she said. An employee who greeted Lilith told the woman that the service today would involve three urns. I asked if the family had all died at the same time. No, people save their ashes, she said, until they can inter all of them. She tried to find the urn of her deceased husband, an Italian from NY, on her phone; she said the urn was beautiful, and her ashes would go in there, too. He was Italian from New York who loved local culture. Is that why he moved here, I asked. "He moved here for me," she said. 

 

The rain had stopped. Lilith and I headed out. "Thank you for talking to me," she said. She's not the first person who has thanked me for listening.

 

Lilith meets a reader

Nearing the end of our first long cemetery walk in a long while, Lilith and I started our final uphill on Hui Kelu. A man on the other side of the street caught sight of us and walked across the street. "You might not remember me (I'm Rod) he said, but we met in the cemetery one time, where I walk with my friend, the tall haole woman. I got your books, and I love them, and I bought one for her, too." I did remember! I asked his last name, and he told me. Probably the last person with that Portuguese name on the island, he said. His great-grandmother had been full Hawaiian; she married a Chinese man; their daughter married a Portuguese man. With each generation he detailed came a percentage of Hawaiian blood. He's only been left with 1/8 %. Went to public schools all the way through, got two Associates degrees from HCC. The first was in drafting, but he didn't see a future in construction, so he went to the Pearl Harbor shipyard and got another degree there. He leaned over to Lilith and said, "you somebody." I pointed the way to the eucalyptus tree in the park, and we parted ways. 

 

When I was younger, my mother would ask me if I wrote only for other poets. Maybe I did. But now I write for Pearl Harbor shipyard workers; guys who work in the cemetery (Ola had his baby, I'm told); the woman whose husband and mother-in-law run the Waikane Store; Jarod, the auto body guy who was selling his souped up car to a neighbor yesterday; my fellow walkers and talkers, and of course for Lilith.

 

Radhika's boyfriend played me "Tom's Diner" last night on his phone. We discovered that it was a Suzanne Vega song originally. The song ends abruptly with someone dumping a blob of milk into his/her half-full coffee cup because the waiter was distracted. "Like a Lilith walk," said Rad.

 

from Startles

 

Startles

Many of the details proved incorrect, but they made such good stories. The truths they assigned to us didn’t come from the stories themselves, but out of a need to tell them. It was we who absorbed them, unknowing, responding in truth to what were lies. If the fear of a bear scares you as much as a bear, both are true, bear and not-bear.

Bear with me. A phrase my daughter can’t comprehend, like “in a word.” She can’t answer our question with one word, she says. It’s not irony, but the failure of an idiom to mean to her what it means to us. The idiom, rendered literal, is silly, like “I’m glad you found each other,” when she wondered where they’d gotten lost.

No one had been lost, they simply hadn’t been found. If they hadn’t been found later, they would not have been lost, simply displaced to fantasy. “At least they’re reading books!” my neighbor says of kids who read “only” fantasy. The truest genre in this time when the real refuses to acknowledge itself as such, or when fiction turns into our history before myth even tries. But I’ve lost my bearings now.

It’s like time travel without time, or dreaming without needing to dream. I dream I need to rent an apartment in New Haven, return to school, but I keep forgetting where the apartment is. Roads ramify into veins branching out from the suburbs (never central) and into wooded areas. The poet sat beside a large window, out of which we could see lawn and trees, and more trees beyond those. Unable to see well, she listens to books.

The actor’s memoir concludes with a 45 minute reading of poems. That a life story can end with verses suggests they were necessary to the unraveling of time into experience. His accent accentuates significance. Some Shakespeare, some Heaney, some lives, like the widow’s, defined by lost couplets. What shall be the exit song of us?

Will the stadium darken, laser lights do ADHD flickers across the crowd, or will the lawn sit unmown like the palm of a hand that eases closed? Speed correlates to compassion: move quickly and you lack it, but move slowly and your hesitation maps love’s portion. The words of the loving kindness prayer evaporate like rain from a summer parking lot, but I’ll lay it out like a sketch. Not detail but structure matters then. Not the hollow tubes of a pervert’s island home, but a monastery’s poor plenitude.

Hurt, not harm, my mother-in-law says. Is that like pain without suffering, I wonder? Between concepts a yellow police line droops in cold rain. I’ve changed my climate—warmth startles me!--but echoes feel cold to the touch, as if sound were transmitted by light off a pond. He loved it, but she ran, its tintinnabulations chasing her like a breaking chord.