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.

Chinatown crackseed blues

After coffee in Chinatown, my friend Beth Yahp (here from Sydney to see family) and I wandered into a store full of large bags of crackseed candies, amazing piles of salted plum, lychee, and so much else. We paused at a box full of light hollow yellow objects, and wondered what they were. Spotting a woman at a computer nearby, I said, "excuse me, excuse me"; she turned and said in distinctly American English, "It is incredibly rude to ask a question of someone who is eating," which I then saw she was doing. I apologized. Beth and I turned away and were then confronted by an older woman with a Chinese accent. "What is your question?" she asked. "We were wondering what these objects are," I said. "They are fish stomachs," she responded. "What other questions do you have?" she asked, staring at me, her tone belligerent. None. We left the store.

 

"You only give me your funny papers"

 

The man in his 60s had been talking to people at the United gate; he was clearly a man who liked to converse. We sat next to each other in row 28. A vet, he'd been a nuclear weapons specialist when he was young. Wrecked his teeth. He wears a grill when he travels to explain insurance benefits to people: on this trip alone, he'd been to Idaho, Chicago, Indiana (he was wearing an IU jersey), and Connecticut. A lot of it he drove. We were flying from Hartford to DC, and then he'd fly home to Texas. He can't sleep after a long trip like this one, though he sleeps a lot on the road. He'd witnessed an ICE raid at Midway airport, or he'd more than witnessed it; a man "in uniform" demanded his papers, which he refused to give, telling the guy he wasn't a cop, had no authority, and to f-king leave him alone. "They're going after the black and the brown," he said. "You know why they pardoned all those J6 rioters." Runs into racism all the time. "I'm in charge here," he told one office manager; "do you want to know about your benefits or not?" That guy backed off.

 

He pulled out his phone's calculator app and started multiplying numbers. What the government takes from everyone who works (400 million of us), what they take over 30 years of our work lives, how it adds up to four quadrillion dollars. "Do you even know what that symbol means?" he asked, to which I shook my head no. "Where does all that money go?" As we approached Dulles, huge mansions came into view, not McMansions but MaxMansions, and he noted that some of the money had gone there. Started rapidly inserting his left index finger into the circle made by his right fingers. "That's what they're doing to us, all of them. All the old politicians have to go." When he'd posted his equation on FB, he was called into the boss's office, and some feds came looking for him where he lives.

 

His congresswoman is Jasmine Crockett and he's not telling her to go. As he walked off the plane, his bad hip was clearly hurting him; he was heading home by way of other conversations, no doubt. 

 

[Lilith was with me in spirit, though she'd never have fit under the seat]