Nolo stalls

On an ominous, gray morning, Lilith and I ran into the woman who sometimes walks backwards up hills; this time, she was walking forwards. She is not the subject of this walk, only its first sentence. We also ran into Auli`i, whose person is the retired aircraft mechanic obsessed with Ukraine. "I hear Lithuania is really worried that Putin might invade." I wondered out loud how Putin, who can't defeat Ukraine, could invade Europe, as well. "He probably wants to do it while Trump is still in power," he said. Like everyone these days, we got to talking about hurricane Nolo, sitting off the coast of Hawai`i island. "If a category 3 hit this island (O`ahu)," he said, "it would take years to fix things. We're out here in the middle of the Pacific, by ourselves; help can only arrive by air and by water. They can cut those off," he added, darkly. Later in the day, Nolo is finally turning to the much advertised left (closer to the American than to the the European model). But at 2 pm in Kane`ohe, we have a heavy evening sky, brief gusts of wind, humidity to cut like butter.

Lilith stalls

 

Lilith and I have walked hundreds of miles together, settling mostly into a three mile walk to the top of Valley of the Temples Cemetery and back, always under the gentle reach of the Ko`olau. I'll stop to take photos, she to sniff and pee and stare at chickens, cats, and mongooses. She'd rather hunt them, but a red leash prevents that. A few weeks ago, Lilith started to go on strike. The leash would suddenly tense. I'd look to see Lilith leaning back, her eyes directed at me, as if to say NO. At first I tried dragging her, but that wasn't good for her or for me. A few times, I let her go home, thinking she wasn't feeling well. Arthritis? Too many kitty poop snacks? Late middle age? Boredom? (That's it.)

 

I remembered that when we took walks with my creative writing students, I let her choose where we went. Strange perambulations we took around the UH campus, off sidewalks, nearly down storm drains, around old buildings. Why not do a variation on that again? So I began to let Lilith choose our way, at least some of the time. Today, we got to the cemetery, and then veered off on the grass, wandering to a tree at the top of the hill, then down and off to the dirt edge where the cemetery ends. No, she didn't want to get back on the usual course (whose treat at the end is the guys who spoil her silly), so we turned back, walking along the edge beside `Ahuimanu School (hearing the sounds of delighted children), stopping at my favorite paper bark tree, then crossing Kahekili to walk through the strip mall near the new instagram sensation, known for its sublime views. McDonald's, that is. We passed a group of water workers, air hammering holes in asphalt. One guy was wearing a Cardinals cap. "Are you?!" I asked. "No, but I like KC," he said. I was wearing my KC hat. It's a Negro Leagues Baseball Museum cap, I said. "The Monarchs?" That's it.

Death of a hired man

 

Lilith’s and my old friend from the cemetery, Uncle John, texted to say that his little brother died earlier this month. Jason had worked there, too, once telling me he’d looked at the photos in Lilith Walks. In this interview, which I found on-line, he talks about growing up a preacher’s kid in Kahuku on the North Shore: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jowmBOlOB98 RIP.

Startles

My light heart conceals a squeaky toy. Dog throws heart in air. Dog digs and digs for toy. Now my light heart is half heart, half squeaky toy, scattered on a flowery carpet. I never understood carpet remnants; the carpets were always whole.

Dog refuses to walk, uses her eyes as lanterns. I’m her interpreter, but can’t tell what she’s saying. My light heart tries her rhythm, turning back to the door, landing on the flowery remnant. Dog’s nose is all I see through the open arm rest of the couch. Termites have munched the semi-fancy sculpted wood.

Lightheartedness presumes time lasts, that before and after time don’t match, but their awkwardness hurts no one. Lighthearted is not a word you’d use for Simone Weil. 1942 was a heavyhearted year. But even she must have known a puppy, tossing bone in unclouded air. Stilled time is light.

She preferred baseball to softball, because her hand fit the baseball more snuggly. A hard ball rests lightly in the palm. We gave out baseballs at our wedding; guests threw them, and gliders too. The air was heavy with moisture, but our hearts were light as arcs of flying objects beneath the matrimonial tree. The Cajun band played “take me out to the ballgame.”

Our vows were meant to last into extra innings. This was before they put a runner on second to start the inning, back when you had to earn your way to second, at least by stealing it. Our closer holds his heart in his hand, the one he placed on his heart before the game began. Flags in center field are blowing out as the ball is thrown, only seeming to rise as it arrives at home. No one stays there long.

He didn’t mean “lighthearted,” Rachel advised me, “but congenial.” Jen had said “Susan goes into the dark, the dark, the dark,” and I almost laughed to hear her performance of the word. It’s gray outside and the trees are still. We’ve got our hurricane remnants. Cut your carpet up and fly!

 

--for Larry & Lily 

 

 

 

Startles: philo-fantasizing

Each elegy is about us; hence our discomfort with its details. Privacy’s a shield for the reader more than the subject, who “will be dead for a long time,” as Anne says. To leave in chaos is a kind of invisibility cloak. The death of a friend leaves a debt, if only you can find the bank account. Someone will pay the utilities.

Proceed along this path, finding places where brown leaves bleed yellow light, or where paperbark peels into shadow, or where palms stick out their pollinated tongues to the bees. In grief, I’m told, nature offers us solace. But we’ve had two hurricanes this month, three Kona lows this year, storms without name that made our ceilings into topo maps. Dry wall’s decreation gives us distraction, like the portrait of a lion on a gynecologist’s ceiling. I love dead leaves, not dead friends.

Follow the light through this patch of rain forest, geometries of large green leaves held over twigs. Asemic, this forest’s language. Can we read it the way we read our dead friend’s essays, for the shade they might cast on our friendship? A tentative series of vertical lines, fraktur that’s at once fracture and a grid for syntax. Italian sentences walk backwards, from mystery to resolution, hiding their punch lines at the end.

Stories are reputed to develop empathy, the palliative effect of narrative on  fractured synapses. My friend didn’t understand why stories might be a problem. Assume there’s a progression from beginning to middle to end, even in Hopscotch. There’s no end to this life, or the end’s as imperfect as the life. She refused help, until no one offered it any more.

Because “help” suggests weakness, and that’s disallowed in a survivor of her parents’ flight from Mao. And other traumas I will leave out, for privacy’s sake. Diaspora doesn’t choose its trajectory, or its shift in words. Some part of origin remains as sacred, however beautiful the breaks in clay. When she told a friend that she’d “saved her life,” the friend had no idea what she meant.

I’ve come to understand my mother’s retreats into self, her silences, her willingness to hurt rather than to be hurt. What saves the child sometimes kills the adult. Her shield grows knives inside, so each defense causes a wound. To lose a self is not to be self-less. It’s to be a faint pattern on a carpet, a computer left on in the dark, a cat waiting to be saved.

 

A 9/11 rerun from the blog

 I don't remember the novel. I can't hold onto plots. But I vaguely remember having written this essay about Don DeLillo's book, Falling Man, inspired by the photograph of someone we now know was Jonathan Briley, sound engineer, falling from one of the twin towers. DeLillo connected the event to Alzheimer's in ways that made sense to me then, and now that I reread my response: https://tinfisheditor.blogspot.com/2011/05/don-delillos-falling-man-911-alzheimers.html

 

Startles (an elegy)

1.

She told the story from beginning to end, when it was the end that mattered. Story gets in the way of death; perhaps that’s why we’re drawn to it. Not that stories explain our lives to us, but they interrupt their flow. Do not want your friend to be immortal, Weil inveighs. But mortality's the form of our beauty, and hers (and hers before) was not.

2.

She and I watched the OJ chase in my living room in Makiki, spent hours on the phone weighing the clues. Among them, the blond detective with a racist bent, and a glove that may or may not have fit. There was a wall, and an outbuilding with another blond man inside, a high pitched, thin Falstaff, good on television. She liked television dramas, the way you could piece clues together. She wasn’t persuaded OJ did it.

3.

We never solved that one, nor can I solve her death. The unopened cards, years old, the unopened bills, the unopened boxes of subscription teas, the unopened suitcases and a box containing Sina’s papers. The scatter itself was closed, too confusing to piece together. She’d laughed at my resistance to narrative; now I wish there were one. A clean one, beginning, middle, the end.

4.

A good day to sit inside the rain, a roof between, the constant percussion of high and low, fast and slow drops. Ferns reach out their tousled hands, as if to reach through the window grid. My algorithm brings me a brief video on shame, a song by Dolly Parton. Another friend prays to Dolly for her, though she’s Buddhist. Survival is a rhinestone performance in high silver boots and low cut dress.

5. I pulled her tiny red shoes out of the car after she died, carried them to the garage, wondered why I was holding them, returned them to the car. Inside were remnants of fast food, dog treats for the dogs she walked. Her slice of the gig economy. Academia was a sick jig we danced lest we get stuck, like Medea or Lot’s wife, for looking back. One student tells me she was writing a “dark memoir.”

6.

She talked in code. Or was it fiction as fact, easier to breathe through? She called them “Heathers,” devoted a square of her instagram to the name. Sometimes she laughed to think they fit a narrative they’d never recognize. “The clique,” AI tells me, “consists of three girls who are all named Heather.”

7.

Beside the door from her garage into the laundry room, I spotted a copy of Cortazar’s Hopscotch. It had just arrived, her twin tenants said. I told them they could read the novel from beginning to end, or they could use a key at the end to read it in other directions. He wrote narrative software before the fact of software. I didn’t tell them about the man in a short story who became the fish he’d been visiting at the aquarium.

8.

Looking out, he saw others looking in at him. Trans-species thought seems paranoid, but knows what the other thinks, and it’s rarely good. To be a fish is to inhabit a role you can’t understand. A diasporic person flung from China to LA to Honolulu, where she was doubly foreign.

9.

Polite (though "she was a fighter"), self-enclosed, distant in public. And then, over the years, in private. “She became more distant after she didn’t get promoted,” a friend told me. “I tried to call and text and write to her,” they all said. She told stories to push them away.

10.

“I’m worried about our friend,” Sina said. She wrote a long letter in her defense. Then one morning I called her to say that Sina was dead, murdered by a friend in Samoa. We’d all had lunch some months before in Chinatown, an awkward triad that failed to last the twin defeats to come. Silence became us.

11.

“We read,” Weil notes, “but we are also read by others.” “To be a slave is to be forced to read yourself as others read you.” “ A dialogue of the deaf.” “Each being cries in silence to be read otherwise.” Weil writes. “Don’t be deaf to their cries.”

in mem.RYH

Simone Weil, Cahiers: Tome 1. Paris: Plon, 1951. Translations mine.

 

My 9/11 poem

 

from _Portraits and Parables_, Tinfish chapbook, 2005. 

Valley of the cameras

 

"I'm sorry," I mouthed, remembering the security cams in the cemetery. Woman had been hugging man (his tattooed forearm wrapped around her back), whispering "braddah." When she turned I saw that she had tears in her eyes. I said it was good to see her, thanked her for taking care of the cats. I realized that mine was the only voice. Man and woman remained silent, looked at me without responding. 

 

Up the hill, a worker in a Black Panther shirt and Josh in emergency green were surveying the cemetery. "We're going to cut down all these trees," Panther said. They are eucalyptus trees, a couple damaged in the storms. I suggested cutting the broken areas and leaving the rest. "It's the boss; he wants walkers like you to have a view." When I said I liked to see trees, he said he meant "tourists." 

 

I've never seen a tourist up that particular hill. But there is a security camera at the top.

Smoke between the flags

 

"She's got some years on her, doesn't she?" said the woman walking toward us cheerfully with her somewhat less cheerful husband. "But she's perky." She was wearing a cap with a Maryland flag on it; he was carrying binoculars. We were at the top of the cemetery, having spent time with Ola and Hoku at the Lilith salon. The woman wanted to know where the crematorium is. Her mother is getting cremated today. She didn't want to witness it, but she did want to watch the smoke rise into the sky. "Something sacred about that," she said. Her mother had died in a muumuu with flags on it. She loved flags. "You'll see the smoke between those two flag poles," Ola told them, which made the woman happy. Her death had been sudden, but her mother had been 90 years old, "had a good life." The woman (white, in her 60s) had come to Hawai`i since the late 80s to work in the archive; ten years ago, they moved here. As Lilith and I walked downhill, she and her husband drove by in a black Chevy; she waved. "Did you see the smoke?" I asked. "No, but it's ok," she said, smiling, through the open window.

 

 

Addendum: The woman remarked on how pleasant it was to stop and talk to people. Ola was especially kind to her. I mentioned the Lilith Walks books. "Maybe we'll be in the next one," her husband remarked.

Devotionals

 

S speaks of her in the present tense. He'd been to see his wife, he says; he comes every morning and feeds the cats. There are fewer cats than there were, and the boss hates them. Ola tells me S got his job because he used to sleep in his car near her grave. He buys her flowers and, because he wears a wedding ring, one friend assumed she was alive. (I think she is, in many ways.) He got fired a couple of months ago, still comes to see her and feed the cats. The woman who quit before she could be fired feeds them in the evening.

 

Up the hill, we talk about the next storm. A woman on a plane years ago told me that after Iniki took all her neighbors' roofs off--but not hers--everyone moved in. Ola says power was out in Kahalu`u for days. His grandfather took a shovel and dug an imu in the empty lot next to his house, invited everyone to cook there. "It was one fat party!"

 

Some social media posts suggest Hawai`i is preparing for sovereignty. After all, we're on our own. "Da national guard do nutting." Others tell us two more storms are coming. Each storm leaves a map on one of our ceilings. The map changes color, brown to black. We agree to help each other.

The park defender

 

I wish I had a photograph of the `Ahuimanu Park custodian. She was weed whacking again this morning on her side of the chain link fence; Lilith and I hailed her from the other, Kahekili, side. I told her I'd seen a guy under the octopus tree the other day who was clutching the frame of a drone. "Haole guy?" she asked. She said she'd kicked him out of the park restroom the other day. I don't know if it was the same guy, but a man had been hanging out near the kids at the school nearby. A teacher asked the custodian to shoo the guy away. "We need you to leave the area, because people are uncomfortable," she told him. He balked. "YOU NEED TO GET THE FUCK OUTTA HERE." That worked better.

 

She'd been weed whacking on the other side of the fence one day when a man ran by without a shirt on, as if to be admired. "I'm not interested in men," she said, jerking her head away as she remembered. "This all you going to do?" he asked, as he ran by the other way. "It's not even my area," she informed him.

"It's gotten physical sometimes," she said. "I look out for this place." A sturdy woman, her eyes glinting under a camouflage bandana, she laughed with wide open mouth before pulling down her plastic windshield. I so wish she'd let me take her photo.

from Startles

 

If you’re certain of something, there’s the indicative verb in Italian. If you’re uncertain, there’s the subjunctive. No longer a signal, now simply a verb form, like word sculptures erupting. If space and time are only thoughts, then what is this sentence that fills both with ambient noise (try listen your native tongue from da odda side of da wall) and dark pixels? Fairy tales hover like dragonflies, their shoji screen wings slapping the air .

I can’t remember their sound, simply that there was one, or several sounds, gathered beside the parkway where my friend and I had gotten lost. No one to pick us up, despite our thumbs. I remember only images of images, which is lucky, considering what images there are on our phones. Beware the lion, but welcome the dragonfly, I remember Weil writing, I don’t know why. “That was unintended!” the sangha member said, after she rhymed “air” with her “hair,” which might or might not conceal ukus. Can’t be scared of what you happen upon.

Once upon a time, we remembered very little of this, because we lacked phones. I’ve farmed out names to mine, but not their effect on me. Quick hesitation denotes surprise, but not what that surprise is or might be. I think leads to the subjunctive, but I know does not. Do I know what I think?

Or do you? You’re my reader, after all, even if I can’t locate your name or face. I think you’re subjunctive, or at least a figment of my subjective mind, the one that prattles on at night. Continuity’s a remnant nostalgia; images arise and cut the power. A picture startles, but so does its sudden absence.

One image is not disturbing: we see a man’s ankle, his shoe, someone pointing. Use the ordinary verb for that. The second image cuts like Brutus’s knife; a man falling to the ground. He wasn’t stabbed by a knife (indicative) but by what he felt (subjunctive). “This is what they put on slaves,” he says, of the GPS fastened to his leg.

They want to see them so that they can’t be seen as us. My neighbor wore an anklet for months; image of a narrative lost on me. The narrative for this man is who he is, which is hardly story, but being. We’re beings apart from the gossip we tell about ourselves. An anklet erases that.

I want to walk away calls for the subjunctive; I walked away does not. The man in the anklet can do neither, though he walks. He can't want to walk in the way I or my dog walk. To walk is to identify as the person being watched. “Do you think of yourself as a convict, or a cook?” one prisoner asks another.

Man killed at the maximum security prison. But the newspaper photograph attests to another story behind the story. He called himself Denise, wore lipstick and a bun for his mugshot. The man (for he was a man) who killed him had killed before. Sentences that tell us this waver between he and she, birth and death, a face trapped in a box with a smile on her face.

 

Lilith and I are purveyors of gossip

Jo says that on some days her job is being done by Joe; that gives her something to tease him about. When I say I miss R at the front gate, she wonders where he's been. "Fired," I say. She pushes back in her receptionist chair, astonished. We talk about how nice a young man he is, how his mother and sister work at the cemetery, too, and how many folks are being fired.

 

Gesturing toward the walker standing beside her chair, she says, "if I get fired, everyone will cry! It's mean to fire old people who can't run!"

Octopus tree

I heard her weed wacker next to the chain link fence before I saw her. She pushed up the windshield over her face. "See those branches there on the ground? The tire tracks? That's an octopus tree, and they like to use the berries for lei. Drove up to the fence, pulled down the branches. Someone saw them--they left quickly and I found their slippers." The branches are on state property, but she's responsible for them because she's the custodian of the park on the other side of the fence.

 

Her sister's godson works at the cemetery. "You lazy ass, why you still there?" she asked him. "The big ugly security guy; he was living in my [public] bathroom. When I ask what he doing there, he says he was laid off. Of course, was taking all those drugs. In Hawaiian terminology," she added, "kapakahi--crooked." She's going to have to get her men to move the branches soon. They're not going to like that.

 

Prison visit two

 

He sits in the law library hour after hour typing letters to send to legislators. Hundreds of letters. If he makes 25 cents an hour and stamps are 70 cents; if each envelope costs 10 cents; if there is paper involved, it's hardly a winning proposition . . . he writes to call attention to prison conditions, as he once wrote to ask for drug rehab. He was sentenced to 20 years for using meth. Where do these letters go? he asks the local politician on the other side of the circle. They're probably filed away, the politician says, her face pointed down, her eyes uneasily up. 

 

"When do you feel outside of community?" was the evening's central question. The word of the evening was "judgment." Why we judge others, even though we hate being judged. Why judgment hurts. The men on the inside have particular knowledge of being outside community. On this evening, the organizer shows a short film about trans-men in Samoa. Fa`afatama do not have the honored place of fa'afafine (trans-women) in the culture. Where I sat, in a curve of the circle, there was grumbling. "What is the world coming to?" But the grumbling faded out like the end of a 60s rock song. The film over, the group talked about choices, about creating community where there was none, about filling roles, about the wedding of a fa`fatama that ends the film. 

 

"You get to choose who you are," says one inmate. "Do you think of yourself as a convict, or as something else?" he asks a more skeptical colleague. He's the wisest among them, at least for this evening; says he's a bad dad, absent from his kids. "I want to be a trans-good-dad," he says. 

 

"If I could vote," another man says, looking at the local politician, who is running for state-wide office, "I would vote for you." "Why?" ask other men; "explain yourself." "You've come to spend time with us more than once," he responds. The man next to him looks at her and says, "You seem to think of Hawai`i not as a business, but as a community.

Another pink slip

 

I've had a hard time remembering his name for more than two days running. Always offered a kind greeting at the front gate and a "walk safe" to Lilith and me as we headed in. I told his mother once how much I like him; she also works for the cemetery. As we approached our friends at the top of the hill, I asked them why I hadn't seen the young man lately. O made a throat cutting motion. Why? He'd missed too many days of work. But, said O, he had a doctor's note for every absence. "He was over this place," the guys said, and I agreed, "but quietly." H smiled. "The whole security crew is getting cut," O continued. "Well, no need for them if you've got all those cameras on high poles," I opined. "Humph, half of them don't work." 

 

It began pouring rain as Lilith and I walked downhill; we'd seen gray sheets of it coming from the ocean. We ducked into a covered area where a funeral was going to be held and waited out the worst of it. The Ko`olau assumed their misty aura; in this scroll, the men using weed whackers are the scholars of old. A long row of drops formed along the tent's metal supports. Lilith was drenched. My bright red Springfield Cardinals shirt could have been wrung out.

 

The guard shack at the front is being renovated to include two rooms, more windows, and a computer stand. It's still white, not the dusky maroon color that for many years matched the temple. I wonder what the young man's mother is thinking. I hope he gets another job. I'm glad I got him a cup of coffee from McDonald's a couple of months ago. It took an hour inside "the most scenic McD's in the world."

A prison visit

 

I facilitated a poetry workshop in a prison the other evening. I was reminded of my mother's Alzheimer's home: here were men shut off from (and, more importantly, by) the outside world, locked in and locked out. As I left, I remembered closing the door with a thud on an old man in her home who wanted to leave. 

 

One man who stayed late said he'd taken English 100 at another prison. "It was so much fun!" he said. I told him I hadn't often heard the word "fun" used for that course. "We wrote five papers," he reported. He wants more classes. He'd promised his father he'd get his degree. "Education is everything," he said. His aunty had taught Hawaiian Studies at the local college.

 

We wrote "I remember" sentences (not so possible in my mother's "home," which would now be called a "memory care facility"). Locking up involves a lot of loss: one man had a sentence each for his children; another remembered how to skin an animal and how to fish; another remembered his first kiss with his wife, 40 years ago; the young guy remembered wanting flares at a fair, saying "but they're just flares!" after his father said no. He's the pastry chef in the prison. "Good haupia!" the others exclaimed. He remembered the flight to Arizona (where lots of Hawai`i prisoners are sent). And he remembered taking photos of his dog, which for some reason worried his mother.

 

One man made his every memory and later, his every moment in our exquisite corpses, about ice cream. He was truly the emperor of it.

 

 

Dementia Blog: a kind comment

 This appeared on my Facebook page the other day. I'm gratified that this book, nearly 20 years on, still has currency, though I'm sorry for the reasons why. 

Hi Susan--am finally reading Dementia Blog (the first volume) with admiration and pleasure. You manage to keep the focus on the local conditions surrounding your mother's dementia, giving her a space to be in both her and your world. The blending of clinical and geopolitical spaces during this period is important for placing the body/mind in the world, not separate from it. You've found the appropriate tone for an experience that for most would be traumatic or, rather, that the trauma of your mother's memory loss is experienced through your careful, patient record. It's a great accomplishment.

Best wishes,

Michael Davidson 

from Startles

Not the image itself, but a memory of the image. Not color or black and white, more a pattern with feelings attached like nuts that burn in the light. Deer fleeing the fires run from between trees in France. The caption tells me there’s a barrier they can’t cross. I turn the video off.

A scrum of men on the street in Madison; three or four on top of another man-shape. They don’t move, at first, image of violence without the act. The caption reads that one of them executed the man on the ground, calmly put gun back in holster. I turn the video off. And I turn it off again when the scroll comes back.

Blurry image off a video of boys in a boat. Diptych of dialogue from 911 call, white words on black screen, no names attached. Someone has cleansed the audio of superfluous sound. “Don’t die, Nolan!,” someone yells. They’re already planning the cover-up. I push past that post; it’s a cue ball in my heart space.

Horses run through a French village, down the street, headlong. Behind them, plumes of smoke. They were ok; they found the beach, the caption reads. Still I cannot watch, even if there’s beauty in the terror of their galloping. I’m sick to death of terrible beauty.

I cannot see what happens in the interval between a man running and his lying on the ground. I cannot turn that interval off. There’s no memory there, but there’s still blood and enough syntax to recollect. Michael Brown in his Cardinals cap, dead nine hours in the sun. I cannot turn the video off, because it’s not on my screen.

A scroll can be sacred. To scroll is action (a movement between messages) and it’s also heresy. An old philosopher ascends to heaven, perhaps, but not these men, these women, these horses on the ground. Ground is verb not noun; there’s no ground on which to stand when it burns away. Woke up scared.

 

Susan's house-hunting tour of Volcano

Volcano, HI.

 

"I'm not interested. Trespassing isn't my thing," said Jill, before Evelyn and I walked onto someone's property. There was a sales sign at the unpaved road (Sotheby's, no less) and no sign of inhabitants. Evelyn and I walked around, looking in the windows, noting the single red chair in the living room. No other furniture to be seen, though the water pump went off occasionally, as there was a leak under the house. "Where's Jill?" I asked. Oh, farther down the hill at an old one room shack made of old and new windows, transparent roofing (used for walls), an old fold-down couch with cell phone charger cable on it. She was already taking photos. The space was hardly empty, though, as there were cat toys (a stuffed mouse), an earring, a larger toy (for dog?); the walls all bore writing. Not poetry, per se, but thoughts, a lot of them. About relationships, some lists, quotations, and references to Harry Parch and Philip Glass. You needed a ph.d. in literature to parse those lines, scrawled in pencil and pen! Some of the handwriting resembled that in Albert Saijo's notebooks, capital letters. The other writings reminded me strongly of something I had seen somewhere else. I thought maybe the man who builds canoes had written similar phrases and lines in his workshop, the one I took photos of that now appear on a Hawai`i journal's website. The photos he gave me permission to use, later objected to, and later again acknowledged in a friendly tone.

 

We made our way back to the side road. In one direction was a larger side road, in the other a burned down house we'd already visited. There was a story there that we could almost remember. It had to do with a squatter, a fire, and a woman who'd been attacked. Evelyn dashed off to the right to pick up a piece of wood she liked from the junk pile. She did not return quickly. Jill said we should just keep walking and Evelyn would catch up. It felt like a pattern.

 

She did, a bit out of breath, as we approached Haunani Road. She'd met Andy!!! He's building the small A-frame next to the lot with the burned out house. He's a photographer and a poet!! (Evelyn is possessed of a marvelous enthusiasm.) He told her who the guy who lived in the shed was, and he was indeed the man I thought he'd be. A carpenter, very well educated. (He'd once told me he's half-Hawaiian, half-Nebraskan, military family; he seemed to know a lot about chickens.)

 

As we walked back toward my home, we saw evidence of the carpenter to the right side of the road. I walked toward the house he worked in front of and called out to see if anyone was there. Someone saw Jill and Evelyn, who hastened to tell him that it was their friend who wanted to say hello. He greeted me with, "Oh the canoe connoisseur!" 

 

Somewhere along the way, Jill and Evelyn had asked if they could be Lilith for this walk. Oh yes, I said, it's a Lilith story. "Let's trespass together again," said Evelyn, by way of farewell.

 

from Startles

She misses her furniture. Her ex-husband, late father-in-law, childhood bric-a-brac. Anger’s sturdy as a plank; depression a constantly popping balloon. Her blind dog grows deaf, his nose banging against walls; he has his own issues with furniture, though he still wanders outside and returns to see if she’s in her chair. The word “clustering” was changed to “chair sharing,” marking the diminishment of faculty and resources.

Meditation clears the one, if not the other. My bookcases were all marked “dispose” on my last day in the office. Grieving stored in my hips, I couldn’t walk for two months. The chair I lived in bore witness to morning shadows, late afternoon light. I took photographs of the lanai floor, snail trails, murky puddles, moss.

Kan`eohe would have been a nuclear sub harbor, according to one state master plan. The master always has a plan, and this included industry where the cemetery is. The dead lack industry, but landscape crews do not. Cameras on poles watch them mow and whack and weed. The cyclops is myth, but what it watches is not, is the history of late capitalism, vision folded into threat.

Vulture capitalism. Buddha sits in his temple in the valley, surrounded by signs that order you not to wear beach clothes in his presence, and by others that beckon you to a cultural event of the corporation’s construction. Bon dances have been replaced by photo shoots of tourists in expensive fake Japanese coats. You can ring the bell after the long line dies down. Sacred greed, release us.

Homeless (not the) wander like tourists down Kahekili. They are our furniture, set out at the curb to be taken away. Old man end-table, young woman torn blanket, dog tongue. We can’t set up house with them, but once we clear them out, we see so much less through their eyes. Even unfurnished, the rentals are extravagant, unaffordable.

from Startles (Volcano)

    

Playing the changes. Dissonant ones. Bright and dull orange rust barrel, fern shadows magnified in a pool of orange water. Circles inside of circles. Metallic sunset that’s all sun and no set.

Forest battered into rock and dirt road; orange circles of cut trees, laid down like corpses beside flat planks. At the back opening, a rock strewn circle around a rock strewn hole in the ground, overseen by yellow earth mover framing `ohi`a trees. To the right side, on a dirt hill, two pigs sniffing. At the road, a pile of tires, shredded, punctured, heaped up, a memorial of sorts. Behind me, a large rock, positioned to be decorative, in front of the hole in the ground, gray and rust colored.

At the road’s end, boat, large stuffed animal, and abandoned cars gone. Abandoned house still empty, weeds installed in the gutters like front facing cow licks. What was abandoned is now gone. Nothing’s been restored, just cleared, except for cans and a card that reads “Humility, Respect, Honesty” on one side, “Disorder, Enemies, Distrust” on the other. Both bear a faded ALOHA at the top.

The card had been a rectangle, torn on its right side (which was the right side), or left on the other side (which is that of “loneliness” and “suspicion.”) I had to flip it to reverse the field. A less forgiving geometry than the circle, which might ease the transitions, if not acknowledge opposites. Two cats sit on the lanai, mother and daughter, one calico, the other black. They are not abstractions.

Abstraction is reality cut out of context, which is what renders it confusing. Do I see part of something larger that I cannot intuit? Or do I see a pattern adjacent to another that might be a sign (like Texaco) or the fullness of sunset (with the set). Do I inherit flat rectangle or circle? Is circle a burnished orange or is it a rock filled hole in the ground?

If one, or the other, there’s no moral to be taken. Momma cat cocks her back leg, puts it down again. Motion is thought is my seeing of it turning. I’d believed the words so long I couldn’t see the evidence of smudge, orange, a morning light as vivid as Robert Glasper’s tear, which is the music running down his cheek. The black cat came inside and disappeared.

See/hear Glasper here: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/oj_ex4NgcDw

More Io ed! Section 3 in italiano

Sono contenta che sia stata pubblicata sulla rivista I Martedì, nella rubrica #Poeta in angolo, la mia nota allo splendido poemetto di Susan M. Schulz, tradotto da Pina Piccolo e Lou Vezzali! Auguri a questo libro ecologico, filosofico e originale nella struttura e nei temi.

Poeta in angolo

a cura di Loredana Magazzeni

  

Susan M. Schultz

3

Eucalipto ed io esistiamo fuori contesto; io sono

l’occhio dell’occhio della macchina fotografica

mentre si fissa su una goccia di resina rossiccia che

proietta la sua ombra come un’esca. Io e il testo non

siamo la stessa cosa, anche se io guardo la sua goccia

nera su una pagina virtuale bianca. Ma tutto il resto

vive nella sua luce. Non è una luce sacra, a meno che

non ci si inchiodi sopra una targhetta di bronzo con

un nome a renderla tale. L’albero è luce nella misura

in cui riflette; stamattina sono luce anch’io, a quanto

pare, col variare del sole. Ieri ho sperimentato una

simulazione d’eternità, immutabile sotto la pioggia

grigia. Stamattina i colori si distinguono. È tutto nel

contrasto. Una donna sta ferma accanto a un albero

(la sua cagna dal guinzaglio rosso strattona), scatta

foto senza capire il perché. Se si tratta di fermare

il tempo, l’eucalipto è già piuttosto lento. Se è per

commemorare il momento, il momento insiste nel

dichiararsi vivo in quanto flashback (termine tecnico

per memoria). Questa è l’eterna origine dell’arte:

l’essere umano che si confronta con una forma che

attraverso di lui vuole diventare un’opera. L’albero

è allora una forma con cui mi confronto? Oppure

la forma è la foto, che opera attraverso di me a un

secondo grado di distanza?

[…]

Da Io ed Eucalipto, traduzione di Pina Piccolo e Maria Luisa Vezzali, Diálogos, 2025

Susan M. Schultz, scrittrice, poeta, critica letteraria e docente di Letteratura Inglese, nata in Illinois, Stati Uniti, vive a Kaneohe e Volcano, nelle Isole Hawaii. Fra le sue ultime pubblicazioni Meditations: December 2019-December 2020 (Wet Cement Press), Lilith Walks (BlazeVox), I Want to Write an Honest Sentence (Talisman) e una serie di raccolte Memory Cards a cura di varie case editrici. Scrive di memoria e di oblio nel contesto di storie personali e pubbliche. Ha diretto la casa editrice Tinfish Press e ha fatto da portavoce per la salute mentale presso la University of Hawaii di Manoa. Io ed eucalipto è stato tradotto per la prima volta in Italia da Pina Piccolo e Maria Luisa Vezzali.

Un piccolo, innovativo lavoro di poesia e filosofia è il poemetto Io ed Eucalipto (edito da Diálogos), un’opera sperimentale della poetessa statunitense Susan M. Schultz, che intreccia prosa, poesia, fotografia come fonti di dialogo e conoscenza. Il rapporto intimo e filosofico tra essere umano e natura, tra civiltà e sua possibile dissoluzione per cause ambientali, fa di questo libro uno dei più potenti e innovativi libri di ricerca, che sa spaziare fra i generi e le arti per avviare un più profondo discorso su natura e umanità. La poeta americana parte dal pensiero di Martin Buber per riscrivere la dualità fra l’io e l’altro, dialogando con un albero, grazie a ripetute e lunghe passeggiate, dialoghi e silenzi, che mostrano anche la profondità e necessità per tutti noi di un diverso approccio alla natura. Il poema si articola in 21 capitoli, ciascuno accompagnato da uno scatto dell'autrice, e invita a una riflessione ampia e approfondita che attraversa il senso della vita, le relazioni umane, l’ecosistema, il desiderio di preservarne pluralità e bellezza, come unica forma possibile di futuro per l’umanità tutta.

Posted on Facebook by Loredana Magazzeni

What you don't know won't hurt you

We'd no sooner left our house this morning, then Raschelle called to say she saw us in the cemetery. Oh, a woman in a red shirt. One problem only: no dog.

 

Up the hill at the back of the cemetery, Lilith was getting her good attention from Ola and Hoku. I asked what the odd smell was. They pointed down the hill near the maintenance shed to a puff of smoke rising from the trees. The crematorium. To no one in particular I said, "it's my job to be observant, and I missed that for ten years?" "All day every day," said Ola.

 

"Now you know, aunty," said Hoku.

 

Dementia Blog conversation with Richard Hamilton, part two

Part two is about part one of the sequence, which is only just.

 

https://rh4075.substack.com/p/part-2-interview-with-author-susan

Please support Richard's substack, if you go there. It's well worth the visit. 

 

Essay about Albert Saijo's Backpacking book

 https://lithub.com/one-of-the-best-american-backpacking-books-was-written-by-a-japanese-buddhist-beat-poet/

I happen to love the backpacking book, its instructions on "how to walk," and the prints by Albert's brother, Gompers. Highly recommended. 

Albert's old cottage in Volcano is for sale for an incredibly high price! We have such fond memories of spending time with him there before he died in 2011. https://www.realtor.com/realestateandhomes-detail/19-3994-Kalani-Honua-Loop_Volcano_HI_96785_M94276-67411?from=srp_next

 

 

 

 

Unnoble truths

 

H does not like to drive the gators/carts. Today he was driving with someone who is not his usual partner. When he saw me, he headed up past an arrow pointing the other way, and stopped. "Where's your dog?" he said, sounding worried. I explained that while she gets dental treatment, I paid $5 to get into the Temple as a walk-in senior kama`aina. He looked a bit drawn, said he was being trained in a new job that involved little flags (arranged at the back of the cart). I asked him to say hello to O for me and Lilith.

 

I visited the temple as a writer doing research, and as a Buddhist, stung by the commercialization of the place where Lilith and I walk most mornings. It was early; I only saw large tour buses on my way out, four of them parked backwards in the recently-expanded parking lot, nestled bumper to bumper behind the orange cones.

I posted photographs. The implacability of consumerism (as Rachel Blau DuPlessis might put it) confronted my every attempt to find a quiet moment, an unsullied image. Even at the meditation gazebo, which was open and--briefly--empty, signs screamed at me not to feed the animals or run or jump or make a lot of noise. I was not wear beach attire. The word "respect" came up more than once. Other signs screamed the availability of niches and plots at "the Eternal Resort." I took my shoes off and went inside to visit the Amitaba statue. Buddha appeared calm, seated on his still lotus. I lit a stick of incense, put it in sand in a bowl beside him.

 

Outside again, ads for having your photograph taken. You can be "iconic"! You can partake in a "cultural" moment! You can buy something "more than just a photo"! Inside the gift shop, I caught sight of yet another camera, like the ones on polls throughout the cemetery. Cyclops with an eye on you and you and you. Another sign indicated that bad karma comes to those who steal. Who was not stealing?

First impressions

 

Her name rhymes with Michaela. She moved to Washington State a year ago to be with her daughter and grandchild, after years of working at Christian school here. But she's back, circling the "heart" (or cul-de-sac) at the top of the cemetery. We'd agreed once that our first impressions of one another were poor, I in my "Make Racism Wrong Again" hat, which from a distance could be confused for what it parodied, and she in her Christian themed shirts. "What's going on around here?" she asked me in her high, but not soft, voice. "The vibe is bad! And where's Scott?" I told her about the trees, the bushes, the missing cats, the missing men, the untended scars on the landscape. She yelled. "But S's wife is here," she said, meaning his late wife's grave. "He comes very early to visit her," I said, so I don't see him. She saw rhinoceros beetles the other day, dead but; Makoa says they've attacked the palms. (Without the lines of palms this place would really have a bad vibe.) There's some guy who comes and injects one of the trees, I noted, but only one it seems.

 

She misses this place. The image is in her mind at all times. She can't imagine being a grandmother, but she is. When she's here, she walks many times up and down the last hill. After Ola and Makoa come up the hill, she reaches out to give Ola a hug. She'd given him a present when his baby was coming, but she gave it to the wrong guy. 

 

We peel off, but she comes down hill after us, apologizing for saying "you've got to get rid of that cap!" No harm. She walks with us again as far as her late ex-husband's grave on the hill where an American flag flutters. There's a long story there, but clearly her visit isn't one of anger but of a more loving remembrance. Lilith and I walk toward the exit, just past where four cats lie under a gator to avoid the ever hotter sun.

The American dream

 

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I took a nice photo of Lilith with him the other day; she jumped up onto his cart to get his attention (and mine). At the back of his cart is an upside down broom and a row of flags of different colors. He's the worker who sets down flags before the graves are dug. A young man with a long tattoo down one arm, an earring in one ear. I see him either leaning over to put them down or zooming around not-quite-recklessly on his gator. Yesterday, we met at the back of the cemetery, where the large water feature makes the sounds of running water and revving machines. He asked where I live, and I pointed north toward the townhouses on the other side of `Ahuimanu School. "May I ask how much it costs to rent one?" he asked. "A lot," I said, only later telling him that a three bedroom went for over $3,000 a month. I told him that my kids have to pay nearly everything they make in rent in Seattle and Virginia. Then he asked about mortgages, how much the townhouses cost to buy. I told him that we paid off our mortgage after my mother died. We'd paid under $200K in 2001, but they're now going for well over $700K. He said his dream is to own a place. 

 

The other day I took a photograph of a man wearing a shirt that read, in modified cursive, PRIVILEGE. As if growing through the top of his cap, a pole wore a Hawai`i state flag.

Conversation with Richard Hamilton about my second dementia volume

 Recently, Richard Hamilton and I had a long discussion of my book, "She's Welcome to Her Disease": Dementia Blog, Volume 2 from Singing Horse Press. Richard has put the conversation on his substack, which is worth visiting in any case. 

 The second volume of DB kind of disappeared into the ether, so it's good to see that it's getting notice now. It's the most formally inventive of my books, using bureaucratic forms, photographs, inventories, children's stories and other materials to tell the story of my mother's last years. It's also a portrait of an Alzheimer's community, one in which people have long conversations, fall in love, fall down, and experience emotions. I miss them.

https://rh4075.substack.com/p/revisiting-shes-welcome-to-her-disease

The covers for both volumes were thoughtfully designed by Gaye Chan. 

 

On a day too hot to walk much

"If I ever met Barack Obama," the retired airplane mechanic said, "I'd tell him how much I admire his oratory, but how much more I admire Michelle's." I told my story about Obama and the skinhead, and then about the time I saw Michelle leaning over to look at me through outstretched hands as she shook mine at Ke`ehi Lagoon. (I felt her husband's hand on mine, but he didn't peak.) Alison, with whom we were walking, counted the six degrees of separation she had from Obama, including a cousin who went to Punahou with him when he was Barry. 

 

Up the hill from those stories, she and I ran into the woman who lives on the corner, her house always dolled up with flags and signs. A loud house. We talked about the heat, how she suddenly wished for the rain she'd wanted to have stop just the other day. She said she ran a lot of things in Honolulu, including the zoo, the Shell, the Blaisdell. She was really happy that they might make the zoo into a sanctuary for old elephants. Her expressiveness manifested itself several times in exclamations of "Oh shut up!!" as when Alison said she'd been at the circus when Tyke killed her trainer and ran out into the streets of Kakaako, only to be shot dead by police (1994). The police are still traumatized, she told us. Not her daughter, who was only two at the time. Her husband had told her to close her eyes when the trainer was killed, and she did. I said Tyke has a memorial stone in the pet cemetery nearby, though her body was disposed of in the Waimanalo landfill, which is somehow in Waianae. "Oh shut up!!" said the woman, who said she'd go look for it soon. She was pleased that the new zoo director used to run the zoo in DC; he also used to work for Obama, who made him ambassador to Australia. A good man, she said of the former president, whose 2008 campaign shirt I was wearing.

 

Ozymandias in `Ahuimanu

 

"I'm a senior influencer," the tall Asian man said to me and Raschelle yesterday, as he asked me to retake his photograph. It needed to include his feet, decked in bright blue Hokas. The hat he wore over his white hair and pony tail also read HOKA. His daughter works for the company in California, and the photo was for her. He lives on the other side, near Skyline (the billion dollar rail system on stilts). Everything's so noisy over there, he'd rather live over here. Now, if only the Japanese had built Skyline, it would go all the way to Hawai`i Kai by now, through Waikiki (in a tunnel under the Ala Wai), and to UH Manoa. Their speed trains were built in the 1960s and there have been zero accidents. What are they doing putting all those sculptures on the Skyline poles anyway? (I suggested they made them look a little bit less boring.) But with everything so expensive already, why decorate a pole? The trains are elevated so that they don't have to have drivers, he said.

 

Today, another walker told me that the Chinese man whose odd Christian nationalist patriotic American tomb sits at the top of the cemetery has been detained for a year now. She called up a story from Hawai`i News Now last week. "A Chinese millionaire who has invested more than $100 million in Hawaii real estate is fighting deportation by the U.S. government, claiming he fears retaliation for supporting democracy while officials say he smuggled aliens and has communist ties." You've gotta read it to believe it, and even then it seems fantastical. https://www.hawaiinewsnow.com/.../chinese-millionaire.../

 

I showed Bryson the photograph I took of him petting Lilith yesterday on his John Deere gator. "I saw it already!" he said, "Hoku and Ola showed me" He said he'd seen John, who is doing ok, better, somehow has taken a good turn. No, he doesn't have a new job but, Bryson said, as he stared off in the distance, "you've got to put yourself in his hands." He raised his toward the sky.