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 Bon dances have been replaced by photo shoots of tourists in expensive fake Japanese coats.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.