A is for apathy: Elegy 29

 

A is for apathy

Om mani peme

Hung you’d mutter

Push back against

The pressure of

Reality (Wallace Stevens)

At least make

Obstacles of sound

To defeat sound

(This morning saws

Shear the dovesong)

And I can’t

Push death away

Or the fascism

You prepared for

By using Signal

(An encrypted app)

I understand apathy

Is push back

Noise reducing headphones

Interfering with interference

Apathy’s active response

To grief to

Murder to misogyny

Stolid cemetery workers

Strip sod / stoic /

They’re older men

Who stop to

Watch traffic below

Like two statues

Shovels in hand

Before they resume

Hard labor for

The death industry

What got Mark

About Dachau was

How exquisitely beautiful

Was the surrounding

Landscape not what

My mother described

When she reported

Seeing corded piles

Of corpses on

Railroad cars men

In striped pajamas

I can see

Wanting to look

Only at one

Not the other

Guarding heart space

A photograph of

You at beach

With Selina smiling

Peaceful heart surf

Your aumakua bird

Forget what came

After / I cannot /

Gaza, year two: Elegy 28

 

Conversation opened. 1 unread message.

Gaza: Year Two

Sina, we’re called

Upon to speak

A friend sends

Photo of hand

Raised in conflagration

Of Gaza hospital

Says we were

Talking about Radhika

This was mother

And daughter burning

Is it like this

In the afterworld

Outside the box

Ashes scattered like

Glitter for saints

Gleaming faces turned

Up where artists

Hang on trapezes

Let dust fall

To be boxed

Later / Murphy’s ashes

On bar floor

Down theater toilet

Don’t know to

Laugh or weep

This world burning

What do you

Say, dear Sina,

On after-death apps

Maeve killed bird

Yesterday / I buried

It in dumpster

Bryant found rat

Foot in old

Trap in Volcano

All this blood

On our hands

Our claws / Sign

Bomb and let

It rip apart

Kids who can’t

Yet read and

Old women with

Eyes too fogged

To see anything

Beyond clear suffering

Absent Lilith meets the queen

 

"It's awful what they did to our queen," said the small woman in a large sun hat, sitting next to me on a picnic bench at Swanzy Beach Park. "It's men," she said. "I know that women can be cruel, but men have something else going." I'd met her earlier at the other end of the narrow beach with her dog Poni. Poni was Queen Liliuokalani's dog. Looked like the photograph of Lilith I showed her.

When I walked from beach to park, I'd seen her tiny crocs on the rock wall, neatly set beside a purple leash; Poni was walking without it. Now we were watching the K`a`a`awa pickle ball club, which recently lost a member to the attempted assassination of an ex-president. "The FBI was swarming all over the place for a while," she said. I detected some memory lapses in her speech. Though she'd introduced herself to me twice by name, I can't remember, except that it began with an E.

 

 

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Liliuokalani%27s_dog,_1917.png#/media/File:Liliuokalani's_dog,_1917.png

Lilith befriends a nurse

Lilith stopped on the path alongside Kahekili, not to smell the considerable perfumes in the grass, but to wait for a woman walking toward us. We exchanged words. "Have a nice walk," I started to say, when I realized that Lilith wanted her on the walk, too. She'd stop to smell, then run forward to catch up with, as she turned out, Maile, a Kapiolani nurse who just went back to work after the strike and lockout. (It wasn't for money, it was for ratios, she said, and they got their ratios.) As we started walking together, she said she'd been going to Kailua the other day, when she decided not to. She went to Target at Windward Mall to return something, but decided not to stay to shop. She drove back to our neighborhood, saw a toddler running down the sidewalk all by himself. She stopped her car, tried to flag him down, went to someone's open door. No parent. Called the police, waited for 20 minutes. Finally, a woman came running down the street . . . the nurse (her name is Maile) assumes there was a reason she'd not gone to Kailua and cut her shopping trip short. The little guy needed her. 

 

 

The former Bernie supporter

"So you're the person with the righteous bumperstickers!" I said to a woman at the ticket booth to the Temple; she'd gotten out of a truck with four Bernie bumperstickers, one I'd wondered about. "Yes, I used to love Bernie," she said, "but I gave up on him when he surrendered to Hillary." Now she doesn't care. I said I was happy to see her truck, because most of the cemetery employees seem to support Trump. She doesn't like any of them now. They're all on the same team and just pretend otherwise. She had a spiritual experience during COVID and realized that none of this matters. Everything will be ok. "But what is ok?" I asked. She smiled. I asked if you couldn't think both important, politics and the spiritual life. No, the politics drove her crazy. I said I wondered at how she could be both so cynical and so hopeful at the same time. "People call me a walking contradiction," she said. "Everything will be ok." Lilith and I walked away. "Vote for Kamala," I said.

Identity positions: Elegy 27

Identity Positions

Identity is other

People / what they

Want us to

Be / one thing

Or another / or

The operative word

You either fit

None or most

Shape-shifting where

Shape wasn’t goal

But way station

Like a comma

Between clauses or

Items in lists

Store bought selves

Easier to shelve

Than silly putty

Or broken egg

Identity is history

Not essence you

Knew / culture not

Birth stamp but

Stories some of

Which might sometimes

Be true--

Kintsugi: Elegy 26

 

Your brothers all

In uniform / lavalavas

Flowered aloha shirts /

Between them complicated

Politics let drop

Easily I lay

On the couch

4 a.m. the next

Morning / jetlagged /

Feeling their grief

As mending as

Scar tissue denotes

Healing more than

Hurt / when Selina

Broke down at

Magic Island's healing

Circle and I

Put my arm

Around her shoulder

("The fittest poet

In the world!")

And the space

Between us warmed

Like you were

In there somehow

Holding out your

Finger which we

Saw directed at

The ocean sky

Whatever is clear

Measure of compassion

Where measure is

Not at issue

Mending comes after

A broken pot

Packed full of

Flowers / gold stitching

To show us

Where potter drew

Shard to shard

Where we made

Lines to erase

Distance you are

There like tree’s

Paperbark mouthing joy

When wind arrives