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.