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