21

By the very right of your senses, you enjoy the World. The poet reads to an audience of pigeons and geese. Now, this is good company. Dirty white goose in puddle, poet in Echo Park. Walks over the bridge with red railings, then saunters back. The past is gone, but he's forced to remember. He doesn't like this. Past fronts the park: father in one building, old temple in another. Only birds are unghosted. As we did walking meditation around Krauss Hall pond, it occurred to me that duck politics are fucked up. The poet is dead now; his video a rerun, freshly digitized. The buildings he remembered are buried behind new ones. His dying brother tried to put a life's possession into tiny boxes. To die is to re-imagine world, to let its pencil edges drop. To die cannot be imagined by the living as transitive.

Who shall put into your hands the true Treasures? From my bike, I saw an old woman walking on Ahuimanu Place. “Eh aunty,” I asked, “why you walk in the street?” There's a sidewalk. “I'm hungry, don't have any money to buy food.” I pointed where she'd been. No food in that direction. “My friend lives there,” she said, but wasn't home. “Good, because if the ex came, they'd fight.” She'd had no breakfast, lunch, and there was no dinner. Where's your family? “Kalihi,” she said. Where do you live? “Down that lane.” There was street there, but no lane. Please stay on the sidewalk, I asked. Circled twice, then rode home.