I want to write an
honest sentence, one without judgment. When young, we're reaction
machines—like the student who leaped in the air when I called his
name—but then a long slow distancing begins. We acquire a moat, or
see-through border wall, between us and our emotions. My response to
the death of a poet is to imitate his sentences like Matt Morris throwing Darryl Kile's curve two days after Kile died. Style's a form
of grieving, one that threads out like a shawl over bent shoulders.
We see weight in the absence of uplift. Or in a back's bony protrusions. Occasionally, I see an old Asian woman doubled over at the
waist, walking intently across a street. We interpret that angle as
hard work or as hard emotion or as osteoperosis. I asked my students
to define “haole” and to use the word in a sentence, which they
did with utmost accuracy. Even within the context of bad history, it
stung to read their answers about how those who are pale as ghosts
lack breath, are foreign, outside. The man explains to his child self
why another boy hit him on the head with a 2' by 4' as if he were
half a metronome. One student described this as an embarrassing
moment, not for the bully but for the bullied. Perhaps his skull
didn't keep good time. To revise is to take private thoughts and work
them into public shape. The guys at the gym do this in front of
mirrors that are at once for them and for us. The distortion is all
in my seeing you seeing yourself (muscle bound) in a wall length
piece of glass. The woman who asked me to deliver her divorce papers
trusted a stranger to do the work of making public her private grief.
“Don't ask how I got involved,” I said as I turned back toward
the gate, away from the yapping dogs and the smiling man. She was
haole, he Hawaiian. “You live on an island” has so many meanings,
not all of them geographical. But check your metaphors at the door;
this is an age of literal fact and lie. His biographers, he says,
have no access. That makes all of it fake news, as if “fake” were
such a bad thing.
--12 September 2017
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