Electrical outage

Awakened at 2 a.m. by tracings of light in the forest, thud of hammer on metal. An electric truck filled our narrow dirt road, its lights directed toward the end of the loop. A lineman in cherry picker, his helmt shining brightly as a ball-field light, banged at the top of a pole. At least it wasn't raining storm remnants; those came back later. From the house his crane showed through palms and `ohi`a trees, odd mid-night cyborg.


Do boundary issues always involve their lack? I see my friend, warm within a block of stone, not let go of the substance she's held by. I feel my own static muddle the air around me, self-hologram, incapable of being touched. As a child, I rubbed my fingers inside a box of kleenex, thinking there was something transgressive about the act. But the tissues were so soft.


Our "property" was last inundated with lava 600 years ago, Ron tells us. The lot is half solid rock (from which the cottage launches into air) and half loamy earth. The old bath-house rested at a slant until Bryant jacked it up.


Style is not decoration, the Dante scholar says, but a way of looking at the world, a perspective. Poetic form is not a container, but a wheel upon which you run your clay until it forms a circle in three dimensions. An `apapane sings, grace note without melody, unless you cut your line short.


What is the poetic form for fear of touch? for fear of care (being cared for, or caring)? When touch is read as violence. I would touch the small plants in the field over and again to watch them shrink away. My dog loves to pee on them.


Surely, it's not lack of affect in language, the flat tone used to re-create the scene. A family sits around a wood table in the suburbs, beneath a chandelier, barely adequate art on the wall-papered walls, view of driveway and road, a mirror house. They talk in code. When I saw the movie of it later in Boston, I cried.


My suspicion is that it has nothing to do with form, or even sound.


To code means to die. To code means to create a platform from which to hurl opinions through the virtual air. The correspondent breeze created by industrial fans in warehouses, inherently spooky ones. A corner socket provides power to the harp, and bare space stares back like a mirror.