I and You: Elegy 31

I and You

Eucalyptus is tree

Bark is not

Eucalyptus is tree

Sap is not

I am alive

You are not

I talk to

You who don’t

Talk to me

Which of us

Is more lonely

Billy Mills review

 Billy Mills is an Irish poet, one who devotes a lot of time and energy to reading the work of others. He read my books, Lilith Walks and Meditations carefully, here: https://ellipticalmovements.wordpress.com/2024/03/27/recent-reading-march-2024/

And now he's done an attentive reading of I and Eucalyptus, here: https://ellipticalmovements.wordpress.com/2024/10/23/recent-reading-october-2024-a-review/

Lilith and the untaken photograph

Lilith and I saw a man walking toward us on the asphalt path next to Kahekili, a lanky man in dark clothing. When we got closer, I told him that I've been doing final edits on a piece of writing that will be published and that one section was about him and his wife pushing a baby stroller on this very walk. "What kind of writing is it?" he asked, and I expressed some befuddlement. He said he goes to visit Leona every day at the other big Kaneohe cemetery; her parents had bought four plots, two for her and two for her sister. Their dad was a vet. It's got a wonderful view of the bay, and is within walking distance of the house where she grew up. Several years ago, I'd ask Les and Leona if I could take their picture. Even though their nephew is a professional photographer, they said no. I regret the picture not taken.

Lilith and my tee ball player

We crossed the street to avoid two little dogs that Lilith didn't want to see. Three young men were walking on the other side, coming back from the pool with their towels. One of them greeted me; he'd been on my tee ball team when he and my son were five years old. Since then, he'd been in the Navy. Now? "Doing lots of LGBTQ stuff and singing in the Honolulu Gay Chorus," he said. His mom had a knee replaced a month ago, and is only now driving again. And your dad? I asked. Even then, he and the young man's mother were divorced; he did baseball duty with his son. "You know what your dad said to me once?" I asked. "He told me not to let you act like a girl. I said that was not my job, nor did I think acting like a girl was a bad thing." He said his dad had taken him to try out for another team and had thrown the ball--hard--at him. Hit him three times in the head. Never played baseball again. (And then I remembered the young man's name, because it comes after "the Eskimo" in a Bob Dylan song.) He smiled, said his dad had died of cancer a few years ago, but had always had to remind himself that his son was gay. You could watch the gears moving in his head, he said. Smiled.

Lilith meets a Trump supporter

 

The gray bearded man in the Ka’a’awa park came to sit across the picnic bench from me. He held a cigarette and lighter, but wasn’t smoking. He has one of the best cardiologists on the island, one Dr Ng. Had a couple strokes. Said he likes my shirt (Nope / Not Again) it reads with toupee and long tie on the o. He doesn’t understand why people don’t like Trump. Trump cares about people. People listen to him and Kamala has no foreign policy. Inflation and gas prices. I point out that both are down. He says he’s comfortable in his positions. Came here over 30 years ago from Brooklyn. Kept saying how much he liked Lilith. Her coloring, her ears. His girlfriend has a sweet pitbull. She goes to Alaska on business, and he goes with her. Really likes Alaska. “Have a good day,” he says as he walks away.

Lilith and the man on the curb

Lilith walked onto the grass between sidewalk and street to sniff the man's glass of milky coffee. Beside the glass was an unlit cigarette, a carton, and what I remember as a bracelet. He held a phone in his hand. "What's her name?" the man asked. "Lily," I said. "Oh, a flower." He asked my name and I said the origin of my name was also lily. When I asked him for his, he responded "Donald Trump." "I saw that," he remarked on seeing my reaction. "It's all entertainment," another woman had said to him. 

 

He'd clearly heard Trump's latest, and wasn't happy about it. Used to work for Hopaco, now Office Max, in Anaheim and Tacoma. Wore a Seattle Seahawks shirt. He asked my nationality, and where I grew up. Irish/German, and east coast. (He's Scottish and Filipino.) When I told him I've lived here for 34 years, he said, "I like numbers!" He pulled the cigarette up to his mouth, but didn't light it. Was happy to have me take a photograph of him. Small man on a curb, holding up a shaka, hoping for the best on Nov. 5. His twins were born on the 4th. Numbers again.

Wisdom parami: Elegy 30

Wisdom parami

I’m supposed to

Talk about wisdom

Tomorrow thinking relation

Is where it

Begins or ends

Me and tree

You and me

Even now in

Relation across life’s

Death line you

In tomorrow I

In today still

Spooked by drone

Video of man

In bombed out

Building seated on

Dust couch dust

Man wrapped in

Dust fabric staring

At drone we

Cannot see because

We are it

We kill because

We see / is

That it / vision

As violence when

I only wish

To see you 

Whole again and wise

Notes: "The man" is Yahya Sinwar; "you" is Sina

Sign-waving without Lilith

We were told to stand next to the wall beside the highway, hold our signs away from the road, and look each driver in the eye, while waving. Some of us responded to waves back with shakas. Only between traffic cycles did we talk to one another. I googled one woman on the line, having recognized her name. She'd fought against H3, advocated for Hawaiian culture, and clearly knew someone I admired at UHM. So, between cycles, I meandered down to talk to her. 

 

I told her I was retired from UHM, and she said tenure needed to end; so many students tell her their professors are lazy; the legislature needs a direct line of communication. She'd worked for Ph.D. engineers and they were so arrogant. So many ph.d's are arrogant. She had never finished college; only did three years and never got back to it. But she'd had people with fancy degrees who worked for her. The students are customers, she said, and there needs to be accountability. (I said I didn't want to think of students as customers, because then I'd be trying to sell them something.) It's a business, she opined. I asked her to give my aloha to her friend, the one I admire for her political savvy.

 

A bus stopped in front of us. An older woman stepped out, walking away from us. One of the sign wavers lit up and said, "when she gets out of the bus, we know it's time to go home."

A is for apathy: Elegy 29

 

A is for apathy

Om mani peme

Hung you’d mutter

Push back against

The pressure of

Reality (Wallace Stevens)

At least make

Obstacles of sound

To defeat sound

(This morning saws

Shear the dovesong)

And I can’t

Push death away

Or the fascism

You prepared for

By using Signal

(An encrypted app)

I understand apathy

Is push back

Noise reducing headphones

Interfering with interference

Apathy’s active response

To grief to

Murder to misogyny

Stolid cemetery workers

Strip sod / stoic /

They’re older men

Who stop to

Watch traffic below

Like two statues

Shovels in hand

Before they resume

Hard labor for

The death industry

What got Mark

About Dachau was

How exquisitely beautiful

Was the surrounding

Landscape not what

My mother described

When she reported

Seeing corded piles

Of corpses on

Railroad cars men

In striped pajamas

I can see

Wanting to look

Only at one

Not the other

Guarding heart space

A photograph of

You at beach

With Selina smiling

Peaceful heart surf

Your aumakua bird

Forget what came

After / I cannot /

Gaza, year two: Elegy 28

 

Conversation opened. 1 unread message.

Gaza: Year Two

Sina, we’re called

Upon to speak

A friend sends

Photo of hand

Raised in conflagration

Of Gaza hospital

Says we were

Talking about Radhika

This was mother

And daughter burning

Is it like this

In the afterworld

Outside the box

Ashes scattered like

Glitter for saints

Gleaming faces turned

Up where artists

Hang on trapezes

Let dust fall

To be boxed

Later / Murphy’s ashes

On bar floor

Down theater toilet

Don’t know to

Laugh or weep

This world burning

What do you

Say, dear Sina,

On after-death apps

Maeve killed bird

Yesterday / I buried

It in dumpster

Bryant found rat

Foot in old

Trap in Volcano

All this blood

On our hands

Our claws / Sign

Bomb and let

It rip apart

Kids who can’t

Yet read and

Old women with

Eyes too fogged

To see anything

Beyond clear suffering

Absent Lilith meets the queen

 

"It's awful what they did to our queen," said the small woman in a large sun hat, sitting next to me on a picnic bench at Swanzy Beach Park. "It's men," she said. "I know that women can be cruel, but men have something else going." I'd met her earlier at the other end of the narrow beach with her dog Poni. Poni was Queen Liliuokalani's dog. Looked like the photograph of Lilith I showed her.

When I walked from beach to park, I'd seen her tiny crocs on the rock wall, neatly set beside a purple leash; Poni was walking without it. Now we were watching the K`a`a`awa pickle ball club, which recently lost a member to the attempted assassination of an ex-president. "The FBI was swarming all over the place for a while," she said. I detected some memory lapses in her speech. Though she'd introduced herself to me twice by name, I can't remember, except that it began with an E.

 

 

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Liliuokalani%27s_dog,_1917.png#/media/File:Liliuokalani's_dog,_1917.png

Lilith befriends a nurse

Lilith stopped on the path alongside Kahekili, not to smell the considerable perfumes in the grass, but to wait for a woman walking toward us. We exchanged words. "Have a nice walk," I started to say, when I realized that Lilith wanted her on the walk, too. She'd stop to smell, then run forward to catch up with, as she turned out, Maile, a Kapiolani nurse who just went back to work after the strike and lockout. (It wasn't for money, it was for ratios, she said, and they got their ratios.) As we started walking together, she said she'd been going to Kailua the other day, when she decided not to. She went to Target at Windward Mall to return something, but decided not to stay to shop. She drove back to our neighborhood, saw a toddler running down the sidewalk all by himself. She stopped her car, tried to flag him down, went to someone's open door. No parent. Called the police, waited for 20 minutes. Finally, a woman came running down the street . . . the nurse (her name is Maile) assumes there was a reason she'd not gone to Kailua and cut her shopping trip short. The little guy needed her. 

 

 

The former Bernie supporter

"So you're the person with the righteous bumperstickers!" I said to a woman at the ticket booth to the Temple; she'd gotten out of a truck with four Bernie bumperstickers, one I'd wondered about. "Yes, I used to love Bernie," she said, "but I gave up on him when he surrendered to Hillary." Now she doesn't care. I said I was happy to see her truck, because most of the cemetery employees seem to support Trump. She doesn't like any of them now. They're all on the same team and just pretend otherwise. She had a spiritual experience during COVID and realized that none of this matters. Everything will be ok. "But what is ok?" I asked. She smiled. I asked if you couldn't think both important, politics and the spiritual life. No, the politics drove her crazy. I said I wondered at how she could be both so cynical and so hopeful at the same time. "People call me a walking contradiction," she said. "Everything will be ok." Lilith and I walked away. "Vote for Kamala," I said.

Identity positions: Elegy 27

Identity Positions

Identity is other

People / what they

Want us to

Be / one thing

Or another / or

The operative word

You either fit

None or most

Shape-shifting where

Shape wasn’t goal

But way station

Like a comma

Between clauses or

Items in lists

Store bought selves

Easier to shelve

Than silly putty

Or broken egg

Identity is history

Not essence you

Knew / culture not

Birth stamp but

Stories some of

Which might sometimes

Be true--

Kintsugi: Elegy 26

 

Your brothers all

In uniform / lavalavas

Flowered aloha shirts /

Between them complicated

Politics let drop

Easily I lay

On the couch

4 a.m. the next

Morning / jetlagged /

Feeling their grief

As mending as

Scar tissue denotes

Healing more than

Hurt / when Selina

Broke down at

Magic Island's healing

Circle and I

Put my arm

Around her shoulder

("The fittest poet

In the world!")

And the space

Between us warmed

Like you were

In there somehow

Holding out your

Finger which we

Saw directed at

The ocean sky

Whatever is clear

Measure of compassion

Where measure is

Not at issue

Mending comes after

A broken pot

Packed full of

Flowers / gold stitching

To show us

Where potter drew

Shard to shard

Where we made

Lines to erase

Distance you are

There like tree’s

Paperbark mouthing joy

When wind arrives

Gold Watch / Elegy 25

Gold Watch

No consolation to

Be remembered I

Know / to be

Divorced from am

Or are / verbs

Have lost their

Tenses you need

Not learn them

Or wear watches

(“It’s about time,”

Eddie Vedder says

Of Trump’s $100K

Bling) to see

Time that cannot

Be seen except

In retrospect memory

Invisible fog unless

Developed on leaves

But we yank

Them off branches

Wood and water

Water and wood

Lake sodden with

Houses timber animals

Roofs / who protects

Us now without

Your presence / friends

Orphans / you who

Were drawn to

Underdogs doggedly watch

From heaven’s keyhole

Return to child’s

Images for what

Cannot be seen

As ascension (the

-c in Italian

Sounds as -ch)

Like Chimney Rock

That floats in

Lake Lure no

Allure to wreckage

Someone’s uncle is

Missing someone’s child

Is missing someone’s

Missing as you

Are: there, presence.