You're the robot!

A and B were talking just outside the guard shack, so Lilith and I approached. B said he was fine, well not fine, and he pointed at the new camera set on the side of the shack. I said something about Trump's America. "Oh, the surveillance state, that was Biden." A: "I can't believe you supported Biden." I tried to say it was the Democrats I was supporting, not Uncle Joe, but he responded with another attack on the Dems for installing Kamala as the candidate. And besides, the new boss hates Trump. He's a Democrat. I didn't say anything about my political ambivalences. Ambivalence, like irony, is hiding under a rock somewhere (a power washed rock, I'm sure).

 

A started in on No Kings, the hundreds of millions of dollars funneled into the protests. "I've been to them all," I said, "and no one paid me a cent." "That's because you're a ROBOT." "Don't you call ME a ROBOT." 

 

The other day, my auto body shop friend told me, apropos of leftist over-stepping, "I hate what our side does sometimes; we NEED those words." He listed a batch used in stand-up routines. "I NEED the word RETARD," he said, "because that's what he IS."

 

Union brothers

Heading uphill toward what once was Ferdinand Marcos's grave, Lilith and I encountered a short Filipino man power washing stone walls. He stopped. I leaned in to say how much I love the moss and lichen. "Boss's idea," the man said through a bluish cartoon mask, which he lowered. "Have you seen the big stone wall?" Yes, I responded, I used to love the green moss. "Ugly," he remarked. I said something about hoping this cemetery regime ends soon, and he reached over to fist bump me, green debris on his right hand. I said I'd heard that trees are being power washed too, and he pointed up the hill, where Lilith and I were to find palms nearly naked up to a point that no one could reach. "He thinks the black stuff is ugly, but it's not going to work. It doesn't all come off." Sure enough, the trees wore ghost lichen and moss, faint shapes that reminded me of hundreds of photographs I've taken of them before they were ghosts.

 

The subject of surveillance cameras came up. "If he puts them in our dining area, we're going to the union," the man said. I said I was glad they have a union.

On the way out, close to Kahekili Highway, dozens of cars were entering the cemetery. One woman was standing beneath a palm writing a condolence card; her young daughter, in a bright dress with her hair carefully combed, was reading gravestones. "Big funeral," I noted to a man in a San Francisco 49ers shirt. "Yes, someone with a lot of support in the community," he said. "A stevedore." I said I'd appreciated the support my union had from the stevedores when UHM went on strike. "He went to UH," the man said, "football player." Young.

 

Ruminations on the surveillance state

"I just want you to know," said worker A, his tone uncharacteristically formal, "that cameras with audio have been installed in the building." Lilith and I mouthed our thanks and hellos as we walked by. Out of recording range, I was told that the boss said cameras were there for the workers' "protection," that they wanted to work there. Up the hill, workers B and C tell us that cameras are being installed everywhere. "I don't care," said the one; "the guys who are bothered by them are the ones who don't want to work." 

 

"You know," worker A had said, "I talk to a lot of people who are grieving. We have conversations--rather intimate ones--and I don't want them being recorded." He hesitated at the word "intimate," but there's no better word.

 

I, too, record these conversations. Is my intention different enough from that of the boss who so clearly distrusts his own employees? I'd like to think that I record them--and you read them--for better purposes. Is the archive for control or for preservation, and are they always separate? Do we write out of suspicion or trust? Out of fear or love? Is there any pure space, and if there were, could we write about it? At what point do I stop posting stories and photographs on the internet? Shall I write in the voices of the trees, the mongooses, the stray cats?

Tree washing

 

"What kine fish dat?" asked a new guy at the guard shack. "Fish in a tin," I responded, as I was wearing my past tense Tinned Fish cap, given me by a friend. "Oh, Pidgin!" he said, "Filipino!" 

 

At the top of the first hill, Lilith and I noticed that the beautiful mossy stone wall before the hillside recently denuded of trees, had been power washed. No moss, no ferns. From above, we heard the sound of a power washer "cleaning" another wall in the cemetery. On our way out, I told Scott it all had nearly made me laugh, the traffic snarl at the Temple, the naked stones. "They're power washing the trees," he said. Wondering if I'd heard correctly, I repeated, "they're power washing the trees?" Yes, they bring union guys in on Sunday now (they get double-time you know) to wash all the stuff off the trees. I pointed to the palms nearby, as yet unwashed of their lichen. Yes, those. "I've taken so many pictures of them." 

 

He said he hadn't heard that the East Wing rubble will be used to expand a golf course. It all seems of a piece, or pieces.

from Startles

She’d been praying as she drove by, she said. Not cell phone distraction, but god’s own. I read an article this morning on attention as “predatory.” We become prey, as he (yes, he) devours us. The author argues that attention is usually conceived of as solitary; I suggest otherwise.

The cult is false friend to compassion. It closes what is opened otherwise. The woman in the cemetery comes nearly every day to lie on her son’s grave. Grieving is her attention to that patch of earth, a blue dinosaur in brown lei standing beside a typed prayer, a white rosary. I witness her grief from the road with my dog.

To witness might be to prey upon, I suppose. Effective witness is rare, like royal jewels, and can be stolen in broad daylight, if you bring the laddered truck. When nothing comes of it, keep at it. The woman looks at me with tears in her eyes and smiles. The other day I left her alone under her black umbrella set against the sun.

In a poem, her tears would be jewels. According to the article, I might be stealing them. To write about them takes, and then offers, like a palm over the heart, or the palm over my stained white umbrella. What does the language see in us? Does it take the words we write and reorder them, making true statements false?

If I take her story, am I thief or amanuensis? If I offer her story up, have I pawned it, or left it on a doorstep like a foundling? To the extent that her story becomes mine by way of attention, I am both creatures, prey and praying for. If I breathe in her hurt, I take what she would not offer me, and breathe it out where she cannot see it. In my depression, mere politeness seemed the utmost of care.

Both depression and happiness are true, even in the same container. Put it on a ship and send it to sea. Or talk about it as a shaggy dog story. Daniel told me one that ended with “soldiers in your cup.” We live on the hinge of the pun, the turn between truisms, the balance born of counterweight, a sometimes happy accident.

 

BathHouse 27: Resistance

 The new issue of BathHouse is out, and includes one of my Startles, along with other work by Steve Benson, Deborah Meadows, and many others. https://dev.bhjournal.net/bathhouse-journal-27/ Patrick Flores-Scott is editor, and Carla Harryman is the faculty adviser.

 

Have a look. 

from Startles

In the everything makes sense department, the Temple’s enlarged black parking lot fills with orange cones and “compact only” spaces, each separated by a line of fresh white paint. No need to up the contrast. A lone chair sits on the grass, lone cat beside it. I ask where the tourist buses will park. “Behind that line of cones,” one worker says.

The line of cones in front of “compact only” spaces? Yes. The woman at the front gate says where there were two rows for buses, now there will only be one. “They need five people back there now to figure out what’s going on.” A line of temple-colored bird houses stood where only compacts dare park.

In the everything makes sense department, the White House now resembles Gaza. Who saved the furniture, the windows, the wooden floors? Who removed the archives? Where will tourists go, whose entrance was into that wing? A huge American flag droops over broken concrete.

Who needs metaphor now, when rubble is rubble, and history’s washed away with water hoses or blood? Susan Howe’s “rubble couple” denoted the end, but at least they had each other. Tree stumps on the cemetery’s hillside sprout new branches. The same “rubbish trees.” You don’t have to weed, if you replace plants with stones, says my worker friend.

In the everything makes sense department, I suggest that the cemetery’s boss has taken over landscaping for the White House. “I don’t pay attention to that,” the woman at the front gate says; “it gets to me.” The trees are coming down, the grass being paved over, roses getting cut out. It gets to them, these living beings inhabiting a symbolic space. If you tear down the space, the symbol goes with it; that’s the thought.

In the everything makes sense department, the homeless of DC were taken away, the men at “Alligator Alcatraz” disappeared when it closed, and the rubble will doubtless be sold at a profit, like the Berlin Wall. It hardly matters for what the symbol stood, it stands for him who sells it. And the rubble will turn to gold, like water into wine. And donors will come from far and near, bearing myrrh and incense, chips and crypto, to dine with the ballroom’s money changers. Senators must make do with goodie bags given them by the Orange King.

 

from Startles

Startles

The land of magical thinking forsakes thought for desire, a flatter sense. Days I want to think I drive the car; only at construction sites can you see the road’s peeled skin, mud and pipes. As a child, I had a clear plastic doll filled with colorful plastic organs. I could take her apart and put her back, admire her pink intestines, her gray lungs. Like a jar of pickles, she seemed immortal, though they both got misplaced in the end.

The inside that is outside lacks air. The outside that is inside escapes the brine, the bitterness. It’s all compromise, but we’ve forgotten how. The diagrams on fliers apply to other procedures. The joke begins when a literature professor walks into a room where engineering diagrams have been written on the chalkboard.

Whatever the process is, she follows it. An IKEA bed frame instructs you on your grief. There must be five stages to both, though only one is clear cut. Instructions on how to meditate offer us paradox. Images of screws and wooden slats take wing, then fade out.

The diagram is a recipe and a dream. The recipe appears stable until you follow it. The dream revels in its precarity until you wake up. The bed is sturdy, though you’ll forget it unless you put your memories in a jar, hide them on a shelf somewhere. I write to close my jars and read to open them.

There’s an engine of return to the poem, more form than format. Double space your way back to the doll’s transparent skin, her plastic bones, and see if you can’t imagine her alive. An older sister to your childhood. No matter that your mentor was plastic. She hid nothing from you.

 

from Startles

 

Writing not to know what I think, but to think how I write. Now, when the street resembles itself only and my bed is still firm, nothing else is the same. Nothing else feels like metaphysics, a windshield blurred by heavy rain, but is an ICE raid set to music. Only perform! If you say there is peace, then there is; if war breaks out again, it hasn’t.

How I write changes with circumstance, as if style were a mirror, after all. As if everything we post is a position, not an impulse. Even whimsy’s become instrumental. Be the frog who isn’t that frog, but isn’t real, and you’ve arrived at the counter-symbolic nature of fact. Meditation’s a fly-over state, all content striving not to be.

But none of this gets me to the end, even if the end is everywhere in sight. Are long sentences back in fashion? a friend asks, noting the cultural capital of words that fail to find pause. Your post will find more readers if you include music, the very music you find suggested above. A man wearing a Yelich shirt and zip ties gets pushed toward the maw of an open van. It’s 3 a.m. in Chicago.

The sound of the music echoes Fox during the bombing of Baghdad, classical yet hollow, in case you can’t imagine people dying below. Gaza re-opens, but there’s nothing left that isn’t wrecked concrete. What’s the music for that? Post-triumphal, like the melody of a single tone that warps on stage. Silence is freaky, don’t you think?

The era of magical thinking lacks magic. In lieu of cleansing mantras, we have the clutter of lies. America is a hoarder whose storage container is set to explode. To describe it would require one long sentence, if only you could walk inside of it. The dream has awakened us, as if we were its dream, folded inside a sheet.

Does the dream know we exist? Can it be witness to its own vanishing? Can we find it in Freud’s index near “pulled teeth”? What interpretations do our dreams have of us, of our desires to live them out? What dream embraces the men who walk the highway’s narrow shoulder, pushing their shopping carts?

Put music to it, the supermarket refugees. My son said a homeless man asked him for something to eat and he bought it for him. Said the man was brave to ask an officer in uniform. One or two different decisions and we’d be there, too, he tells me. I’m proud of his wisdom, if not the cruel economy that gets him there.

Breaths of life

O leans over, puts his forehead to Lilith's, says "I do the Ha with all of my dogs. Breath." Went to swim meets this past weekend, so we talk dull sporting events with kids. "Practicing for fatherhood". O says he already raised his brothers; their mother a single mom with two jobs. In a better place now. "Or so they say," I interjected. "Oh she is," says O. Cancer.

 

An expanded forest of cones greets us at the Temple parking lot, where a man sits in a bulldozer, dozing. Preparing to expand the parking lot. "So many tourists," he says. "Why do they all come here anyway?" He has family in the cemetery, but he's never been to the temple. I don't know how we get there, but we always do. "Why aren't people kind to one another?" he asks. "They seem to get such pleasure in hurting each other, and they call themselves Christians." He's going to Vegas soon on vacation, but given what's going on, he doesn't want to travel, told his wife that. But the tickets were bought. He's hoping things get better. I say Lilith and I will look for him later on in the week.

 

I ask at the booth why they don't put more parking at the front, and move tourists on trams to the back, where the traffic has gotten so thick. "Oh, they can't have the tourists near the funerals," I'm told. "Some tourists started yelling the other day at people at a funeral who were trying to use the restroom. It got ugly. Most of them don't even know they're in a cemetery; they think it's a park with flowers scattered over it." The stones are flat, most of them, so they don't see that they're graves. 

 

"That asshole blocked the cats from getting under the guard shack at the front. They're killing the spirit of this place." Sure enough, plywood's installed between asphalt and the bottom of the shack, nearly all the way around. "The cats were all upset; they started circling the shack, some almost getting run over--we warned them about that." They're going to block off the space under the refrigerator, one guy says. (The space is very small, indeed.) "See that guy over there in orange bandanna?" he asks. "He did it, was proud to do it. Says he enjoys pissing people off." (This surprises me, a bit.)

 

Does anything surprise you?

from Startles

 

Startles

No doubt, I’m an awkward Buddhist. No, there is no no doubt. Can’t be two places at once, unless you are. Imposter of prosody, I limp. Here with the donkey, there with the cloud, if it’s imagined. Even faux transcendence is better than this, no?

That is, if transcendence gets us out. Expats of natural time, clutching our memories as truth’s pearls. The ocean, Buddha said, though he’d not seen one. Led by our noses to the shore, where water is water and is also greater than itself. Let my feet stay in damp sand, my hair in the “firmament.” All words are doubles.

The rain keeps us in, but we still hear it. Sound shorn of wet, plunkers plunking. A man in a regal blue shirt played an instrument in the cemetery; not xylophone but more like a workshop table being struck with a hammer. Around him, people in masks picked up sticks around the grave. As the mortician said, the acoustics are very good.

If the beat of the rain runs in accordance with my pulse, does my pulse spatter? The matter on the sidewalk is now kept behind a wall by instagram, except when it isn’t. It’s brain matter, arm matter, child matter, everything that ought to matter. Mother and child, father embracing white sheet covered corpse. Our meditation teacher said she’d cover the corpse later.

But that was metaphor, that corpse. The body, unmoving, rendered as log, as plank, as half a cross to bear (without the wheels). Even as metaphor, it’s heavy, but we feel less anguish over it. The man in the cemetery bangs his mallets, but we can’t see what for. The mongoose is a prospective corpse.

My body is useless before the animal on the road. Compassion knows us connected, but no umbilical gives my blood to him as nourishment. How do we make an action out of helplessness? The return to self precedes the exit into community. Or does it?

I know that kindness matters, but it’s not armed. If it were, I could zip-tie small children with my love, throw grown men into unmarked vans with my caring. I want to think the outcomes would be different, but I’m piss poor at logistics. The woman is but two steps removed from the man who (was) disappeared. Soon so many more of us.

If only disappearance could return to the world of magic, rabbits escaping back into their tall hats, children running to follow them. Transcendence isn’t magic—Thoreau could tell you that— nor is it unentertaining. Hire a mystic for your birthday party, and you might grow younger yet. More time to witness history unfolding inside and outside of time. Put metaphors of blood and flesh here.

from Startles

 

My eye met the mongoose’s eye; the animal appeared to be paralyzed, though one front leg shook. A leaf-like object fluttered in its mouth, from which an electric pulse seemed to emanate. The mongoose’s odd stillness met our own. I spotted a motorcyclist at the top of the hill and told him, as if to describe the mongoose might cure it. On the way down, the man stopped to tell me the mongoose had walked off the road, “struggling a bit.”

The story lacked a beginning or an end, at least for us. What it didn’t lack was analogy. Take the mongoose as an immigrant on the concrete road; take the road as a cul-de-sac, which it is, though it’s at the back of the cemetery in front of accordioned mountains. Take yourself as witness without power to aid, your dog less bloodthirsty than befuddled. This is not a story, but a situation whose emotional center is helplessness.

If I could have walked for the mongoose, I would have gotten him off the road and onto the grass. But empathy doesn’t extend to the limbs. If I could reach to remove the zip ties from a small child in Chicago, I’d need to break the screen that sits between us and history. Not like a truck window in late morning, reflecting blue sky and trees and me with my camera. Rather a screen that cannot reflect. One that only projects.

I can take photos now, but I can’t reflect. It’s not that I’ve become a surface, like a window, but that the truck cab inside my ribs is stuffed full of paper cups and straws and a Bible on the passenger seat. There’s no way to get inside. Auto-portraits come of it, my face blocked by the camera’s lens as it looks at, but not into, itself. One comfort of photography is its refusal of depth.

To say is not to explain. To have explained was a privilege, but explanations wear out like light bulbs and washers and dryers. We hope to hear the sound of the machine to know we have fixed it, but there’s no looking at its eye, an eye that stares back. There’s no talking to the small brown mongoose on the road, though it squeaks like a tiny motor. To say is to say what you see in the early light beneath mountains and the clouds they seem to spit out, but there’s nothing to listen to now, except 80s music that leaks from the earbuds of another walker.

That isn’t the sound of time passing, but of its repetitions, those that are surfaces that prevent us from feeling time boring in, reminding us of politics and loss and the fact we won’t know where the mongoose went or if it is still alive. The man on the motorcycle sees things not as they are but as they pass by. Fence post to fence post to fence post, the clicking of a shadow into place. I cannot think of what it means, but I see it as musical notation, stuck in space but marking prospective sound. Start time by singing it.

Lilith in the hinterland

 

One of her tenants just moved out, the one who wobbled when she walked, slammed down the stairs, parked way at the top of the hill when there are spaces much closer by, who had more stuff in her room than the mover could believe was there, who ruined the walls and floors, who had a family but never saw them, who had had a house, but got rid of it because the roof needed to be fixed; now she's waiting on her other tenants to leave so she can get a reverse mortgage and live alone. No one in her family needs her property (one has two houses, another three, the kids will each get their own). Her nephew earned his. Maybe some heirlooms. But no one needs anything. 

 

When thinking about having too much meets thinking about not having enough. When, in what remains of a gift economy, no one needs what you might give them. When families are divided into haves and haves less. When thinking about housing turns into thinking about dying.

Lilith encounters a grieving woman

I had thought she was his sister, the young woman who keeps coming to visit Noa's grave, he (now) a handsome young face staring up from a headstone in the grass. I've seen her buy flowers and chat with S, a wide smile on her face. I've seen her drive by in her black car. I've seen her at the grave, where she was today. This time I asked if she was there for Noa, adding that I'm niele and sometimes look to see what graves people visit, and she said yes, he was her son. He died in a motorcycle accident in April. Some days she's strong, and other days she cries a lot. This was one of the latter. I suggested that crying is a strength, then told her that I'm on a medication that keeps me from crying. I miss it. "I understand," she said, "it's such a release."

 

Lilith's island life

"Does anyone ever comment on the name of your company?" I asked a man with a very long yellow level. I'd passed his truck a few times in recent weeks. "What about it?" "Looks like RACIST," I responded (it's actually RAYZIST). Lilith and I came downhill to take his picture. He held the level out horizontally "to show balance," he said. 

 

Lilith and I ran into our three worker friends; I told them I'd teased the guy about his truck. "Oh, racist!" they said. I told them his name was Kahua T, as he'd followed me on instagram. "Oh, the T's from Waimanalo," one said, "they all hate each other. My braddah dates one of them; that's how I know."

 

Looking for Lilith

 

"Yeah, Raschelle and Aldon (of the Waikane Store) asked if you were here," said S., as we left the cemetery. "Actually, they didn't; they asked after Lilith." They'd found us at the top, just before you get to another patch of new stumps, where Lilith had presented herself to Ola and Hoku for attention. Raschelle started taking photos of Lilith, as Aldon asked Ola his name. "Oh, Kamakana! I used to take his bus--that was your grandfather? The nicest guy, though you know those guys can turn, too." Ola said he missed that man. 

 

Somewhere between Raschelle's telling me what they're going to do in Vegas next week (Seinfeld and high tea!) and the discovery of Ola's grandpa, Aldon started telling tales of the Hawaiian mafia. "Oh, mafia on the mainland sent guys here; they got sent back in pieces, with a note to send more. That was before Osama bin Laden." "Before who?" I wanted to know. "You know, before the mail got searched." He asked me to say shalom to my husband. What? "He's Jewish, isn't he?"  I said no, he is not. Told him about a friend of mine who spoke Hebrew and got a cap in New Orleans from some Lebanese guys that read "Shalom, Y'all." Raschelle said, "Shaloha!"

 

Back at the front gate, S. was ruminating on management styles. He'd asked the old boss how he dealt with all the babysitting; he had so much of it to do with the young guys in the guard shack. The old boss said it was easy; he managed seven people and they managed everyone else. Now this boss is different. He thinks all 200 employees are his to order around. The maintenance manager will assign tasks and, when he goes to check on his guys, they're not there. What happened? Well, the new boss told them to do something else. He drives around the cemetery all the time in his white SUV telling people what to do. 

 

"They go through these guys a lot," said S. "This one'll probably be here until I retire, though."

The Temple's new shave ice truck

Lilith and I followed a shave ice truck and trailer into the cemetery this morning. Five Sisters, it said on the back of the trailer, above a wooden door. Workers were already figuring out where the woman lived and to whom she was related, as well as who in the cemetery must know her, when we walked by her parked truck, which sported an LA Dodgers logo on it. Was someone going to have a funeral with shave ice? I wondered. Later, we saw the truck and trailer next to the booth where you pay to get into the Buddhist Temple grounds. The woman in the booth said, "guarantee that's why they're cutting everything down in there; more vendors!" The guy at the front gate said, "yeah, they're making it into Waikiki." 

 

I looked up the Byodo-In Temple on-line. "Honoring over a century of tradition, tranquility & legacy," reads the headline. Beneath that you find "purchase tickets" button.

 

Two men from Michigan

Hardly any tourists walk through the cemetery to the temple. Most stick iphones outside their car windows to record the mountains and keep driving forward, ever forward. On the way out, they look diligently forward to the next stop. But today, two men approached Lilith and me on foot. One exclaimed at the cute dog. When I told him she's named Lilith, he said "first wife of Eve!" While suggesting that he meant Adam, I said he was the first person to know that (or was he maybe the second?). Most people talk about _Frasier_, which made these two look as blankly at me as I look at the _Frasier_ watchers. (Note to self: watch _Frasier_.) They said they were from Traverse City, Michigan; the one guy pulled up his hand so he could show me where on the mitten that was. "Oh, I know where that is; I have a cousin who lives there. He's a curler. Bolo headed guy, really nice." They didn't know Dan Ladd by name, but suspected that a friend of theirs would know who he is. "A big island friend has a cousin who curls there, too," I added. Small world.

 

As Lilith and I walked away, I realized no one from Traverse City would know what "bolo head" means, even if I did wave my hand in a circle over my Cardinals cap as I said it.

 

from Startles

 

Startles

I met myself at the intersection of Despair and Compassion roads. They looked about the same, but the book had said to choose Compassion, that Despair led to no good. I felt most comfortable in the intersection, not on either of the roads (whose signage was non-existent), so I lingered there with myself, suffering through yet another Platonic dialogue. Both of the roles were mine, though they felt more sturdy than roles, because I knew I would never forget my or my lines. That I and I spoke them all at once seemed normal, for I was accustomed to public places, their cacophonies of opposing voices.

The book makes a separation between the two, like a Maginot line between speakers of different languages. (I met two Germans in the cemetery today; one was east Asian and the other middle eastern, but their words came from Essen.) There was a reason the two roads crossed, did not simply run parallel. The word “despair” hadn’t yet suffered the fate of vocabularies emptied of meaning by fascist word workers. Nor had “compassion,” more mist than air, more air than earth.

How would I know compassion, had I not known despair? I asked myself. How would I know despair had I not felt the soft fleece of compassion? I had met myself, but we talked past ourself, not arguing exactly, but also not capable of agreeing. If the first amendment is dead, how can I talk to myself at all? Kill mockery, but leave hate behind like burned rubber, pretending to write but only impressing tire prints on the mud.

So, like the watercress farmers of Pearl City, I put down my hut at the intersection’s center. I preferred the “inter” to the “section,” so I called it “cross roads.” Around my hut they built a roundabout to keep traffic from flattening me. I appreciated the roundness, the cyclical nature of this traffic pattern, though it still led from Despair to Compassion, or vice versa. When I wept at night, having watched the news on my phone, I felt a kindness rise in me, as out of despair’s mud a lotus bloomed.

There was still nothing I could do about the beaten, the disappeared, the hung out to dry, those drowned in debt, the meek who had thought to inherit the earth before the oligarchs took over instead. The meek may still wear their Meek signs, but they also cradle AR-15s, because there’s no getting away from the argument that isn’t one, rather a violent assertion of one over the other self. I raised my Swiss flag, hoping there was a sliver of memory left that wars leave some mountains out. I worried only that traffic would stop, that the corner of Despair and Compassion would die of drought. I will go fund some water for me.

The woman in rehab

We've seen her the last couple of mornings, leaning against a truck, her coffee cup, its purple handle braided, balanced on the edge of the bed, a cigarette in her hand, looking toward the mountains. She says she's on rehab and wants to get back to work. "Environmental specialist," she tells me, which means "housekeeper." Hurt her back leaning over to wipe a low table. Hadn't liked office work; too many people in too small a space. She stays with her family here, and also with her mother-in-law on Okana Place (her mother-in-law is named Susan, her dog Lily). I tell her a friend of mine wrote a book about the sumo wrestler murdered on Okana Road, and the drug issues in the area. Her daughter knew the wrestler's girlfriend, who really had a hard time after he died. Drugs. I recommend my friend's book, _Big Happiness_, and tell her my mother-in-law was guardian ad litem at the house in front of which he was killed. It's a small island, you know.

 

"That's my president," she says, when the inevitable comes up. "I voted for him twice," she says, clearly not happy with her choice. Didn't like Biden either, thought he was a puppet, but now her friends say, "did you hear what Trump did today?" and they groan. I mention that Title III has been cut (which benefits native Hawaiians) and she said yes, he's going after all the minorities and that's all we are in Hawai`i. She's Chinese-Hawaiian-German, and no one in her family is "pure blood" anything. It's not even been a year . . . 

 

Her kids ask her how they can survive in Hawai`i. She tells them to go to Molokai, where the family has land. But what would they do there? they ask. Her nieces and nephews aren't political; they're just trying to make it here. But they seem content.

She's nearly finished her cigarette and her coffee. She wishes Lilith and me a good walk. Just the first trip around the parking lot, I say. Gotta have another coffee before we do our long one.

 

Gender reveal

"It's a boy!" says O, "I saw da boto on the ultrasound." Oh, that's a word I just learned the other day, I say. Had to call my friend who helps me with Pidgin. "It's a Filipino word, isn't it?" he asks his maintenance side-kick. His friend lights a vape pen, and my nose perks up. "Oh smoking da funny kine!" He laughs at my saying it in Pidgin. "Pakalolo," I add. That word must be Hawaiian.

 

"How's destruction going?" I ask about the on-going tree and bush-cutting going on. (The guys just laugh now, S had told me, at all the tree cutting.) O points up the hill, says that the azalea trees will all be cut. But azaleas aren't trees. He meant albizia trees. Invasive yes, but I doubt the boss is interested in botany. Lilith collects her attention from O and H, and we head downhill.

 

At the cemetery office, we stop for water. Our friend, the woman who needs new knees, wants to die at 80, and whose brother died by suicide in 1979 at 27, is seated behind the outdoor desk. I say I have something to show her, then wend my way through my instagram photos. "Here: I added your brother's name on a card for the memorial tree at the Out of Darkness Walk." Her face softens, and she thanks me. I have a post-it with her email address on it. The photo's been sent.

 

Lilith and an untraumatized man

"Well, he's not dead," said S, when I asked what happened to Charlie Kirk. "You're not so foolish as to believe that kid did it, are you?" he demanded, casting side eye at me. "A Lear jet left the airport 20 minutes after, turned off its transponder, which is illegal, then landed in Delaware and came back. And that wasn't blood, it was goopy, like motor oil, and his white shirt wasn't stained. There were three guys giving hand signals next to him, and the one guy just stepped back after the shot, didn't even look at Charlie Kirk."

 

"That kid, he was wearing one set of clothes going up the roof, another on the roof, and then a third change of clothes after the 'shooting.' No sign of a rifle on him, not even when he had a limp, which they said was because he had his gun under his clothing. Then he runs off without a rifle." You can fold a rifle, I suggested. "Not a Mauser; requires a kit and 20 minutes to do that," he said, after earlier saying he wasn't a "gun guy."

 

I wrote a prose poem years ago called "The Untraumatized Man," about someone who had refused to watch the twin towers fall on TV. Unlike everyone else, he wasn't wounded by the imagery of that day, because he didn't see it. But the friend on whom I based that poem knew that 9/11 had happened. S is another untraumatized man, one who denies that the trauma even happened. His world is oddly safe, wound in stories that make no sense but insure that what we saw happen did not. "That was sheer AI," he said at one point.

 

Lilith and the entrepreneur

"Don't go up there!" yelled M from his John Deere-mobile, as Lilith and I walked past the guard shack at the cemetery. "You won't like what you see." 

 

"Oh no, what have they destroyed now?" I asked. Trees in front of the Temple, M. told me. 

 

"You know, my husband's theory is that you guys will cut so many things down that you won't be needed any more, and they'll lay you off." "Oh, that's ok," M said, "I got three companies." After storms, he cuts trees in Kailua. That was one. Used to live on the Big Island, had three parcels in Puna, but the lava over-ran them. Wants to get land near Glenwood, build a tiny house, and grow vegetables to sell. If he gets his food license, he can start a shave ice business. "But the Big Island's one good place foa retire, not foa work," he said. I agreed, having retired to Volcano (sort of). 

 

"If you weld, can make $60K a month on the mainland." Wow, I said, not quite believing him. "My husband wants to learn to weld." Oh, just go to YouTube. He was going to go mainland to a welding school, but gotta stay close to his kids.

Lilith and I walked up the hill and started down again. I expected utter devastation at the Temple, but noticed very little. Some tree limbs down was all. When I told O that, he says, "you just wait." O was weed-whacking. His workmate was, too, but had a nice aloha shirt on. "You're well dressed today!" I said. Oh yeah, Aloha Friday. Lilith couldn't be bothered; she sniffed a drain where a mongoose hides.

 

I meant to ask S his take on the Charlie Kirk murder (he'll have one, I know that, and it will be extra- if not counter-factual), but it was hot, so Lilith and I wandered home. Tomorrow, if he's there.

 

Tasty bbq stories

Her family had moved to the US from the Philippines in 1971, but that's not where our conversation began. She'd noted that we had the same credit cards (Hawaiian Airlines) though I said I often flew Southwest, to which she made a funny face. Then there was a snide remark about dear leader from me, which displeased her not at all. She'd worked for DOD and NATO in Heidelberg and Stuttgart, she said, and knew how much money got spent for fuel (one thing he's right about, she said, is that other NATO countries don't pay their way). When I collected my kalbi plate, for we were in line at the Korean bbq, I asked if she was leaving; she said no, she'd eat there. So I sat across from her in a narrow booth, I with my plate, she with her soup, and talked story.

 

Her father had owned a ranch in the Philippines, where he organized some political events for Ferdinand Marcos. Her voice got softer when she told me this. I'd mentioned Marcos's former grave at the Valley of the Temples, before his body was shipped back home. Her parents bought a house in Enchanted Lake in the 1970s, and also four plots in the cemetery (cheaper then, yeah). She doesn't want to be buried there, but her parents are. Her father didn't want a flower vase on his grave, so they didn't get one, but when her mother died, she thought a vase would be appropriate for her. So she added to "the plan." The vase was placed on her mother's grave, but close to her father's; it didn't look right. So she asked that the vase be put between their graves, so it could be shared. 

 

Nothing happened. So she called, and she called. Finally, she went to the cemetery, explained in person what she wanted. Got a photograph later of the vase in the right place. And then the conversation came around again. Again she whispered as she said she's only voted once or twice in her life. For Ronald Reagan. She loved that man! 

 

This was yesterday. I can only write so many stories each day, especially when the news keeps intruding. Yesterday a man was shot in the neck. My son, in law enforcement, watched the video over and over again to see how people reacted; he tells me not to watch it, though I confess I tried to find it. Before all of this happened, S in the cemetery had offered a long monologue on the horrors of the funeral industry. Two companies own big cemeteries on island, and their people hate each other.

Suicide is (not) painless

 

The woman at the desk, the one who needs knee surgery but can't afford it, the woman who once told me she wants to die at 80 years old, that woman looked at me differently today. Lilith and I were heading back from the water fountain on this airless, humid day when the mountains were excruciatingly beautiful, as they often are in blue sky and cloud. "Thank you," she said. "My brother committed suicide. 1979." I was wearing a Walk to Prevent Suicide teeshirt. "It was work related. He was a policeman, single, 27 years old. He was sued for something. A year later, he was fully exonerated." She said her son is also a policeman. "But he has a wife, two kids, and a mortgage; it's a different deal then. When he was in the police academy and they'd all go to the range after class, he had to go home and take care of the kids. He took a $1K per month pay cut to do it, but his wife encouraged him. He wanted to." What was his name? I asked, almost as an afterthought. She told me. I told her I would think of him on the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention - Hawaii Chapter walk this Saturday. She was now on the phone, but she looked at me and pointed her finger at her forehead. 

 

When I got home, a neighbor texted to ask if I knew about the Charlie Kirk shooting.

Remembering Ken Quilantang

Ken Quilantang must have taken a course from me; how else would I know him? What I do remember clearly is the course he did not take from me, a graduate course in Documentary Poetry. Ken was a fiction writer, a very good one, so I was game to have him in among the poets. Many students in that class wrote about their families in the context of Hawai`i's history. It was a wonderful group of students. A week or two into the class, Ken came to my office. He had wanted to write about his kid brother, Jonathan, who had died suddenly, and who loved cars. He'd suggested making a container for his poems that was a mock-up of a car. He was nearly in tears. He wanted this to be his project, but he couldn't do it, as he was still grieving intensely. Years later, I heard that he and his wife Gail had had a son; they named him Jonathan.

 

Today, I attended his funeral, a beautiful service offered by his friends, family, and colleagues from KCC and HCC. As I sat in the chapel, a memory came up for me. Every so often in my teaching career, but only rarely, I would look at a student and think that my father would have liked him. Ken was one of those students, kind, humble, responsible, hard-working, talented, full of heart. Rather like my dad. He died of cancer at 52. Two black kittens kept coming down the aisle before the service, were carried out, and returned over and again.

 

The roots that clutch are all that's left

"I don't want to be driving by there when it all collapses," says Uncle John, "or maybe I do." Beneath a rock wall, an entire hillside is now bereft of trees. First they came for the pines, the bougainvilleas, and now for the albizias. (And no, this is not rooting out invasives to be replaced with native plants.) "Is there a plan?" I ask S. "I'm not the only one who thinks the new boss is just cutting everything down to show that he's doing something," he says. "I don't say anything to him any more; he doesn't listen." 

 

I tell the woman at the entrance to the Temple grounds that I've written comments about the tree apocalypse on Yelp and Google. "We're all on his shit list," she says of the boss man. "And he talks about his local roots," she adds, her eyes rolling like Prime Minister Meloni's. "If we refuse to do it, we'll lose our jobs--and have you seen the temple grounds?" I say I haven't, because I can't take my dog in there. "He's wrecking that, too." And he wants to get rid of all the cats.

 

We're all watching the path of Kiko, a hurricane in the mid-Pacific. It's expected to pass north of Hawai`i, unless it doesn't. There are still roots that clutch on that hillside, I hope, but they will relax as they decay.

 

 

Corruption and conspiracy for the win

2.

"It's all a fake," says S at the guard shack. "He's alive and living in Israel." "But those women," I say, "their lives were completely messed up, decades of PTSD." "Oh, it's fake, all politics now," he responds. "They're getting $200K each to say all that." "Have you ever known anyone who was sexually abused as a child?" I ask. "Oh, yes, I'm very close to one."

 

1.

"No, I just look like a bitch today," says the Ahuimanu Park custodian, when I ask if I can take her photo. Her wide smile is framed by the chain link fence between us. She's been weed whacking, has to pull up the grass-splattered windshield of her helmet to talk. She's aggravated because she has to do all the work around here. "So much corruption," she says. And they're blowing up her bathrooms. (I see exploding toilets, but she means graffiti.) Scrawling "BOTO" everywhere. (She kindly translated for me.) It might be better if she stopped and the place went to hell; then someone might clean it up. But she does it. "Hard being the competent one, I know," I say. Her neighbor down the road said she was going to die in a few months. Her grass got way too high, so she cut it. "Why'd you cut it, if you weren't paid for it?" the woman demanded. "Well, I knew you needed help, and besides, I have to look at it all the time, and it's ugly."

The woman hasn't died yet, she says, her smile turned ironic. But the custodian's father passed four months ago. As she goes back to weed whacking (she'd had a mower, but the bolt fell off in high grass and she thought people would assume she was on drugs, crawling around on the ground looking for it), I say I'm sorry about her father's death. "It's life," she says.

 

0.

The phone tree was more banyan than oak, options writhing around options, roots tangled, no way to know what limb would sprout next. (Imagine a John Cage piece composed of touch tone tones.) I was trying to roll over an IRA from a company that never responds, no matter how many trees you follow and forms you send in. "There's something wrong with the form," a woman finally says. "You hadn't confirmed that this was what you wanted." "But it's all on the form that was sent in three weeks ago!" Yes, this is what I want. "Will Susan get updates?" asked my adviser, also on the line. "No," was the response.

 

Stumps where bushes were

"The only thing they pay attention to is the internet," said a woman cutting flowers at the cemetery guard shack. "I wrote to complain," I said, "and got not response." Oh, I wrote to them. It's gotta be Yelp, she said. Lilith and I had just completed a circuit of the cemetery and had seen ever more stumps, where plants had been. One long hedge now resembles a jaw missing teeth. (So that small children can now see the mountain view?) A long bending line of bushes was down around one of the flagpoles. A Filipino worker, gathering up shreds of shrubs, told me everything was getting uglier. He laughed when I muttered, "baby Trump." And, on the way out, the sign at the entrance had been cleared of shrubbery, so you can see the word MORTUARY in all its glory. Those were bushes where cats hid.

 

from Startles

 August 15, 2025

“Nothing in it can transform grief into mourning,” Roland Barthes writes of The Photograph. It’s his photo of his mother as a child, one he doesn’t reproduce in the book. I wrote “morning,” thought “meaning,” surrendered to “mourning.” Is grief then aura, the once only mist that chills our face, dampens our shoes? He refuses to reproduce his photograph, for his spectator would not even grieve.

I balk at the idea that photography is more allied with death than painting is. If the scene is Impressionist, the painting is dead, not to be reproduced by any but the most derivative of artists. But between the painting and us, light’s transformative; we can see the world as painting without wanting to use our own brush. The light from my dog’s flashlight tail renders the grass beneath her more green. Repetition need not be reduction.

I check my files to make sure last year’s wedding occurred, now that the marriage is over. We played our roles in their happiness, but not their later suffering. The public privacy of social media has been edited to take out joyful content. My husband still throws a lasso, badly, at the ranch. I can laugh at that, both as what it was and as its memory.

Look at the father before, and the father after, the infant before and infant after. Gaza photos cause us our own pain; they demand that we act. Social media is so often an act we can’t see through this screen, or we don’t want to. The man’s face, too, has died, though he still holds his dead child up. It’s not that I want to theorize photography, but that it offers me a lens.

The lens is limit. Limits can be wit (the lily looks like a Pac man eating plants) or it can be horror (he cannot get outside the photo of his dead infant). The frame frames him, but also us. The frame contains a wave, a hurricane, an erupting volcano, but our expansiveness offers us fear. Context is space is freedom from the frame, not ease.

But a photograph lacks context, always, that is not description in words. It’s hardly worth a thousand of them, if you don’t know where it’s taken. It’s taken me away from my sunny room, my sunny mood, my cats, my dog, and onto a dying strip of land. Or a memory one wants so much to erase. Her father offered her to men over his CB radio; only she can see it like a photograph, which is not memory but shock.

For Dogen, all time folds into this one time. To time, Dogen was an annoying teacher, taking the sting out of it, letting it fall like a tent when the pegs come down. Halfway into its fall, tent echoes mountains, their vertical, etched valleys. There was a moment, once, when I got clear of this. Did you?