1 July 2021

 

At the workshop the day after Losing It, they read a paragraph about their first trip to the grocery store in Hyde Park. A woman squatted, shitting in a parking stall. Hard to theorize, easier to describe. They asked if I was angry at them, after they interrupted my talk to object to it. Four years later, we talked about Obama and grace at an outdoor table, fenced in. At the coffee shop nearby, there was a memorial to a man who died by the gun; a church memorialized others. The first visit was winter, the second a cold summer day. They stood in front of the L, where a round pillar zig zagged black and yellow beside a vertical steel support; they were dressed in black shoes, black stockings, a black dress and jacket, their hair still peppery. How to theorize the immediate, the instant of recognizing that photo as mine, of them, amid an awkward geometry of concrete pillars near a lake. Something of the hot and cold, cold pillar warmed by sunlight, abstraction reflected back on concrete. But it wasn’t thought that seemed forced; it was world, so difficult, a puzzle to be completed, then mapped. A den, piled with books and papers, by the kitchen. A white cat, a conversation about older male professors. The food they could not eat, the way they talked about it. Confusion’s necessary, they said, not seeing that meditation’s a further confusion, or a confusion set in molasses. Molasses spilled in the harbor. The sweetness of a mind moving, and of its end. RIP Lauren

2015

Her obituary refers to Lauren as "they." I'll need to change the pronouns.

Gravity and anger

25 June 2021

While dreaming, he floats from here to there, guided by a mental joystick. On waking, he fights gravity to get up from his chair. Anger is like that: we fight it like gravity, but gravity never gives in. A woman in a muumuu stands in front of her old car in front of the relay station; I remember the car’s bumpersticker is about nukes at Pohakuloa. I already heard her screaming at a dog, a chihuahua who comes to investigate us, tail between its legs, torn between our smell and its owner’s loud voice. When she sees me, the woman smiles, greets me with “aloha!” At the corner of Maile and Maile, we make a triangle with two large dogs, their owners unable quite to control them. The man with a husky mix uses his foot to push his dog away. I hear a woman yelling “NO, NO!” and see a pit bull pulling her to a seated position. She doesn’t know if she can stop her dog, asks me where we’re going. We choose the road left vacant.

Lilith dives into the ginger, smelling pheasants and their young. She isn’t angry, nor is she hungry. She’s programmed that way. Computers made to be possessed of instinct only; the AI machines recognizes patterns, but sometimes they’re the wrong ones. A pitcher’s sunscreen marks him as either a sober adult or a cheater, maybe both. The limitations of my iPhone camera mean I cannot take still photos of batter or elephant (if I were to see one); instead, I gravitate toward the still angles that move only when you see them in the photograph. The camera’s movement before the photograph makes the image of a magnolia blossom, its pistil capped with a yellowing petal, move. Movement before meaning, unless of course it comes afterward, in the case of the video replay. The triangulation of a foot reaching for the bag, the baseman’s glove leaning toward the ball, and the umpire’s eye meets the passive gaze of a camera lens, which must then be interpreted by someone we can’t see, in New York.

“Buildings simply do not fall down,” a mayor says, of the building that fell down. Folding cards or pancakes, the balcony railings fall along with concrete and rebar. One apartment, shorn of one wall, reveals a bunk bed that hangs at the precipice like a bad dream. It’s reality we can’t imagine; our dreams are perfectly ordinary. That I put up bookshelves without screws, and that they fell down, is more reasonable than a condo building dissolving within 30 seconds. She was upstairs in her house in Kalapana when the 6.9 hit. “We got a trampoline,” the young cousins sing.

Did I dream his road rage? That might give him latitude, apart from my reciprocal anger, the kind like a wall against which you hit a tennis ball and it faithfully returns, so that you can slam it again against the difficulty of a response that never fails. They don’t tell you that when you learn another language. You’re prepared always to answer, tell your interlocutor where the train station is, or even that you don’t live here or speak the language. The option of silence isn’t given. When the answer is mute, and there is no wall, just suspense. The guy across the loop has hung loops on which to swing in front of the water catchment tank, green.

Lilith meets Republicans on Haunani Road

 

We crossed paths on Haunani Road with the older couple (my age, if not Lilith's) we'd encountered several times before. The first time, on passing us (Lilith has important research duties by the side of the road), the man had said cryptically, "the dog is now following Republicans." So as we crossed paths today, I said, "Are these the Republicans?" She smiled, but he did not; they both answered in the affirmative. I said, "oh, gosh," in lieu of anything else. He said, "it's reality," as they disappeared behind us. The word "reality" turned my mind to mush, as if my mother in her dementia had told me--which she did--that I'd gone to Catholic school, when it was she who had done so, unhappily. It took me walking half-way up Kilauea to realize I should have turned and said, loudly and brightly, HAPPY JUNETEENTH!

10 Years On

 

14 June 2021

What to take out: vatic statements, extra words, memories between the memories that don’t belong. Parataxis is what was taken. My mother, ten years today. The rest of the page left blank, but for her dates. “After the Hyphen” too cryptic a title. The addition of that date denotes subtraction of person.

Bee's heads

 

11 June 2021

The graffiti on a whitish tarp screams at the owner of the large dog that attacked a homeless person’s small dog. I didn’t take the picture. Writing it down is another violation, or act of witness. They rhyme. Witness your internal organs, the yoga teacher says. Witness American violence, the Roshi tells us. A friend watched beheadings, to be witness. Another posts a bee’s head on Instagram, framed by sidewalk. Yet another the mural of a child bearing his arm with menace. To bear arms: bear = give birth to, or large mammal celebrated in Hilo coffee shop; arms: what we use to control our opposable thumbs. Thumbs and guns, by way of Susan Howe. I talk to a Chinese Susan about mental health activism. Names are arms to hold us inside our decades like artifacts. After an American woman hugged him, Thich Nat Hahn created a meditation of it. Like every form, it goes slowly. Lift it in your hands, like your heart. (Bryant shrinks from that, as he sees a heart that slobbers blood in his hand). It’s not an actual image, I tell him, though my yoga teacher has synesthesia; she smells what is not there (flower). The flower (here) punches my memory clock, though it's only a word. The 10 poems that will change your life are found, drenched, between hard covers on a fence in the Park. Bryant opens to page 80-something and finds “amoeba of ancestry” about a Galway Kinnell poem. Marthe had a story about jumping out a window to avoid Kinnell’s attention, amoebic in their oblivion to boundary (or bear). An Irishman in the woods is still Irish, no? Reaching up to the top of a fence, the girl fought off a bear too interested in her dogs. Punch a shark in the nose. The football coach’s 10 year old son told his father about a doctor's abuse; the coach punched him in the stomach. That was the beginning of the end, he says, a man in his 60s, suffering from abuse and a father’s violent neglect. We come here to avoid his triggers, and that takes us back to guns, as if we were rowing our boat in rounds and they turned to arms slung through the water of a northern lake, hunting our memories like ghost-beings. He’s seen one, and so has our son, his absent deceased first mother. I said, both your mothers are rooting for you. She and I are a team that lacks any common language except “son.” He was offered to me, but the gift was of two minds, precious cargo composed of sorrows. The iPhone witness earned a citation from the Pulitzer committee; she came armed with a phone. He came armed with leg and foot and no emotion we can locate in those blue eyes. Had a gun, but didn’t use it. Gun and moon offer eclipse, and sometimes the blood moon comes on like an allergic reaction. The daughter of the senator who blocks bills tried to charge more money than almost anyone has for Epipens. Only the rich can survive their shellfish, their peanuts, their bees and their beheadings.

Geographical determinism

 

For many years, our townhouse block in Kane`ohe had three Gary's in a row, all of them Yankees fans. Several years back, the one Gary and his wife, a postal carrier, moved out. Today, Lilith and I were walking around the loop in Volcano, going past the little gray cottage with red trim that I've always found appealing, when we spotted a woman gardening outside (the first time I've seen a person outside the cottage). We did a double-take and decided we knew each other. She said she'd been driving the other day and told her step-brother she was sure she knew me, but not from where. Thought maybe on her postal route in Manoa. No, she was Kathy, now divorced from middle Gary of the townhouse block. I remember she'd told me a story about a difficult genealogical discovery she'd made. We talked for a while and she showed me the inside of the cottage, every bit as charming as the outside. Then Lilith commenced to bark (I'd tied her to the post outside) and she and I left. The cottage is owned by a woman who was married to its architect; when I looked her up, I realized she had been a long-time Poet in the Schools. The cottage is practically across the street from Saijo's old place. Her neighbor up the street, the one I walk with sometimes, _was_ on her Manoa route back in the day.

Bulldozer

7 June 2021: 8:13 a.m.

I google for the day, acquire the hour and minutes of this departure. Two white men in Volcano, always together, head to the Hilo Safeway, never wearing shoes unless the bus driver tells them to. She likes rules. I used to ask where shoes were made, passing on those from Cambodian factories; it was luxury, this turning away from a particular vehicle of consumption.

The newly scraped lot on Wright Road is another version of consumption. The absent ohi`a, invasive ginger gone to the blade of the largest bulldozer I’ve ever seen. It sits near the back of the lot, as if shy of my iPhone camera, its blade the dullest of mirrors. Never nothing unless we make it so, or declare land as absence. Theresa asks about the mystery building in the vacant lot next to Saijo’s old place. It’s a white chimney, remnant of a house whose foundations sit nearby, blue plastic barrel providing the color contrast to a long winter’s green. A singer’s green and gruen, gruen and green.

The scraped lot is fenced by fractured trees; large rocks ribbon toward Wright Road, so the bulldozer can't sink in earth. The ohi`a is the first tree to grow on fresh lava fields, punctuating their black channels with red lehua blossoms. Lava is not nothing, braids itself down slope, stopping to sculpt an obstinate tree, if the sculptor begins from a living object, then casts rock around it. The lot has neither tree nor sculpture on it: is tabula rasa in reverse. The abundance of tearing abundance down, capital’s answer to the rain forest.

A new house sits behind chain link fence, its driveway a concrete road. Around the house the blankness of the bulldozer’s eloquence. Beside the fence one day I saw a man putting in small plants to replace the absent forest. Yesterday, I noticed they were brown. In front of one pallid seedling a sign: No Trespassing.

To be inside silence is luxury, to hear the birds make of silence a soundscape, to attend to drops of rain on the metal roof. A loud mechanical noise enters, suggesting that we “fuck our feelings,” like tree huggers. And now it’s gone again. A line of moss at the roof line hangs down, and water drops, streams, then again drops to the ground. A bad pun about coffee on my twitter feed, thanks to a zen prose poet, calls ground into question. They have ground the ground into bits, but its taste is sour mud. Avoid PTSD by pushing your feet into ground, breathe loam.

8:40: sun streams through the tree ferns. A good eye finds reflections on props, stakes, human clutter on the forest floor. Why is our good eye singular and not bifocal? We look at screens now before we take our photos, not with one eye but with both. The fascination of Polaroid is its hesitation before printing. What was instant now takes time to develop on a small paper square. History runs backwards as method of conveyance: vinyl record, manual typewriter, shutter click. Sound bears image. We contrive our mistakes via app. Random chance belongs to the outdated machine.

I will read my book backwards. It gains weight as it goes until, near the end, it weighs on my sinuses like a headache in a chamber too small for it. A judge says AK-47s are like Swiss Army Knives, so handy. You can carve your pre-sculpted body a thousand ways with it, can make organs explode into bits. It’s like whittling; you can sing as you do it, before running back to the car that’s found later in a canal, taking up space. We take both time and space, if not at the same time, and the bulldozer takes the space of a grove of ohi`a trees. In the absence of bulldozer, we find real estate. You can plant your garden later.

8:49.