more from Startles

I'm not posting all of my startles, but here's a new one. Steve B. suggested the five sentence paragraph form to me.

 

July 31, 2025

I know how to write crisis, but not catastrophe. That’s the argument, lacking detail. The paper bark tree I take photos of in the cemetery wears a yellow ribbon. Ola says they’re going to replace it with a water feature. “This isn’t Disneyland!” I say.

Posit this as crisis, for me and for the tree, so high and healthy. A photograph of a boy who is his bones only is catastrophe. If I describe his body (which I cannot fully apprehend), I have reproduced a crime. If I lament his bones I accept his death as grievable. There’s no word for what goes so far beyond grief.

No grief in genocide, only a horrible joy (on the one side) and desperate need (on the other). An open mouth that doesn’t speak but cries. A body so ravaged no food brings it back to flesh. Some photographs are censored; you have to click to see them. Others pass through the corporate censor like bribes, in the French sense.

Or is the horrible joy simply work, torn from its root as making? Is writing evil’s mitigation, because it accrues? Detention defies design, renders it purposeless. Am I able any more to say anything obliquely, or is each direction forward? Like late Lennon, song stripped to bone.

Lennon’s pockets were full of buttons: red, yellow, green ones. There were also picks inside his blue suit, appropriate for one who plays guitar. My classmate took several; afterwards he said they could talk. How to get past one’s own symbolic value. How to devalue oneself without degradation.

Each child in Gaza has symbolic value (only). There’s no privacy for those who are symbols among us. You take his buttons; you take their photographs. Lennon, too, would die a violent death, one he couldn’t choose to bargain with. His self-grief was a single cry.

These are not my poems of joy, dear Norman, though I do love the light that passes through my husband’s curly white hair as he stands on a ladder to clear the gutter. These are poems of an emotion so tortured it cannot be parsed in language. These are not poems, but statements made as directly as I can. Even oblique light is light, and the dark comprehends all. Let me download that light to look at later on.

from Startles (an ongoing sequence)

from Startles

The curb says, do not park here. It says, storm drain below, says palm tree above, says graveyard, says take my picture. And I do: narrow band of weathered yellow paint, stains born of damage to the concrete, one splotch of red paint showing through. The curb says it might be art, though no one intended it for that. Workers meant to lay the paint down; weather and heavy machinery altered it.

Unintentional art, like a tree’s runnels of sap, chance colors capturing real moths and ants. My photograph gets selected for an “abstract only” exhibit. The print shop tells me it’s blurry, unfocused. My photographer friend says it’s unfocused. Months later, I return to the storm drain, sit on the road in front of it (workers and tourists driving behind me) and take the same photograph. Too much light.

Later, under cloud cover, I hurry back, several steps in front of the blue sky coming toward the mountains. I sit; I take; I take more. Downloaded, there is less light, but also less abstraction. As my friend John says, “hyper-focused, it looks like, well, a curb.” Reality, you see, is clear.

Back I go to the first, the beautifully muddled image, less curb than canvas. Guy at print shop says AI software sharpens it. I go with the artificial clarity, sharper than the first image, blurrier than the last. It’s the curb photo’s equanimity, the middle path between smudge and careful syntax. A good story, my second friend says.

AI writes: It seems you're interested in the blurry elements present in some of Dorothea Lange's photographs, particularly her famous "Migrant Mother". I’m addressed as if I’m real, and can be taught. There are reasons for the blurs, it seems. But the images are evocative! Do blurs make them more or less “real,” or does the sharp focus?

The curb doesn’t talk to us about suffering, nor about itself as the subject of our regard. The curb refuses introspection, which is one of its virtues. What it does to us is difficult to name. Abstraction is what runs, like paint, leaving bits of story like a red island poking through yellow. Napalm girl might also have been out of focus.

In Italian, no one “takes” photographs. That’s our vernacular, this taking of. Your image is now mine, though you keep what hides behind the blur. It’s a strange form of decolonizing, this being out of focus, Improvised Expressive Device. It hurts the certain eye, but bathes the uncertain one in dull light.

 

Organ donors

 

The mortician at Valley of the Temples, dressed in blue, was gently chiding a maintenance worker who'd parked his John Deere vehicle in the wrong place. "Need a diplomat?" I asked. I remarked on the mortician's black shoes, not the nice ones I remember. Those are in the car (a red Mercedes), he said. They have posts in the heels so he can't pronate; the ones he had on leaned to the side like skiffs in a stiff wind. "Do you guys do the autopsies?" the maintenance guy asked. "No, we mostly close them up. The worst are the donors; they really get cut up." "But isn't a good thing that they donate and help keep someone else alive?" I asked. "That's what they want you to think. You donate your body and someone else makes money," he responds. 

 

"Do I have to disbelieve everything?" I ask.

Lilith times three

Lilith and I ran into S and J on our way out of the cemetery; we went over to say hello. Soon enough, S says: "haven't seen much of Joe lately." "He was at the funeral of the politician who was assassinated by the MAGA guy," I say. S guffaws. "That was CIA! You need to do your research."

 

"It's going to become a thing," says J. "Anarchy. Lots of politicians killed." They're all corrupt, says S. Over 80% of them. Both sides. Awful. J says he's a "free thinker, an independent." When I respond that he's a Trumper, he says yes, he loves Uncle Donnie.

 

"I just want to weep every day,"I tell them. "This is not the country I grew up in." "What did you like about that country?" asks S. "The sense of possibility; the way people were getting more rights, not fewer." What rights? "Civil rights, women's rights, LGTBQ rights." "You haven't cared about LGTBQ rights all your life!" S retorts. "Ever since I was a child, I wanted people to have more rights."

 

J: "They're forcing their agendas on us. Drag shows! LGBTQ in our faces, all the time." "I have two dear friends in Waikiki, men, who are married." "That's ok with us!"

 

S walks off. B and I say a few more words, pointless ones, I guess. "See, we can still express our opinions to each other," he says. "But really, I just want to cry," I say. "Do you want a hug?" I said no.

 

At the entrance to the cemetery, a small woman with a baseball cap on (turned out it read "Samoa") was taking pictures of the sign, and of McDonald's across the street. She'd put down a bag. I offered to take her picture, and she lit up. Yes, of us! So I took one of her, then we did a selfie in front of the sign and she made sure to get contact information so I could send her the photo. Her phone rang. Gotta get this. She was telling someone where she was, how she'd been shopping so she could make fried rice ("Everyone loves my fried rice!"). She said she was with a new friend, Susan. 

 

Turned out we were walking the same way, so Lilith and I accompanied Ato to Hui Kelu, where I peeled off. She said she was 82, has 11 grandchildren and 14 great grandchildren (or vice versa). Her son lives way up the hill, looks down on the cemetery from the back. She didn't want a ride there, she said, clutching her blue bag with a tin foil cooking pan sticking out. She said she'd be in touch.

 

As Lilith and I headed down Hui Kelu toward home, "Susan!" rang out from one of the townhouses. It was Jarod, who looks Trump but talks Sanders. We talked on and on about how sick we feel at the state of the nation. My memory is running low, but there were--as ever--lots of F and S words. He's been on MAGA sites lately, pretending he used to be MAGA but doesn't understand any more. The things they write back to him. And the hate. The racism. Jarod doesn't get it. How can they be such racists? How can Americans be so stupid?

 

 

The guys on the deck

Two guys work on our condo deck, the one that's leaked off and on into the downstairs for 25 years now; they're putting the final coat of paint and sand down. The boss owns a Tesla, which starts him talking about how there won't be credits for electric vehicles any more. The other guy, a "local haole" (you understand this if you understand this), doesn't think that matters. He starts talking about the "Big Beautiful Bill." I come to the sliding door and note that the BBB will get rid of social safety nets and health care. "I got health care," says guy #2; "I'm not worried." "How about when you're old?" asks guy #1. "How about other people?" ask I. Guy #2 starts talking about how he's going to make a killing on crypto. I suggest that perhaps a country that can spend a billion dollars on a bombing run might be able to afford health care for its citizens. 

 

"You didn't care for the bombing?" said #2, which made #1 chuckle at his polite language.

 

Deportations come up. Yeah, that guy had MS-13 on his knuckles, says #2. They're criminals. I tell him about the landscaper with three sons in the Marines who was beaten by ICE. Brow furrows; he hadn't heard about that.

 

Boss: "we don't talk religion or politics!"

Me: "I do."

 

As #2 leaves on a ladder, he thanks me for the carton of Stella Artois we gave him the other day. "Don't step on the deck until tomorrow," he adds.

Our favorite cone-chaser

Lilith and I saw our favorite off-duty cop / traffic cone chaperone in his silver SUV; he was talking to a tall, thin, sandy-haired cop (kind of an Ichabod Crane type, but with head still attached). "Didn't I see you in Kailua the other day?" I asked. He wasn't sure. "Talking to the homeless guy next to Walgreens who's always reading a book." Oh, yes. "You were saying that you should get back into reading, too." "Not many homeless people read books." "Not many people do." We all glanced at our palms, as if they were phones. "I tried to give him some toiletries one day," I said, but he declined. "Give him a book!"

 

"You should turn your vehicle around so you can see the mountains," I advised our friend. "Well, you know how much I like to look at cones," he said.

 

The woman who thinks she knows me

She crossed Hui Iwa in front of us, a short woman in baggy shorts and slippers. She held some large leaves and smaller flowers in her hands and looked through chain link at the culvert, diamonds of light shining off the water. As Lilith and I approached, she asked me what the building on the other side of the culvert is. I said it belonged to a spiritual group that holds meetings there, though none in my recent memory. She had light brown hair that fell to her shoulders, another flower behind her ear. A young woman, some scabs beside her mouth. "I've seen you somewhere before!" she said to me. She stopped our conversation a couple of times to say she'd located the memory of me, but lost it again. "Did you go to UH?" I asked. "No, BYU. Took a Samoan class at UH, though."

 

She asked where I live, and I gestured "up there." "That's what they say in Kaneohe; up the road," she responded. "I am . . . " Her mouth formed a word, but didn't sound it. As I leaned my left ear toward her, I realized that the soundless word was "homeless." As if shame. "Can you get into a shelter?" I asked. "None of the shelters will take me," she said; "they'll take everyone else in Kahalu`u, but not me." I said I was sorry. "You should be grateful," she said.