The Wind-Honed Island Rise 9780824891503

Table of contents :
Reuben Tarn - 1916-1991
Contents
Pacific Geology
Letter from Kaua'i
Kealia Lookout
'A'a
Hawaiian Archipelago
Each Step You Take
Waking to Makaleha
To Anahola Mountain
Looking for Wainiha
At Ke'e
Lapping
Inter-Island Flight
Tectonic
Sphere
Story of an Archipelago
North
Yukon
Maligne Lake Mountains
Oregon
Monhegan, October
Off Maine
Sphagnum
Colony in Rock
Falling
Island Night
Kaua'i from Monhegan
From Kaua'i to Fundy
Ways to the Stars
Sea
We Live by the Sea
If You Think the Sea Alien
Where the Island Ended
Adjectives for Sand
Sandbars
Ways to the Sea
Phyla
Night Sea
The Band of the Sea
Waipouli Reef
Survival
Bikini
Gathering Seaweed
Shells
In Micronesia
From Meadow Rue
Crawling
Moon
The Ironwoods
High Tide
The Quiet Side of the Island
Other Strategies
Ghost Dogs of Hata 'ula
In the Vastness of Zero
Homestead
Groundwater
The Rainbow Shower
My Kealia Landscape
The Hills of East KauaH
Liliko'i
Humus
Constellations of Aphids
Inside the Island
From Kllauea Point
Return to First Land
Full Moon Time
In the Slant of Morning
Stopping Before Olohena
Being Here on the Seventh
Teach Me Web
The Dark That Folds the Leaves
Night on a Hill

Citation preview

"Scree" Ink, acrylic and graphite on paper 17 x 14 in.

The Wind-Honed Islands Rise

Selected Poems of Reuben Tam

Mänoa Books University of Hawai'i Press Honolulu • 1996

Illustrations appearing in this volume are from Reuben Tarn's sketch books. Edited by Beryl Blaich and Geraldine King Tam Text and illustrations Copyright © 1996 by Geraldine King Tam All rights reserved. N o part of this book may be used or reproduced without written permission from Geraldine King Tam. Published by Manoa Books University of Hawai'i Press 2840 Kolowalu Street Honolulu, H I 96822

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Tam, Reuben, The wind-honed islands rise : selected poems of Reuben Tam. p.

cm.

ISBN 0 - 8 2 4 8 - 1 9 3 2 - 2 (alk. p a p e r )

1. Kauai (Hawaii)—Poetry. 2. Islands—Poetry. 3. Nature—Poetry. I. Title. PS3570.A444W56 811'

1996

-54-DC2I

96-45132 CIP

Designed and produced by Barbara Pope Book Design Printed in the United States of America

Reuben Tarn • 1916-1991

Artist, Poet, Teacher Reuben Tam was born in Hawai'i and received his early training at the University of Hawai'i. H e was a nationally known artist who had an illustrious exhibiting career that spanned half a century. His works are in the permanent collections of over forty museums. He divided his time between painting, writing, and teaching, spending winters in N e w York City, summers on the island of Monhegan, in Maine, and the last ten years of his life on the island of Kaua'i. Awards and honors came his way, including a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1948, First Prize for Landscape at the National Academy of Design in 1977, an American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters Award in 1978, and in 1989, the Cades Award for Literature.

Contents

PACIFIC GEOLOGY

I

Letter from Kaua'i 5 Kealia Lookout 6 'A'a 7 Hawaiian Archipelago 8 Each Step You Take 9 Waking to Makaleha 10 To Anahola Mountain 11 Looking for Wainiha 12 AtKe'e 13 Lapping 14 Inter-Island Flight 15 Tectonic 16 Sphere 17 Story of an Archipelago 18 NORTH

Yukon 25 Maligne Lake Mountains 26 Oregon 28 Monhegan, October 29 Off Maine 30 Sphagnum 31

21

Colony in Rock 32 Falling 34 Island Night 35 Kaua'i from Monhegan 36 From Kaua'i to Fundy 37 Ways to the Stars 38 SEA

41

We Live by the Sea 45 If You Think the Sea Alien 46 Where the bland Ended 47 Adjectives for Sand 48 Sandbars 49 Ways to the Sea 50 Phyla 52 Night Sea 53 The Band of the Sea 54 Waipouli Reef 55 SURVIVAL

Bikini

57

61

Gathering Seaweed 61 Shells 64 In Micronesia 65 From Meadow Rue 66 Crawling 67 Moon 68 The Ironwoods 69 Tide 70 The Quiet Side of the Island Other Strategies 72 Gfowi Dogs of Hala lula 7 3 In the Vastness of Zero 74

71

77

HOMESTEAD

Groundwater 81 The Rainbow Shower 82 My Kedlia Landscape 84 The Hills of East Kaua'i 86 Liliko'i 87 Humus 88 Constellations ofAphids 89 Inside the Island 90 From Kllauea Point 91 Return to First Land 92 Full Moon Time 93 In the Slant of Morning 94 Stopping Before Olohena 95 Being Here on the Seventh 96 Teach Me Web 97 The Dark That Folds the Leaves Night on a Hill 100

98

Pacific Geology North Sea Survival Homestead

Untitled Ink, acrylic and graphite on paper 15 x 18 in.

Letter from Kauali

Strange clouds come to our mountains. Yesterday, over Anahola, a spiral of silver mist, like an ice ghost from Siberia. Then it vanished, and the crags edged to redness again, and the twin peaks resumed their command of the district of Kawaihau. All along our shores the sun attends us. It is unfailing. It anchors our days. But the nights clatter like fronds, sieving the Tropic of Cancer to beads of cold weather. Kamchatka to the northwest may be usurping our stars. We are losing our legends and our sense of island. Salt coats our roads and lanais. It appears on our lawns. It gleams on the sword-leaves of hala. We imagine icicles. We dream of channels evaporated to limestone and crystals, and of an ocean folded into grids of seamounts. In the calm shelter of cliffs we swim in the shallows, trusting the current in its steady streaming. Where a reef and a stream and a lava ledge converge we lie down on white sand in the realm of sea-level, to see daylight ending in sand, and the horizon faltering. Stone by stone our mountains are falling into the sea, to join the drowned islands of the northwest rift— Ka'ula, Nihoa, Necker, Gardner, and the shoals— Laysan, La Perouse, Pearl and Hermes, swirls of reef breaking and breaking into the North Pacific night.

5

Kealia Lookout

These black boulders that frame the ocean for us came down from gullies and fissures, from the dome of the island. Now they line the views, the bay of Kapa'a, the mouth of the river, Ten-C beach. We think back to lava beginnings, fire, tremor, and we know the redness under the cane on the hills. Red silt stains the river banks and the rafts of water hyacinth floating down to the shore where hau logs from embattled forests print hyphens on the unwritten sand. From the lookout you can see how lava continues undersea toward the barrier reefs. Then it is gone, and we hear the coral droning in the low trades. Over the island, they say, there's a great wind circling in the shape of Kaua'i, rounding the raw capes, the angled mountains. An onshore breeze dies in a cove of shells to sound again when we face the bladed ridges. See the shadows of clouds slide down the hills and ride out to sea, like archipelagoes drowning. We stand by guardrails arranging the scene, tracking the scattered marks of place. Out there a wave strikes crystals. From black rock bright asterisks leap, catching our eye, trying to articulate a view too wide for us.

6

'A'a

The way these lava crags stalk the clouds today you imagine saber-toothed fire-eyed beasts slinking behind cycad and steam coveting the moist flesh of pterodactyls. Our island of mountains began as a simple layered mound swelling undersea, erupting into the sky fitfully, its ejecta red magma, sharp rough first rock. The early Hawaiians named it 'a'a. 'A'a as in the glottal first cry of the nene, hatching between cold craters, or the spiked scrape of pandanus against the cliff face that we climbed at Mokolea Point, or cloudburst, the moan of sky where cumulative lava ages achieved apex.

7

Hawaiian Archipelago

I saw Ni'ihau from the upland of Mana— Ni'ihau, half its hills drowned, joined undersea to Ka'ula Rock, to Lehua, to the bird islands beyond, to Necker and Laysan, to the unnamed shoals, to the last of the reefs, galaxies of darkness clouding the blue ocean, staining the eye of the frigate bird. I once heard of an island spewing black ash. The mountainside trembled in the channel. The magma raged all night. In vertical unease the wind-honed islands rise. They spill their strata onto the coastal plain— Kapa'a, Kealia, Waipouli, Anahola. The ocean floor bears the pattern of drowned stream courses, as plovers bear the veins of ancient flyways. I have followed a stream to the sea, to a reef the color of broken crabshell, to my mornings, myself among ghosts of coral. Above me, high across the span of glint, seabirds gather all the tilting sea.

8

Each Step You Take Each step you take will send up the earth as you walk the path from the hill to the river. You will be striding the crust of land. You will tread on accretions of silt and grasses and leaves in brown tangles. Regard each step. You will cross sills of red clays. You are entering silica and breccia and feldspar skimmed from deep epochs of fire and cooling. You will walk in the dust of the last drought and the slurry of tumbled stone plains, in the climates that a hill has collected and pressed between the layers of your path. How many forests have shared this slope with alternating lavas that now lie down among foxtail pollen and tufts of nut grass? Walk lightly. Hear the grains of sand sifting under you, the small fractures of shale and twig, muffle of purslane and amaranth, and the earth touching you, bearing you and the scratch of your passing.

9

Waking to Makaleha

What I know of land I learned years ago from a mountain. How stone sleeps, how it wakes in brittle shards to straggle down ledge by ledge. How the circling weather hones the ridges to cane-knife blades. Makaleha! My roads ran red with the mud of its slopes. My mornings crackled in its downfalling winds. At the end of the day green shadows fanned down from its wide summit gathering the stray plains of Kawaihau. In countless sketches I stole its outline that now haunts my travels. Ghosts of its shape leap at me from cold shale on a shore far from home. Or suddenly, limned on a night cloud, the bladed mountain cuts through my miles. Once on a fog-white coast I woke to Makaleha looming over the rifted horizon, the sun flaring in blossoms of magma, the plains of my village, lowlands and gullies, returning upstream stone by stone.

10

To Anahola Mountain

I have followed pueo the owl to its hover over the knoll from which you rise, and taken the trail of ridge bones left by the fire goddess after her feasts of long ago. Through the thorns of lantana I see the pocked shadows of your ascent, bands of black cinder girdling your crags, and your ledges stacked in some toss of geology played before the birds came. You are faced toward other mountains— Makaleha, Nounou, and giant Wai'ale'ale, stone acknowledging other kingdoms of stone, hurling spears of cloud and light in your own sky games. I wait among your screes. I hear only the trickle of gravel you have dropped in your casual debt to gravity. All I can ascertain of rock is the film of dust on my skin. Nevertheless, where the tropic bird from the sea has strung its meridians of memory over your flanks, I have this afternoon left you my shadow, scattered among the cinders of your last lavas.

II

Looking for Wainiha

One mountain vanishes, and then another, as rainclouds roll in from the ocean, and down the range at Hanalei a third peak loses its place in the new slant of squalls. How can I tell you where to find Wainiha? Even the falls darting down the cliffs will disappear from their vertical tracks to emerge singing among reeds and moss stone drums. I can only say that water has its rituals, dark and inexplicable as the chant of creation. When you arrive at the twin bridges of Lumaha'i, stop for a while. The double stream will hold you and tell you a legend of gods seeding the flood, male for the narrow waters, female for the broad waters. Look past the gingers and plumerías by the swamp— flowers are for some other time. Today is the day for acknowledging rain. See how it floats the mountains and softens stone, how gently it takes you into the valley of Wainiha.

12

At Ke'e

At Ke'e the points of the island retreat into the seaside coves of evening, and sand crabs crawl home from seawater. And the cliffs come down to alluvial light with their stains of fern and rainwater, as the dark presses landforms down to sea level. Mande by mande the hills of Ha'ena shed their red strata. The simplified land descends in original gray. Stream and pandanus, ironwood and dune lie down on bedrock together to share the spreading shadow. The thousand black boulders of Ke'e flash one last white glint to the west where the sky narrows. All the places I gathered have dissolved, my miles abbreviated to this outcropping of stark land endings. Shearwater, plover, shore dweller, migrant, now we are islanded together, watching the great night sweep in from the sea.

13

Lapping

Another morning. The bright waves are lapping the round stones at Laellpoa. How many waves, how many tides before you could say the sea has taken something of rock away? Or is rock battering water over and over, ramming its body, denying its quest for the perfect smooth flow?

14

Inter-Island Flight

Your island is leaving you and the outer reefline rolls out its final white, and the mountains, so thick you thought they would survive the pull of distance, have just now joined the sliding past, and you are borne into this huge present, blue without edges of place, only these passive clouds, one great white polyp after another, taller, deeper than clouds should be, and your space now is vertical, through which you part your way past unmoving vapor, past time that folds into itself, past the hiatus of your landlessness, your borders of passage a haze, your horizontal glide invisible, until the bottom opens, and you see through the immensity of oceanic space the dim shard of Ka'ena Point, land, land surfacing, veined as your hand is veined, brown as your skin, and shaped like all the stones you have ever held.

I5

Tectonic

Islanders away from islands will hear their surf. Geology drifts with them, folding the hum and crack of reefs into the seismic air, forgiving the salt distances. The island appears whenever I summon place. It was waterfalls and black mountains, guava and cane straddling the fissures, shoring the broken craters. Kaua'i. When the sky turned, the island tumbled from cumulus to rain to rainbow. I played in a ring of banyan and coral and learned where lava began, where it drowned. It was Kaua'i that called the oceans in. Roil and thunder at the outer reef, flotsam scouring the beach, margin after margin, and logs riddled with codes of other coasts. At Kllauea Light plovers fell from the North, scattering season and stars against the cliff. In torn wings I touched the dew of tundras in bones the cold, the Humboldt. Jagged under tides, the force that drives the crust seals the sea. The rims of continents grind and gleam, plated to the island, drifting with it.

16

Sphere We have learned the scene so well. Over the steel horizon the sun, too familiar again, forge-red, and in the foreground the band of sand rippled with the day's last shadows and over it the slowing waters gathered in the slurry of evening. See the fired air, the sparks, the last chain of gold clouds melting in the ferrous glaze. With the dust of the day we rise to the arc of the earth. This is our rim, welded of all metals, all our places, our hoard of places, the sum of our tenure. Radiant sphere beaten to darkness, to silhouette again, the last ray piercing the notch, an updraft of ashes. We stare over the blackened bindweed, over stonecrop pressed to stone. Weir, current, crag, orchard, all our images, all our prizes simplified to dark iron.

17

Story of an Archipelago

In the middle of the Pacific an archipelago swirls in its own channels, rimmed by seismic horizons, washed in its weather of salt and trapped clouds. Coral edges crumble and craters one by one erode to half-moon bays. Tides of sand flatten the broken black land. My shore, the crescent of Kapa'a, plays slope and current to the arc of an ancient curvature. Once, after a Kona storm when riverwater joined seawater and red silt from the hills rafted into white foam, I saw my years assigned like a stream to the sea. And when a cold front stalling over Midway spawned rain that fell for twenty days, I watched the cliffed mountains spill into a low sky. The sea, swollen and warm, surrounded us and held us, and rocked us to the story of the archipelago, how it sprawls in coralhead and spindrift a thousand cratered miles from Kure atoll in the northwest to young Lo'ihi rumbling off the black Puna sands.

18

Across fault slip and storm track we sail, we sail among islands surfacing, or quaking, or weathering down to reef fringes—we cannot say, being part of tide and the swirling, matrix, and sand.

19

Pacific Geology North Sea Survival Homestead

Untitled Ink and acrylic on paper 12 x 16 in.

Yukon

The glacier that scours the mountains winds a long way toward muskeg. Ice rounding the cirques and mounds filters streams from blue caves. On the mountainside, they said, look for mastodon climates. You'll find outcrops, shale on sandstone, and layers of cinder in granitic folds. You could gather and divide the ages there. When I arrived the peaks had turned into jackstraw shadows. I stumbled over boulders in dim ravines and walked among dead spruce that once might have touched stars. Here in the low weather of the melt the sky floats down in whorls of lichen, gray clouds on gray rock. Ice narrows past gravel and graywacke, and a thin sun breaks in tentative streams. In silt-blue eddies crystalline stones turn and flash and turn, like mountains, like glaciers.

25

Maligne Lake Mountains

T h e mountains were turned the other way as if we had come up the wrong lake. At the summits hanging valleys funneled the sky down but the falls were white pegmatite. Rising or plunging the verticals canceled horizontal eons. Glaciers cut across the programs of geology. A wind came down. It shook our view and turned the lake around spilling it into another. From the sedges a blackbird sang, ringing its territory, calling over the summer's nesting, beyond the climates. W e walked into a meadow of saxifrage where an ice age was ending. Ice dripped down to errant wildflowers.

26

Our world fell into place for a moment with the song of a bird, drift, silt, tremor, thaw, note by note in jeweled cadence imprinted in the beginning, coursing down the intricate surfaces, phrasing the wilderness.

Oregon Last night while I slept dreaming of hills moving shoreward, I could hear sea-caves opening in the slopes brought down. The tide came in under the moon breaking traprock, dissolving shale and mande, naming the stones. In the tumble of moon-grit olivines swirled with agates, crystalline again. Jaspers glowed red around red. Carnelian, amethyst, topaz ignited in druse and facet, cleaving the darkness. I wake in the dawn of Yachats. There's salt on the window and an ocean leveled to morning. The dunes have retaken the beachgrass, lines of driftage are drawn, the zones of the sea defined. And on the wide gray shore all the round gray stones unclaimed in the morning draw, belonging only to some great ancient mountain, itself smoothed down, nameless, and everywhere. 28

Monhegan, October What are these rafts that ferry cargoes of light from the island to the open sea, breaking our shorewater, pirating our silver, leaving us this wake of black water? We watch from a torn coast. Some days at sunset our drowned shoals emerge along the horizon, doubling and arching like gleaming porpoises released in a new sky. Some days gulls ride the tide past Nigh Duck into the calling straits never to return. The cove also goes, slipping from contours pebble by pebble, leaving our maps. Down in the emptying pools colonies of mussels weave their threads into the layers of stone. We wait between the slanting foreland and the scoured headland. Look down from Burnt Head. The bottom of the sea might be stirring from its dark sleep of kelp. Wait. Stay. In the white upwelling we might yet be offered a storm of flowers, garlands to shore us, to island our time.

Off Maine

Blackbacks in the divided sky cry a haunting of gray ten tides wide. Through the unuttered afternoon horizontals of shag streak the long salt cloud. From Drunken Gut the diagonal day drags anchors along fierce outer ledges— Barrel Rock, Nigh Duck, Eastern Duck. The island of the flowing headlands stains the sky bayberry gray.

3°

Sphagnum Across veins of rainwater, over sphagnum, I follow trails entwining the forest, encircling trillium and partridge berry, lining a marsh for jewelweed. Ravine of antlers crag with two pines pond of clouds crow's nest. The forest turns inward to its cycles. With each shake of weather the bright cones fell onto black loam in a strew of copper that blinks back at dragonflies. Ring of chanterelle net of gold thread twine of ebony spleenwort immutable rock. How quiet the streams that surround me, seeping from deep geodes to darken the prints of stone, to enter the split bones of the windfallen and stain the tatters of dipping air. The white-throated sparrow in four notes breaks the opal sky, spinning the greening season around me. I wake to the center of my dark ringed wood.

3i

Colony in Rock

On that island that day fog pressed two cliffs and the ridge into white-layered barrens. Gong buoys, bayberry, paths blurred into weather. I was lost in white weather. Under a wind-grooved ledge I saw in dark rock a rift two steps long, half a step wide. Slivers of wrack and a yew berry speckled the floor. Eyebright in stiff axils had rooted in it in scant catch of gravel. A feather, cormorant or kinglet, quivered between two spikes of mica. Scarlet pimpernel danced its bright stars. A cumulus of fog hovered over the crack. The big sea held back its roar of the far.

32

Light chipped out a moment there. In that slant of time the ledge tilted its floor to count its gather of colonists and wayfarers and banners and drums, and whistled salt-wind songs of home.

Falling

How many ways there are of falling into the sea! Through speck and glint the whiteness falls. Over curve and edge and glare and past another afternoon the daytime waits for a falling! And the gull falls! And the smallest rain dragging with it great accumulations of clouds. And the flares of the nighttime: Arcturus, and Jupiter swinging in the spruce slipping through several cat's cradles, and the Seven Sisters, fading nighdy in their falling. And down the faulted coastlines the continents with their screes and their grasses with their silver anthers, oh how they fall.

34

Island Night

Walk to the shore to see moonlight. The low wind skims the rockweed, blending the rustle of bay-caught drift and our singing of a song of islands. The warm rocks leading to the outland are spaced apart it seems for us, firm as the matrix based in our keep. There lies the sea, the full moon on us and the amethyst waves. The current leans outward in a vast waste of glint. The shoals and coves are ashen craters. Juniper, barnacle, heath aster, clinging with us to the outer strata, ride the great ellipse this night. In the cold fading light, in the glare of sudden meteors, see the screes fall away, and the unanchored, and the mica of our days, and the moult of our divinity.

KatiaHfrom Monhegan

When years are a tracing of two islands the marks of one are shadows of the other. Horizons fall through double meridians, through darks of old lavas, or drowned Maine. The terrain of years—did it begin in coral seamounts rising like shadows? In granitic vugs stains of lava appear, a redness that rains in dreams. After the last northeaster the gulls returned in white garlands. Cold kelp in the cove flayed the sun— there was a sting of ginger in the air.

36

From KauaH to Fundy

Whatever it was that day at Waimea by the bay, the faint half-shine of stippled wet sand, or the way the beach stopped at an outcrop of logs, or the waves curling brown algae and white foam, colors of the village behind the sea wall, whatever it was, it sprang me from Kaua'i all the way to the Atlantic, to a beach I once knew off South Carolina, and I was on a mile-long stretch of clamshell white. The quick channels of recall twinkle with the sounds and syllables, the crystals of places over the horizon, the textures and the dew of weathers that once enveloped you. One afternoon, in the stalactitic drip of the cave here at Ha'ena, I was returned to the fir-raining bays of Wrangell. The chatoyant gleam of a pried 'opihi shell can rekindle a herring run off Fundy. Dark Harbour! Summers ago the tides of Fundy washed up a wood decoy for me to take home. The shorebank rode the swells on loose black boulders. A cold north rolled in. I am held there, though I remember having left in a late September when fog and the dulse-draped island of Grand Manan lay down at equinox, and the dying light wrapped me like seaweed.

37

Ways to the Stars

We walked across heather and asters and sand along the night shore, in late August, to look for the great spiral in Andromeda. Four spruce tips north, and there it was, a white swirl streaming down to break in our eyes. In our vertigo we held on to our horizon and the pounding in the cove. Our island drifted like a raft of reeds into the sky where archipelagoes glowed in vast light years. Guessing at constellations we drew oudines to corral each one in its quadrant. We cast nets to trap escaping ions and bands of energy that might tell us if we had once shared the same waters. We sieved downdrafts of bright dust, extracting hydrogen and helium and lithium to assay them against our own atoms. We learned the mortality of light in white dwarfs that collapse like flowers in their allotted season.

38

Tonight, a new June night, the sweet-rocket welcoming us, we walk the shore path again, to confirm the orbits of returning galaxies and the slant of the Milky Way. We will be venturing beyond the perimeters of last year, parting the strange from the unknowable. Some of us will map the amazing new curves of starlight. Some of us will be kneeling before images lit in a lens. And some will be retrieving the rusting implements of wonder. But who among us will dare ride the ultimate trajectory that might take him across time and dimension to a place no mind, not even the mind that sowed the cosmic gardens, could ever have imagined.

39

Pacific Geology North Sea Survival Homestead

"Breaker" Ink, acrylic and graphite on paper 15 x 18 in.

We Live by the Sea

What is the sea for but to follow you along your sand shore, filling each footprint as you pace your islanded time. It dips where dunes dip, reiterates your subtle beaches, and rhymes each jut of rock. The sea eyes you as you stand staring at the horizon. It knows you as it knows the deep-sea akule confused in the warm shallows, and the parched sea-lettuce waiting for the tide at 'Anini. When the night draws all distance in, the quiet sea comes into your latticed room, rolling out a map of continents for your insular dreams, Asia and the Aleutians, the Andes, rims of your outer ocean. Your island gleams in the tilt of morning and reef by reef the archipelagoes of Oceania rise, the red shoals of Polynesia and the atolls of Micronesia and the salt wind, as each islander wakes to his intimate sea.

45

If You Think the Sea Alien

If you think the sea alien, could it be the gray it wears today, gray of terns or cold clouds or the gray of spruce wood drifting from northern estuaries? And the waves arriving at our shore, would they tell us something about the horizon, the images out there? All we know as islanders is the magnetism of that line. Could our days be pictured by water, perhaps in the way pebbled eddies radiate, ripple overlapping ripple, current cresting over current, until all days flow as one? Or that dark boulder shedding the noon tide again, rising punctually with its crown of limpets— what graphs of the sky does it follow? W h o charts our days? Incandescent in nacre and mica, the outer ocean flares with the moon in luminous exchange tonight, burning us back to our dark shore to the fold of mute stones we know.

46

Where the Island Ended

It seemed a different mix of sounds in the air and another time zone as we crossed the last margin beyond Kealia where ironwoods were giving in to the ocean and red clay tracks dropped suddenly. We were bone and mineral pitted by salt. We leaned like sticks in the wind. All around us rocks peeled to sulfur-yellow rings. Lava skeletons crumbled to black sand on the foreshore. We could look back over ten miles of the island at the cloud-capped mountains, angled into tiers of hanging valleys, rain funnels for the canefields striding green over the plain. But here was another time of Kaua'i, of endings, the sounds of submergence, the worn lavas, the outer stones teetering, the descent and the waiting sea.

47

Adjectives for Sand T h e shore is working its eons of erosion as you walk across it, but nothing describable shows today though there's silica from the deep sea beds and the grit of grinding sea energies lying here under the abstract language of sand, which, lacking axis or balance can never rise as a hill rises, and lacking center cannot radiate as the least flower can, or the handsome starfish. Assigned to no place, sand moves marginally as the unbelonging would. Yet all through your years sand has held you and shared the sun with you day after day and step by step— how your shoulders blistered in the heat, how your feet tried to glance the surface— you think your time and the sand's time the same. But the loud sea tells you sand is happenstance, like a ghost of forgotten ages of islands. Today, in a haze of salt-glazed overcast sand looms, primeval, terribly mute, perceivable only in adjectives you have devised from shell cores, coral chips, flakes of light and the deep dead calm.

48

Sandbars Morning slants down on the sandbars in the bay. They lie there freshly rippled and smoothly rounded and serene, as if perfection of design would keep them there forever. But they will go under when the waves of the big tide come sweeping in with an onshore wind. And they will resurface under the next assenting sky, rising in new configurations, regrouped and aligned with fresh nets of the sea, losing or gaining sand in intertidal mediation. Today they sieve down the sun to dry their crusts of flotsam or mudwash from a stream. They will redraw their contours with the cutting wind, and hold the clamor of the outer ocean gendy in the smallest bells of bay water. Dividing the currents, balancing the surges, they flatten each rough hour to a sheet of foam and vapor, achieving a horizontal plane for the tending of calm, and for the elegant flow of equilibrium.

49

Ways to the Sea

Along the cliffed coast you saw how the wind, blocked by lava rock walls, veers to flow the long way over sedimentary beach lanes. Rows of shored stones dulling between tides wait for the cover of water. The red-footed booby on its ledge high above the crystal dazzle of the bay, the sky hooded over its eyes, the sea flattened in its gaze, braces to dive into the first surfacing finned shadow. Once, after school, down the haul-cane road, you saw the stream sifting its way through rafts of coconut husk and kukui nuts, the wash of hillslope gardens destined for the shore. Your days seemed like beach morning glory vines that creep node by node toward the seaside to root into the weather of outer seasons. You would leave your village, the sidewalk grids, the clipped panax hedges, the clicking meters and the mountains with their creased shadows.

5°

You remember a night when all the village lights failed, and you saw, far off, the phosphorescent glow of sea margins. One day you turned seaward, and came to this beach. The strangely empty beat you hear is the ocean drumming its endings. Reefs rise and shatter along the lapidary of chance. Your tracks crumble among shell chips and reed sticks, and the wind has shredded your thoughts. One by one the words you came with have left you to join the vast monotone of sand. In your nakedness the shore receives you, and time and weather, circling intently over you, assay you for calcium, pith, salt and silica.

Si

Phyla

Slatted in verticals, sand-honed, time-severed, the sky falls in with you at the edge of the river by the delta. You are wading through floats of algae and schools of mosquito fish. You dive into slanted mirrors. Clots of ova undulate between chlorophyll firmaments. Tadpoles lead you down to dark ledges of ooze. Skeins of tidewater, like crab nets, weave you to mid-depth along caves of shrimp. You probe the haunting afterglow of unremembered habitats. Flow and vortex, moult and spore, larvae, corm, in one headlong current you are washed deep into phyla that knew you once, long ago. You are nestled in colonies of beaded zoophytes, and suctioned among limpets to primordial rock. Stolons of swamp reed cradle you as you burrow into your dream. And you will wake, recalling space so clear and pure you called it light. You return to your plains, to hard deserts of shale, to terrain with hills from which you could sing to the sun. And there will be that great sky overhead, that all through your tenure strews its glitter down, marking your domain.

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Night Sea Each night as you lay down to sleep you reviewed your place on the island, remapping the boundaries of your personal landscape. Your north side a headland with eight houses on it, at its base the old breakwater of broken cement. Your south a beach curving for two miles, all sand except for a reef so gentle you can almost hear the breathing of coralheads. West, miles behind your pillow, the wild mountains heavy with cumulus and myths and jungle portents. And spanning your east, past the meadow and dunes, the sea, faithful to your surveillance, always there in a band of blue, or white some days, or black and invisible as in this night. But the sea has its own time and course. In the deep dark, at the first cosmic tilt, it pours down the channels of the planet, sweeping out onto the farthest coastal borderlands. What straits and inlets it swirls into! Ice caves and warm harbors, trenches runneled with kelp, peninsulas tolling in fog, splayed shoreforms more fanciful than pelagic creatures lit in a dream. And before morning comes, the sea returns to you, to lie down, staid and still, looking for all the world like a blueprint of a map.

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The Band of the Sea

It is as you said it would be: an island in the middle of the sea with flowers raucous as mynahs, the days falling without sequence, and green fanning down the gulches like floodwater. Villages run into each other, exchanging sprawl patterns as casually as hills sharing their streams and shadows. I tried counting the rains and forecasting the weekend, but the complex winds and the changing tilt of cliffs would not allow me. Somewhere beyond Waipahe'e I stumbled into red valleys. I heard the shama singing in the koa wilds. I could have joined the errant and the placeless. But today it came to me: how firm the band of the sea as it rings the island, how intolerant of the loose outer rocks at Ke'e, how stern as it girds the young beaches of Moloa'a where feral dogs race over the ephemeral dunes.

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Waipouli Reef

Day after day you are swirled into the sound of coral breathing and foam spilling, and your eyes are rounded to the myopia of butterflyfish rippled between algae and limpets. Your reef has spun you into its matrix. You circle with cowrie and urchin and the black crab, your perimeters the warm Waipouli eddies, tracks of eel and rings of shorestained flotsam. You have memorized the vugs and juts of reef rock and the temperature of each tidal flow. Long clouds stream overhead. They are not for you. They bear climates for far vast places. Last night in the orbit of October you heard the arctic plover singing the limidess sea. And where continents slept beyond the oceanic night the horizon snapped, and far coasts flooded in to you.

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Pacific Geology North Sea Survival Homestead

"Erosion, Lobster Cove" Ink on paper 10 x 13.5 in.

Bikini

W e ride into the stare of the sea. W e land on the island strewn with ravens, the shoreline reefless, the dunes crossed with witches' brooms. W e hope to encounter old facts, fact of water pouring from grooved stone, persistence of certain tubers and corms, buds shining from twisted bark, and in the tangle of second growth an evolution of flowers, morning glory that had veined out from blue into pink and was about to show new reds, and we'll go diving for shells, renaming them after lost villages or angels of that lost time, and we'll be wary of spines and stings and poisons, and compare all the small survivals, and search in mud banks, under tailings of ore, in lava tunnels, in the layers of fallen bark for all the creatures in hiding that have come through somehow. But now over the beach, on taut black wings, the ravens, crying sanctuary, sanctuary, circle the caves, the raw gulches, watching us, as we take our first inland steps again.

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Gathering Seaweed

Finally we have reached the coast. It was a long walk through brown forests and valleys of orange mist. Yesterday we crossed gashed hills and looked back at mounds of tar steaming in the dumps. Here at the margin of beach pea and angelica the shore begins. Cores of landforms lie here, hollows of sandstone, wind in the cores, a hum we remember. Boulders rounded to roll if the balance fails nest on uncertain shadows. Crevices buzz with flotsam, feathers and bones, iridescence of endings in a seepage of mixed waters. Dendrites and the flowers of calcite, whelk, limpet and barnacle cling to their riffles, riding, riding the swift flumes of their orbit.

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In tidewater pools at the next level down, kelp, laver, dulse, wrack, in such splendor as of sky rayed to seadark arcing. Kelp, laver, dulse, wrack. Gardens that suns and moons have eddied over, that reefs have won from the vast swirl. And now at the edge of the kingdom of algae we enter the rhythmic gardens to gather some fronds. We enter in our skins of cadmium, with our claws of lead, with our sweat of mercury, with our feces of black oil.

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Shells

In moon shells on the dry flat sand time, oceanic, died, coiled.

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In Micronesia

It was in the Marshalls a wave took a village and overwhelmed a lagoon. I think of coralheads drowning hard, intaglio faces and flowered fingers burnished all night to common reef. I think of ghost crabs swept to enormous salt, clawing the moaning sand, and of the atoll cracking, the wave spilling into the dread dreams of islanders who slept between turtle tracks and the lanes of phosphorous. The storm wave must have been slow to die, riding the heave of Micronesia, returning to the troughs of seamounts. I think of them now, out fishing again, with glass-bottom drums that flatten the sea, with nets dripping diamonds of the noon sun. Eel and shark back in their lairs, weaving across speckled caves, painting dazzling equators on their private seas.

From Meadow Rue

From meadow rue to seven rocks you'll find a path to the rippled mud high tide floods over. Fractions of ringed rock invert to divide the spills and splashes of sky. A site at the merging line will drown twice daily, but will rise into landscape when the tide ebbs, and flash what may be signals. From one day to the next, aware of flood and rip, of rue and rock, we shout our thesis of margins, our footfall staked out in dotted lines, our mirrors, our words flashing back. Over the limp banners of the salt meadow we sing of territory, and cry over landmarks toppling on shale, and cairns dashed to dust. Who would recall how long ago in some forlorn time we left the tide to have a look at it, exiling ourselves forever among dry craters in this dry uneven wind.

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Crawling

If I had come here on an earlier day I would be crawling over ashes and cinder, breathing sulphur, crouching among lichens, wary of the spider and the clacking gecko, watching the scorpion on its harsh dry scamper, wondering which among us would make it. Today after a week of rain the millipede glistens across my path, pulling a sheet of dampness over its tracks, mold and spore and the drizzle of compost its atmosphere, surviving nicely, with nothing to spare. In those arenas through which I move, floodlight of the sun, camouflage of night, which of the creatures will keep pace with me— the angular ones with daggers quicker than death, the metallic ones with mica wings to split the sun, the soft secret ones ovular in froth? I see them, here and now, barbs on their backs, ready with venom or hooks or spittle, crawling in cunning or timidity, in daring or mimicry, crossing my paths and weathers, lurking in the shadows of my trees, or flying over me in proud dense clouds, singing here we are, here we are.

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Moon

Moon, breaking, dust for the solar wind. Or it might ignite, finally, and singe the tatters of infinity. Now, proud, a night-blooming cereus. In the dawn, a residue of thorns.

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The Ironwoods

At the south end of the shifting bay along the shoreline that's beginning to fail, four ironwoods, rooted there for more than twenty years, face an oceanfront death by toppling some time this month. Tonight, full moon, I will look at the shining face over the ocean, at the eye commanding from bleak craters, at the countenance of iron pressing its stare onto the loose wayward sea to order high tide and a charge of breakers. I will hear the frenzy of mullet leaping, the battering of reefs and the scurry of ghost crabs retreating to the upper dune line. I will hear a heavier pounding on sand and louder exhalations. High surf tonight. This may well be the night when one wave, running more fully, could undo the last roothold of one of the ironwoods, and bring it down to death by moonlight.

High Tide Wait for high tide at noon. The sea claims this bank of sand then. The ledge blackens and slides under in a slow tilt of crowns and spangles. Down in the littoral fields shocks of light shake the deep kelp and swords flash. Farness rides in on windrows strewing thunder and diatoms into the coils of the whelk. The tide comes in. It takes rockweed and sandbar. It bends the crimped line of land. Land is one side, sea is darkness, and sky is an orb. The waves sweep wide over a scatter of the bones and hollows of the seared and the spent, over the shards of the misbegotten. In the tremble of new edges you see the desperate starts and revisions and the flashing, as untried phyla in scintillant inches of leap flip over, to die from one look at the sky. 70

The Quiet Side of the Island On the quiet side of the island in sugarcane irrigation ditches boulders have emerged with veins of sea mud. You might watch for other signs. The hau groves in Keahapana seem to be moving into the streambed of the old bridge, foretelling, perhaps, a third dry season. On the road to upper Wailua, another falling rock warning has been posted. The leached hills of Hala'ula crease and fold into their faulted chasms the way each hibiscus blossom wrinkles into its gaping shadow at sunset. Polyp by polyp the reef at 'Aliomanu blinks like a receding galaxy. Early mornings on the beaches file-fish have been found in great numbers, a black moon cupped in each stark eye.

Other Strategies And now in the thinning spread of light I feel the afternoon approaching, shapeless as a stranger. It lumbers over the horizon, shadow ahead of its cloud. I must name it before it names me. Or I could deny it. There are other strategies, I hear. The hau tree will curl outward to cup the late radiance, dripping it into spectacular flowers that glow blood-red into the evening. Or, up in the mountains, outcroppings of ridge stone can forge the gold light into extra weather. Mineral, chasm, mist and the hours erode in unison softly in a slowed season. I could go into the light in the company of the unassigned, playing ripples of the bay, spinning, sparkling, pooling identities and our salt heritage, glint, eddy, jetsam, spore of algae, drifting in and out, becoming tidal and intertidal, never to know where the day goes, or what it is.

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Ghost Dogs of Hata 'ula Islander, surrounded, staring over the rim of the channel, living under schedules of cane fire and roadwork signs, the vast Pacific taunts you as it flows unbounded, rhymed to an unremitting horizon and timed only to the recurrences of the moon. If only your greenseeded fields could grow forever into the reaches of your tropical latitudes the way the plovers of Alaska bind their north and south into a continuous season. The hills of the coastal plain where you were born have been stripped of their alluvial cover, and now erode down to the reefs where you used to fish. Coral beds lie under brown silt. You have seen the broad slopes of Nounou shrivel through programs of excavation, dying the mud death of leveling. Along the road up to Koke'e there's a slow illness, the gashes of last year still bleeding red oxide, the new blackberry gone mad up and down the ravines, and the rainforest birds pale as specters in fog. Tonight. Stars over the island. Seasons ago white firangipani, jasmine and gardenia sprinkled the night yards of the sugarcane camp at Hala'ula, half a mile upwind. Listen. Over the abandoned fields you might hear ghost dogs howling through empty plantation alleys. 73

In the Vastness of Zero

It hasn't been the same since that night on a beach when someone said there were so many stars up there let us forget numbers. Simply equate infinity with zero, and relax. You felt the cold sand under you, and saw shores beyond shores. Waves curled gently toward the arc of the driftwood fire. When the tide rose and wet your feet, the logs sputtered and crumbled, sending sparks into the sky. You were drifting among stars, and sinking in the vastness of zero. Find your way to one, you told yourself. Count one. Like the butterflyfish that you remember of all the clouds and clouds of reef fish at 'Anini, the one that swam in and out among your fingers as you floated so very still while the serrated miles of the North Shore flowed past.

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And that June night in your summer cottage on Monhegan Island. Reading Aiken by gaslight you came upon a moth pressed between two pages. How magical and silvery it was, like fish scale, like a petal of snow-in-summer, as if the long wintered silence of the island had saved this talisman for you. The night outside ticked away with fireflies and crickets and the rattle of bayberry. And you were alone in the space between oceans, with a silver moth imprinted on a line of a poem to mark your place under the multitudinous sky.

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Pacific Geology North Sea Survival Homestead

"Fallen Rock Sunset 2" Ink and graphite on paper 18 x 15 in.

Groundwater

So we have built our house here on the lowest slope of a hill eroded down from distant mountains shrouded in storm clouds half an island away. We marked out a rectangle of raw land, bulldozed an acre of scrub koa and wild guava, framed and roofed a structure, planted an orchard, and called it our place. Doves have found us, and one day a rainbow came down to our hill. We are host to weather—usually a sun too harsh, and winds too salt and dry for the potted orchids. But the ferns and gingers sparkle, as if tapped into a secret. The mango and star-apple saplings must be sending roots down past the hard clays probing for groundwater. Some nights I hear the rain in the mountains flowing down into the sluices of plateaus, seeping into deep fault zones, through strata of lavas and seams of olivine ores, trickling into aquifers and rising into our personal night to vein our land with the blood of mountains, reclaiming the remnant soils and surfaces.

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The Rainbow Shower

I'm choosing a site in the yard for a rainbow shower tree, and I must gauge the path of the sun and the direction of the wind. Will the house shade this spot too long each afternoon? Will it shield it from the Kona storms? If the soil here in Keahapana is acid, as it was in Maine, I'll have to add lime, and as for drainage, I can throw in a layer of crushed seashells, as I did for the lilac I planted on that other island years ago. I'll dig a good deep hole this time. In my hands is the potted air-layered sapling— "smooth gray bark, compound leaves, at maturity producing huge panicles of blossoms ranging from pink or yellow to copper and crimson, its falling petals carpeting the ground, reflecting the branches above." Pick and shovel. And my hands scooping the loose soil back into the hole over the tender and fragile roots— roots that were pot-bound, tangled in endless circling, roots that I had to unwind, prune lightly, and spread out carefully.

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I have firmed the soil. I stand beside the little tree. A moist wind swirls around me in the slanting afternoon, sprinkling rain and specks of light— yellows and golds, dazzling coppers and deep reds, like the colors of the rainbow over Keahapana, over these hills that I'm calling home.

My Kealia Landscape

If you ask me what the place looks like here at Kealia where I have a studio with a view of pastureland slopes and hills of sugarcane, I'll say that the day begins with white light from the sea, titanium-white impastos. Then a wide wash of green comes rippling over the fertile hills. Evening is a glaze of ultramarine, of peace. My seasons are the schedules for growing mango, lychee and sour-sop, acerola and papaya. When to lime and feed, when to water and mulch. My neighbor tells me that once, in a long drought, the earth parted, as if lavas deep down had rekindled. Fruit flies are everywhere. My pheromone-baited traps should kill them off, at least the males. And from the gully down the road where there had been a landslide I gathered pails of sharp cinder gravel to line my pots of cuttings and keep the night toads out.

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Pomelos, in a glow of jade, are finally ripening after a siege of black sooty mold. In the dark thickets of plumeria white-eyed mejiros skip about, picking out white mealy bugs— a picture for scratchboard. Globes of passion fruit sway on the vine, turning from acid-green to hansa-yellow to gold, then to drop weighted with worms. But I was not prepared for what I saw yesterday. A huge rain fell. It woke the soils above Kealia. It cut raw swaths of lava-red mud into the green green fields of cane. Two opposite colors in sudden juxtaposition! The hill flared and trembled and shouted— as Vincent's world did at Aries when he breathlessly lathered cadmium-red between chrome-green stripes "so I can tell you," he wrote, "about the violent passions lurking all around me."

The Hills of East KauaH From the pasturelands you see the plains of Kapahi. They are terraces of alluvium seeped down from the hills after each rain. They are clay pans and water-strung soils on basal rock. Crestlines of hills ripple across the sky, long waves spilling forests and red oxides, rearing into sudden crag and rounding down, to begin the endless map of mound and swale. Some days, between rains, you feel the mantled earth underneath where congealed lavas lie, four million years of quenched magma, pillows of pahoehoe, and the cold sleep of 'a'a, layered in dark rhyme with the landscape in the sun, with the corrugations of climate, with a sky that this hour is folding down to rest in the notch between the hills of Kalepa and Nounou.

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LilikoH

Leave your beach and come to a climate higher inland. Come empty and wordless. Come and fill with the talk and lilt of mauka country. Monkeypod clouds will hover over you to drum down showers intermittently. We'll break into walls of emerald leaves and pull down shining guavas and rose-apples, and listen to the mist that lives there. It will play us a language of rippled stone and flecked water. Wiliwili, tree of red bead seeds. 'Ie'ie, spiked flower. 'O'o, a bird of a lost time. 'Ohi'a 'ai, clusters of garnet fruit splashing into swift streams. We'll walk through honohono grass for a mile to the mountains where the old sky crawls down to sleep with ua-loa the long rain, and all the way back we'll hear passion fruit vines dripping drops of rain cloud to leaf, and leaf to leaf to leaf, liliko'i, liliko'i, liliko'i.

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Humus

Earthworms, castings, vents.

Fumaroles in the young land of humus.

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Constellations of Aphids

From galaxies to flowers, across compositae, the gold sifts down to fleabane, to wedelia, to coneflower and beggar tick, dusting to pollen, glint, and the spore of the sun. Through the night, the tracings of snail, stencils of leaf miner, scrawl on bark. Morning unrolls its parchment, a chart of voyages and forays, constellations of aphids. On the flat graphs of clay, prints of the windfallen. Java-plum, frangipani, bract, pod, petal. Grass staggers on angular paths, diagramming veins of lost rains. Here under the mound of compost, all the greens smothered to gray. Under this press of layered weather breaks the lightning of mycelium, darting from dim galaxies of mold.

Inside the Island

What you must not expect to find here is the simplicity of the seaside where you come from. The inside of the island is wild and unruly, but there's a clarity to it that will come to you later. First you will be walking on red clay or in red mud. Not the red of crabshell or the sandy soil hibiscus, but the bleed of minerals that began as molten lava. Be careful not to slip on mangoes rotting on the trail, or trip over splayed roots shadowy as your reef octopus. You will descend into hollows of black soil, the residue of generations of candlenut groves, of fern, sedge, and all the weathers that lingered and died here. High over the river, eucalyptus, monkeypod and woodrose, entangled, grapple and claw skyward, each in its singular hunger for the sun. If it rains hard over mile-high Wai'ale'ale you'll witness the symbiotic ritual of rock and water as the sheer cliff, honed and sharply grooved, brings the falls down in noble verticals. Streams will surround you, streaking past you or curling through moss, or waiting for the next tilt of the floor. In the troughs of foothills, water rallies to its purpose: mining stone, moving it and tumbling it to smooth pebbles. It is slow work, and water will summon time to help get it done, and perhaps to send some stones down to your white sand shore.

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From Kilauea Point

The horizon looks landward from the line where the sea stops. It seeks the level of my eyes. From this headland I can see it matching me, assigning me a span of the ocean. Here on Kilauea Point, where Kaua'i turns north, I look down at the cliff darkening the deep, at sharp crags fallen to rounding by water, at double whirlpools sliding into lava caves. All I see below swims in camouflage, aggregates of glint and dip and swirl, agates of sound, sounds without echo, leaving me unanswered, rock among dry rocks. But when I look across the astounding ocean before over striated calm, wind rake, a shift of glare, I can tell you of the fact of the horizon. It is clear and even, a firm line drawn in a glance. I say that under this day's wide sky the horizon confirms me. I have placed it, and it places me.

Return to First Land

Night has come down again to erase the landscape of all its names and forms. The two bracketing hills that measured a mile across our window are gone, dissolved with their ironwood and canefield oudines. The river that centered our view in its diagram blurs in a sway of dark matter. The two roads intersected in firm geometry flow into a pathless time with the shoreline and the row of powerline posts. Only a dark undulation of earth lies before us, mass without image or frame. Where are the ornaments and stacks, the signs and banners of territory? Or the grids and lines for perspective, the overlappings, the files of distance? It may be that in this dark spell is our return to our first land, terrain that began when we began, entire and indivisible as it must have been then.

9*

Full Moon Time

What has not been explained is the subsidence of the earth at full moon time, when the moon ascends full white over the plains of my coastland, erasing the river of its murmur and its surges and laying a film of ashen lavender over the village. Tonight the hills around me flatten onto strata of old flaked stone, and the green field I furrowed is a sulfur-pocked caldera of another time. The long ridges and their winding roads have disappeared with their names, and the crestline of forests that sang of altitude is a veil of unmoving vapor. Where waves touch shore ghost crabs crawl over fallen moonlight. What has become of the delta shimmering with fish? Is it now the luminous veins that girdle the sky? See how flocks of clouds gather around the moon, waiting to be touched and ignited, to flash into pictures and alphabets, into animals, arrows and alarums. Such imagery I shall gather as language as I wander into scattered stations of the deep night, asking what light means, what light does.

In the Slant of Morning

Leveling the frayed waves of a long night, the horizon glares over the channel and morning comes headlong firom the sea. Morning equalizes the stages of the island, the peaks and plateaus, the old slopes with tangles of forests, and the pale east beach layered on black bedrock. Morning brings gold for everyone, strewing its largess in wavelets of light. Which part is mine? Which for the hesitant dunes? Zebra doves in the cold weeds search for their share. Old Sleeping Giant, islanded in rock, flexes a gold knee. A crab spider in the paperbark tree dangles new amber. The dim toad impastoed in mud foregoes its share. A talus cliff, one face sheer, the other creviced, turns ruddy, turns ashen in its angled morning. Down on the shore a boulder hoards its small warmth, folding it into cracks and vugs of its ancient rind. Remember. Night is your element and light your gratuity. See how earth keeps the dark and squanders the day. A leaf-lean forest, refuting its lengthening shadows, rides across the hill to detain the sun. You will return to the cave where the dark is.

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Stopping Before Olohena

After you have spent half your life praising mountains and probing the canyon and cliff regions of the island for landscapes to record in your book of spectacles, one day you are surprised by a stretch of land somewhere beyond Kapahi, about a mile from Olohena, where the island has leveled down to a small plain, as if the endemic ridges and restless slopes had decided to lie down for a long rest, or geology itself, tired of its role, had discarded its program of ascent, tilt, break and jolt, of juggling pinnacles and gullies and rainclouds, and had left this place alone. Then land must have said to its soils and gravels: let us be simple, let us remember what we once knew about the sea, the ease, the peace of flatness, the single dimension. Let the bedding ground sift mineral and oxygen and loam until all voids and juts are gone, so the cow grass can spread its green cover evenly, and the low wind can flow without deflection, and the morning can paint the field in one wash of light, and terrain can lie down as seamless as the sea.

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Being Here on the Seventh

The morning is beginning with three sanderlings whistling and a sun caught in the darkest of the ironwood trees. It is Wednesday the seventh of January, and I am here. I am about to say that the old planet deals out placements and schedules fortuitously, but something tells me the map of my presence has been stamped on earth with the same precision as that accorded each root and flower, each migratory bird. I can hear the wind rising. It flows through the gap between that black headland and the inlet, bringing salt dew for the amaranth on the dunes and a day's measure of erosion for the cliffed hill. No errand is forgotten, though the earth in its orbiting has its own course to keep. Out there the horizon, dense with distance, releases its hold one wave at a time, each meticulously launched to arrive at a spot on the island white-curled in a certain configuration. I think of the tides that have swept over me day after day through all the seasons of my years, always bringing me to the place meant for me each time, such as now, today, and here.

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Teach Me Web

Spider catches the fly but not the wind the dust. Garden catches the rain but not the flood the downpour. River catches the moon only the moon of all the night. Everything flying toward me shatters me. So much flowing I am flooded I drown. All the night sky falling I am struck down. Teach me web, spider. Teach me filter, earth. Teach me mirror, river.

The Dark That Folds the Leaves

T h e dark that folds the leaves of the monkeypod and seals the rifts of our hillside gardens unfurls the immense hemisphere of stars for our gaze. It will not let us sleep. Each night begins our endless search. Tonight, from the North Star again, we take a new path, parting the clusters and grouping the stars into names, matching them with our color charts, the reds and blues and the five luminosities of white. We have learned much, but nothing of significance, nothing that could prove affinity, though we know that the atoms of our bodies are the same atoms that spark the cosmos. There are signals too remote for us to read, and some too terribly plain to fit into our words and gauges. W e are on the verge of identifying some roaming specters. At first we mistook them for sound-shrouded nebulae but now we think they could be bands of redshift, or better yet, the orbiting past returning to us, haloed, with messages to free us from our desultory probing.

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There are indications that as it is with forms on earth stars follow an appointed time to an ultimate dark. But what are endings when light brings beginnings so unstintingly? Each reentering star renews us as if to tell us that our destiny rides in the divinity of light. There are nights when it seems the teeming sky has nothing to do with us, and that what we see is nothing more than chance dust lit in a chance wind. On such a night we might as well accept the separateness as a blessing, and rest our yearnings, and be leaf, and fold down, and sleep.

Night on a Hill

The spell of this wonderful night in August lures us onto the path to the hillside by the dark sea to look at stars burning bright over the island. The Archer, lean as steel, draws his arrow at Scorpius, and our Milky Way flows in viscous undulations like algae in surf. There are voices in the sky tonight, like the voices you heard when you were young and could find ways to have a dialogue. What you hear now are whispers—phrases and half-words arriving like echoes from banks of the Zodiac. You know that stars and the earth turn in the same light, and that the language of light dips in the idioms of your own terrain—water and rock, rifts, magma, continents of steam, and whirlwinds of ash. You have been taught how great fires spin into spheres and quench to agates of ice, and that flares and pulsations are energy that could die and be called geological forms. You have photographed them and abstracted them in graphs.

ioo

Walking this incandescent night through pasture grass you tremble in wonder and anticipation like a new moth. The fragrance of wild lantana haunts you with each step. Cocklebur scratches you, like the etch of sudden stars that streaked from the Pleiades into your life long ago. Your antennae, tuned to the magnificence of a sky will catch nothing more than mirror images of your world, and also, perhaps, the persistent chaos of your surf.

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Acknowledgments are due to the following publications in which some of these poems have previously appeared: Bamboo Ridge, The Hawaii Writers Quarterly Chaminade Literary Review Chester H. Jones Foundation National Poetry Competition Winners, 1988 Hapa Hawaii Review Kaimana, Literary Arts Hawaii Manoa, A Pacific Journal of International Writing The Paper Poetry Hawaii: A Contemporary Anthology