Poemunity — your poem community

He marked the page with a match and fell asleep in mid-kiss, while I, a queen bee in a disturbed hive, stay up and buzz: half a kingdom for a honey drop, half a lifetime for a tender word! His face, half turned. Half past midnight. Half past one.

I’m so tired of pretending each gesture is meaningless, that the clattering of niu leaves and the guttural call of birds overhead say nothing. There are reasons why the lichen and moss kākau the niu’s bark, why this tree has worn an ahu of ua and lā since birth. Scars were carved into its trunk to record the mo‘olelo of its being by the passage of insects becoming one to move the earth, speck by speck. Try to tell them to let go of the niu rings marking each passing year, to abandon their only home and move on. I can’t pretend there is no memory held in the dried coconut hat, the star ornament, the midribs bent and dangling away from their roots, no thought behind the kāwelewele that continues to hold us steady. There was a time before they were bent under their need to make an honest living, when each frond was bound by its life to another like a long, erect fin skimming the surface of a sea of grass and sand. Eventually, it knew it would rise higher, its flower would emerge gold, then darken in the sun, that its fruit would fall, only to ripen before its brown fronds bent naturally under the weight of such memory, back toward the trunk to drop to the sand, back to its beginnings, again. Let this be enough to feed us, to remember: ka wailewa i loko, that our own bodies are buoyant when they bend and fall, and that the ocean shall carry us and weave us back into the sand’s fabric, that the mo‘opuna taste our sweet.

The body of the boy who took his flight off the cliff at Kilcloher into the sea was hauled up by curragh-men, out at first light fishing mackerel in the estuary. “No requiem or rosary” said the priest, “nor consecrated ground for burial,” as if the boy had flown outside the pale of mercy or redemption or God’s love. “Forgive them, for they know not what they do,” quoth Argyle to the corpse’s people, who heard in what he said a sort of riddle, as if he meant their coreligionists and not their sodden, sadly broken boy. Either way, they took some comfort in it and readied better than accustomed fare of food and spirits; by their own reckoning: the greater sin, the greater so the toll. But Argyle refused their shilling coin and helped them build a box and dig a grave. “Your boy’s no profligate or prodigal,” he said, “only a wounded pilgrim like us all. What say his leaping was a leap of faith, into his father’s beckoning embrace?” They killed no fatted calf.  They filled the hole.

I swallowed the sweet thing in a dream. I woke up heavy. I said, what’s the matter with you. I said, stop seeing what’s the matter with me. I ran to/from only moving one frantic eye. Something snitched. Then back to the argument. It is more acceptable to steal from the ether. When you said, we take matters into our own hands. I didn’t start the day with a ritual. Again. Twenty days and counting! I said, I was supposed to address my wrongs to you. The sweetgrass still in its plastic. Keep it there for its poetry? Then the driftwood resting on my father’s ashes. Well, you said, ecstasy from a fluted throat. Ha. As if there were presence enough in me to notice, before this. I said, I’m less angry now that you don’t exist. Then the aha moment announced. Whistling nothing like wind through fistulae. That happens here. Left to my own devices, I said. As if language were a refuge. As though the sound of walls.

and then Tony showed us the lake where he had thrown some of his sadness last summer and it had dissolved like powder so he thought maybe the lake could take some of the radiant, aluminum kind he had been making lately. And it did. It was a perfect lake, none of the paint had chipped off, no bolts showing, the arms that Dante and Virgil would have to hack through not even breaking the surface. Mumbling Italian to itself, it had climbed down two wooden stairs back to the beach now that the rains were done. How strange to be water so close to the ocean yet the only other water you get to talk to comes from the sky. Maybe this is why it seems so willing to take on Tony’s sadness which sometimes corrodes his friends, which is really many different sadnesses, smaller and smaller, surrounded by more and more space, each a world and at its core an engine like a bee inside a lily, like buzzing inside the bee. It seems like nothing could change its color although we couldn’t tell what color it was, it kept changing. In the summer, Tony says he comes down early each day and there’s no one around so the lake barely says a thing when he dives in and once when his kitchen was on fire in Maine and he was asleep, the lake came and bit his hand, trying to drag him to safety and some nights in New Mexico, he can hear it howling, searching for him in the desert so we’re glad Tony has this lake and we promise to come back in August and swim with him across, maybe even race.

He sees through stone he has the secret eyes this old black one who under prison skies sits pressed by the sun against the western wall his pipe between purple gums the years fall like overripe plums bursting red flesh on the dark earth his time is not my time but I have known him in a time gone he led me trembling cold into the dark forest taught me the secret rites to make it with a woman to be true to my brothers to make my spear drink the blood of my enemies now black cats circle him flash white teeth snarl at the air mashing green grass beneath shining muscles ears peeling his words he smiles he knows the hunt    the enemy he has the secret eyes he sees through stone

Fortune has brought me down—her wonted way— from station great and high to low estate; Fortune has rent away my plenteous store: of all my wealth honor alone is left. Fortune has turned my joy to tears: how oft did fortune make me laugh with what she gave! But for these girls, the kata’s downy brood, unkindly thrust from door to door as hard— Far would I roam and wide to seek my bread in earth that has no lack of breadth and length. Nay, but our children in our midst, what else but our hearts are they, walking on the ground? If but the breeze blow harsh on one of them my eye says no to slumber all night long.

He was touched or he touched or she did and was, or they were and would. Or the room could, its three doors, two windows or the house on a slant touching, touched by the drift down street, cars pressing quick or slowing. All along the town touched a river, the river the filth falling through it. What was clean— a source pure as rumor—a shore touching lake touched by wind above, and below, a spring. All touch blindly further water. That blue touching blacker regions in the sea so weirdly solitary, each to under, to every sideways past deeper, where nowhere.

“I have not seen one who loves virtue as he loves beauty.” —Confucius Dolorous, here he made his stand Like those who are beaten, Behind, the mountains, and in front, the sea, To the west a rock by the brown river eaten. Here beauty went along the strand Smashing green waves against the white sand. “Beyond the rock there, that’s his thatch.” So spoke up a neighbor. “And you’ll be finding leather string on latch And him inside, at peace from labor.” So he was run in, the fox to his earth, He the old reaver, warm by his hearth, But where was the booty, the gems and doubloons Filched from fat merchants by tropical moons? He, of all pirates prime hierophant, No swords, no silver, no silk of Levant? “Four things,” he answered, “of all things that are: A rock, a river, a tree and a star!” This is his wisdom? He welcomed me ill; I passed by the tree and strove up the hill. This is the saying of one wise as he? A river, a rock, a star and a tree? This is the place, the shrine of the sage, Who lived his last days with beauty for wage. Here’s where the tree was long ago humbled, And a space points us out where granite has crumbled. The river is empty, and a wind sweeps the stones; The stars are not whiter than freebooter’s bones.

Were you but lying cold and dead, And lights were paling out of the West, You would come hither, and bend your head, And I would lay my head on your breast; And you would murmur tender words, Forgiving me, because you were dead: Nor would you rise and hasten away, Though you have the will of wild birds, But know your hair was bound and wound About the stars and moon and sun: O would, beloved, that you lay Under the dock-leaves in the ground, While lights were paling one by one.