The Wind at the end

There was a wind

that begins with suspicion

and by the end

turns a whole valley black .

It passes through the realm of sleep

whispering through

the grasses of a past

that couldn’t be kept underneath.

Like a subtle stirring

in the sea before

the approaching

hurricane turns

the peace and sanctity

to waves of heat

breathing deeply through the trees.

Before there was fire there was fear

and it seared itself into consciousness,

it was insatiable, inescapable.

Dry tinder cracks the hills

and exposed cinder

scratched an inferno

from the billowing smoke

blackening the skies.

It reached the fear lines

on the edges of community,

a vestige of safety

if there was only time.

This wind that sets the blaze,

that uncaged the phoenix

to fly unobstructed

torching everything in its wake.

Tongues of fire

speak through a riot of color,

exploding from under

the once coastal quiet

that becomes unnaturally vacant.

In a swarth of red dirt and anger

that grasps and spreads like a fever,

confusion reigned

and in the calamity

comes the realization that all is gone

as if wiped from memory.

We’re caught in cycles

of endless media scrutiny,

a cacophony of lies where

the opportunistic, disguised as relief,

know the future is malleable and undefined.

Once the dust settles

and the millions of eyes

now fixed on the wildfire

inevitably look away,

the pressure is applied.

2.

I’m wrested awake

as the wind grows in intensity.

The kakea of Manoa,

born out of craters,

let loose from fissures

and overflowing borders.

It runs through the chimes

making curtains into tides,

great gusts of violence

pressed against the silence

prying all sound not held in place.

The scattering of leaves joins

the vagrant scraping of pavement.

Like a deranged rainbow

that flashed across the valley,

this arc diving into the sea,

only to come back around relentlessly.

I wasn’t aware

that this shared wind between islands

carried death on its other end.

Its howling a hallmark

of the recent insomnia,

where the jarring of sirens

brought luminous reflections

to the kitchen windows

like a colorful portal

into the collective pain,

a historic pattern of

old wounds opening

a sleepless suspicion

that it will take everything in the end.

This wind is no longer

in the hands of those

who were born here,

who know the scent as

it runs through the grasses

like an incense in the sacred places.

Now there is only mourning

and burnt out endings,

everything swept into the aftermath

of questionable decisions.

Is there disaster capital

in the passage of wind that

erases everything ?

From where will come the revision?

The old banyan, deeply rooted ,

smolders in ash at its base,

yet still shows glimmers of life,

still holds tightly a community’s dreams.

In the deep reaches of its branches,

in the gentle sway

and rhythmic dances

with the trades the

leaves are no longer blackened

you imagine

once the waking nightmare ends

no longer shriveled by death

and the fate of this place

can be determined again by

those within the reach

of her familiar breath.

It is this wind

that will pick everything up again.

In the Intervals

Between childhood and aging,

travelling and settling,

I know our time here is temporary.

Though the tides

tied everything together eternally,

moments rolling in the soft distortion

of ever shifting clouds.

Wanderers, caught by candlelight

become silhouettes

in the snow mansions

of a dissolving union.

All that is transitory

the sky would express lyrically

through the windows of

these communal rooms.

The sturdy peaks pierced through

the ephemeral,

leaving stars and mana

a milky residue

that through the passing

of glittering stones

carried

hundreds of miles

would construct walls

and floating cities.

From the dark of speculation

we’re guided by coral,

shaped by the invisible.

Behind a veil of questions

we’ll ponder reflections

and the abandon staring back

offers no explanation.

Nanmadol.

What remains of the past

an effigy,

an extension of ancestors and

the energy of creation.

We’ll meet in the intervals

of bones and breaking waves,

as true nature stays

parallel

sourced from the ocean,

the largest of liminal space.

Thirsty, the sedentary receives

swells from seasonal rains.

Unstuck from routine,

boats are cast adrift

towards Argos, Phoenicia and Pohnpei,

the disappearing remnants

of another yesterday.

Gliding past the monolithic canvas

walls that do not obstruct the silence

but give rise

to the vines that

obscured entranceways

and distorted time.

The surface

of canals give passage

to the strange light of torches

toying with the senses.

Moments adrift

and winds becalmed

in a labyrinth of choices

pressing forward

through the blanks,

the sunlight through the palms

looking for openings.

As the wind picks up again,

you’ll consider the will and the breadth

to what has been left

upon this petri dish

of life and death.

It tells a story often repeated,

of benevolence and dissolution

crossing over into myth,

that realm of the unseen

and the power

to move everything,

while waiting in the intervals

as always

for it to pass somewhere

between vibration and illumination,

it will be built again.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

Birth

1.

In the beginning,

born out of the emptiness

of dust and red dirt ,

Kukaniloku appears at 4AM

like an oasis

reinforced through the reverence

of royal births for centuries

the energy of extreme duress

focused and juxtaposed

to the serenity of natural forms.

Breathing in and out

of a circular grove,

the nocturnal breeze

animates the eucalyptus trees

as it always has.

Bearing witness

to what remains conduit,

initiating internally,

the way scent

is directly linked to memory .

The tingling of the fingers,

as it feels for release,

pushing hands with the silence.

The sequence of stones,

smooth and inanimate,

rise from verdant fields.

A woman’s profile,

in the latest stage of hapai,

her dark ridges swollen on the horizon

soon giving birth to the sky.

Deep within the

island’s center,

far from our gaze

comes the cries of strays

feral cats, wandering roosters

those sheltering under tent flaps

sound off and give way

as the last gasp of night

turns into day.

2.

In the recesses of

disassembled words,

from out of the rubble

where art is born

and trauma is transformed,

comes the point of release,

and the gradual changes,

no longer fully dark

but understood by degrees.

In the east

light fills in the cracks

like a paint that is applied

to father sky’s canvas,

the first rays of insight.

From the understaining

comes a vision, manifesting in

patchwork images and plucked lichen

that through the sea mist

stressed photosynthesis

changes color

on maritime gravestones.

It textures the illumination

beneath track lights and

on subterranean walls

the picture becomes clearer ;

a verdant field, a pastoral scene

as you step away.

3.

The Cape

was on the edge of

the distant past.

Absorbed in the fog,

disappearing into the landscape

of wood and bog

wandering like a coyote

past Chatham light at dawn.

Beyond the last clapboard cottage,

our eyes meet

as they did across the fire

in the earthen structure of the Wetu.

Wooden benches

facing each other

and in that space you imagine

all that came before, those

surviving in the face of nature.

There was no separation,

until one day we’re scattered

and the gatherings fewer.

Greater is the distance traveled

to celebrate birthdays and origins,

a mother a grandmother,

the sun which warms us

and from whom all have grown

to appreciate each passing moment.

Each time the light is

a deeper hue of gold

as it begins its descent through windows

until absorbed into the sea

and in our eyes

verdant fields grow darker

and this cycle replenishes endlessly

the sense of collective identity

on the edges and in the spaces

where most things

begin and end.

Bottom image is the painting entitled “Ispica 6” by Dominick Takis Sr.

acrylic oil lichen sprayfoam branch media in silicone caulking on canvas.

To view more of his art please refer to this website:

https://dominicktakis.com/

The stream is dry where the past drowns

The stream is dry where the past drowns.

From the banks of the periphery

you see the evidence of drought,

sunken souls singing out

from the hollows and the bellows,

from what once bubbled and rolled

into an expanding perception.

From these narrow glimpses

and desperate attempts at control,

the waters flowed, drunk enough to know

the inner workings of letting go.

The fading lines,

there is no one place where this is told.

The valley’s scarred relief

replayed

through sensory expressions

and psychic impressions.

Stepping outside of time

to get a sense of it going by,

marking our places with

what has slipped away.

Beneath darkened leaves

dormant streams rise to a boil.

Dragging with them the bloody soil,

the dislodged once royal stronghold

falling into a mud slide of being sold.

With every year the past drowns a little more.

You’ll see the disappearing crown land,

the desperate hands

clutching the old ways

to hold off and to withstand

the flood tide of change.

Journeying out the way we came,

access diverted, mauka streams defiled,

land tied in military wire.

Under the glass of sprouting cities,

the high rises higher

until far from sight and mind,

the wai ola slips into disorder .

Without its source , the illusion of pure water

crawling over its course

becomes scraped knees on dry beds,

divorced, torn to shreds.

Knowing not which way is up or down,

we find new ways to drown.

In the annals of progress,

under monuments of ownership ,

crushed beneath metal gates

private signs and moral claims,

The crooked lines are what remains.

Upon this land the insatiable hands

have stamped their imprints.

Their words

certify the abuse,

meandering in circles of misuse,

in lies and lonely streams

that flow through

like a tightened noose

of shadow and loose stone.

As the Masters Move

There is a subtle stirring

in the joints and the bones.

Synchronized to the movements

and the simplicity of forms,

we’re a facsimile to the master’s

gently penetrating power,

their moonlight to the matter

witnessed on the surface of the sea.

In the waves, endless and consistent,

sculpting and breaking down

the hardest resistance in nature,

we’re eased into accepting what is transient.

Like cloud shadow to the grounded,

shaping and conforming to this energy,

which then dissipates.

With a trace of the hands the motions endure.

Anticipating change, the body and mind

becomes supple in time,

wound in many lessons, a serpent’s coiling,

a white crane’s patient stride

as it catches a glimmer from the river,

pulled by the ocean’s tide.

On the end of a bow everything is connected.

So in letting go, without aim,

it still finds the center

the dantian

the space without beginning

without end

where all is initiated.

Through the past and present,

in the vestiges of memory,

the wind moves among the lau hala

like a master weaver.

Shaping and speaking

through plaited leaves

of the humbling way it lays the braids,

completing the edges

only to begin again.

The moon, now a silver sliver,

seen through the trees

of shenandoah.

We’re similarly a tiny glimmer in eternity,

seeking peaks, some sense of purity.

There is always another mountain,

each appearing higher in the distance.

Our lives, shaped by the fires of curiosity,

going forward courageously.

Knowing something of kinetic energy,

the mysterious rhyme and binding entity

that pulls all this together.

There is a vague understanding through intuition

that in pursuing something just out of reach,

in descending to the deserted beach,

one journey succumbs to another’s beginning.

There, in the punctuation of snare drums,

investing in sweat, no longer beneath ceilings,

leaving all regrets before what is unlimited,

you’ll meet yourself in the shadow

of those who came before,

cloud figures on the horizon

coming into form

in which we can follow

through this permeable wrinkle in time.

Crystal Parallel

The shift was palpable.

From the road

through the first layer of trees,

the mind quietly surfaces

somewhere parallel.

Between the notes of a Shama

leading deeper

by beak and by feather,

the lyrical river

initiates the medicine

in the essence of nature

with canopied light

to transcribe the

enigma of moss

on illuminated stone

faces from the past

when you’re no longer alone

in reflection

in pictures and portals

through dark pools

for the outstretched wings

emerging.

With stealth you’ll go

tree to tree

through the valley,

emissary to the summer breeze

that breathes

in one animated pull of the string,

everything is tied together.

Your white feather

was the first light

in the night sky,

woven in the outlines

of mountains,

a temporal indention

in all the transitioning.

The serenity of streams,

the crystal renewal

of movement

that doesn’t cling to branches

or any one position.

Like a worm in the beak

of indecipherable information,

I’ll go with you down valley.

In Wailupe

rock root meandering.

In Moanalua

by the ruin of a grand staircase,

this parallel place

hidden from view,

caressed and cool

ribbon of silence

only broken by song,

caught in the jungle’s mesh

lush beneath palms.

A thrush and the passing rain

will nourish the parched,

far from the city squalor

and those who’ll twist nature

into backdrops,

into what can be quantified,

voices disrupting the silence.

In the nexus of choices,

there are those that lead you back.

Time, with crystalline continuity

becomes a thought,

firm, re-assuring

that I would rather be here than there,

coming to meet

that which is obscure

but never leaves.

Through the Screen Wired Door

Her father was a stranded moon

a faint and far off hue

in the corner of the eye

at a low table and blue stool

set against the sky

beyond the screen wired door

that divides the world from this room.

Solitude sets the angles,

rooftops and distant birds

that primary layer of painted clouds

gracefully waving

as hands clutch the blade

of morning light descending

on the ridge of Le’ahi

as it rises in a diamond above the sea.

He was up early,

walking the rails again,

visible yet pale

as the slightest pain in the legs,

abandoned in outtakes,

in the hint of rain and asphalt,

somewhere a scent,

a self medication

lingers over the absence.

In Banjemin tiger balm eucalyptis,

I’m reminded of your presence.

With oranges and altar incense,

you’ll drift through the corridor.

In sizzling wok and summer evenings,

the past bubbles to the surface.

Brackish thoughts in the kitchen pots

bring invocations of steam

and in the waters the lucid dream

of seeing you sprinkling spices, the final touches.

There’s an ever present wind

that passes through everything.

The chaotic tail whip of the phoenix of myth

or the gentle plumeria scented breeze

that softens the city dissonance,

you knew these contrasts well.

At the base of the valley,

channeled through the gates of Moiliili,

an epicenter of energy and volatility.

Peeling back years of revolution,

like dust from the ceiling fans.

The nights offer no resolution

only the mere suggestion

of shadows in motion.

Silhouettes in jealousy, voices,

rivulets of smoke from an ashtray

drifting in eternity

through the screen wired door

and back again

to animate what remains of you,

merely dormant

dismantling time

until I no longer differentiate

between memory

and the passing of the wind.

In this physical space so long occupied,

l’lI find a continuity

in all the shades you left behind.





This Moon Was a Mirror

1.

I was seeing it through

an enlarged image of my eye.

Magnified

in an optometrist’s portal,

hanging

in the night sky

like a red lantern,

a flowering blood moon

beginning to eclipse.

This thread of lava

upon the edges of sleep,

reveals a mirror,

a thin measure of light

as from a dying star

would accentuate the spheres

on 3AM screens to be

drawn out of cloud cover,

culled from the crude understanding

of dreams, the coincidence

of two orbs,

differing only in scale,

delicately passing

in the dark that reveals

both to each other in time.

2.

Truth was a moon

that waxes and wanes,

receding like the light of certain

smoke obscured beacons,

incoherent

at times skewed like headlights

beaming into forests.

A blinding or illuminating

belief,

at times hardened, until rigid

as a charred landscape

where words offer no traction

in the forgotten fields of history.

Where bonfires

burn all evidence,

blackening the edges

of the past

and what is known.

Nothing is left visible,

no bridge over the swollen flow,

only rock fall and spinning narratives,

headline fear ad infinitum.

Everything appears in transition,

reason is the first to be cast

into volcanic shafts,

covered over by distress

beneath simmering pools

and with each layer

is pushed further under.

3.

Moons above

the dark inlets of sleep,

where beaks seize the dreams

beneath surfaces.

The sunken pebbles,

the unseen watercolors

of an embedded mystery.

Shades in the crane’s river,

given by the baby’s mother,

will float alone

in bathwater.

Serenely seeking the unknown

in a sea with no compass.

Buoyant, weightless,

void of machinery.

Words offer only gravity,

limbs, humanity

as poems branch out in the distance

like a rain tree of bird choruses.

The refrain was just another name for change,

sound passing invisible borders

like footprints on empty beaches.

Estranged swallows

will breach the deep

where the moon disappears

like a blinking eye

on the edge of the horizon

and the watchful sky.





In Dreams of Trains

In dreams of trains

our faces are pressed up against the glass.

Images strung together

through a film reel

of inseparable memory.

In the intervals of freights

passing strings of suppertime light,

we’ll meet by the makeshift fires

like hobos in eternity

on abandoned beaches and under bridges,

amplified by the boxcar musicality

of the past brushing against the present.

Wheels fill the gaps,

the click clack continuity of dreams

becoming the vessels through which trains

connect myriad lives on parallel tracks.

Restless spirits, wayward rambling

to an alarum of shrill yells

that usher in a collision

of chance meetings.

The seared impressions,

through metal and iron,

are the first sparks of insight,

that oncoming light that floods

the narrow rooms of domestication,

a midnight special that breaks the isolation.

We’ll measure the width of impact and expanse

by rails that clear fields and walls,

all the demarcations of a hemmed in life.

The far off grain towers

were the outer reaches

of the imagination

that motion pierces

to separate lives from careful decisions.

Left in the wake of smoke and vagrant coil,

the scent of diesel that evokes travel,

trains were the sudden revision

before all would unravel,

before blackbirds would pick through and scatter

like storm clouds to the periphery,

harbingers of the necessary renewal

that disperses to the four directions

all the stagnant energy.

We’ll gather once again on a tiny sliver of land,

at the end of our youth,

in the mystic continuity of

long shadows and laughter,

in the beach fire’s theater

we become the protagonists

no longer constrained by time.

The ocean waves through the fog,

motioning to the rites of passage

going thousands of miles

if only in consciousness,

towards the far reaches of a folded map

stuffed in the pockets of a weather beaten pack

these disparate lives will always overlap

at the charred edges they’re seared together

in faded photographs

film reels and

windows

Blurring Ancient Lines

1.

The nature of these ancient lines

is akin to convergence,

those brackish coastal transitions at the source of the stream.

I see them go down the way the unconscious empties into sleep,

revealing through the overlapping currents of dreams

reflections in a dark pool

a spool for the moon in the muliwai,

like a glimmering fish on the end of a line,

a texture in the undulating sky.

It is sustained through dawn

and her capricious rays

of insight in this variable space

absorbing the heaviest of thoughts

like the shore and the assault of the waves.

2.

Descending grooves at twilight,

the edges of streams yield to the unseen.

Blurring the line between the material and the spirit,

a surfacing replicated on the known,

releasing faces trapped in stone.

On the inverse of trees

the ripples of rain are received

like information from an alternate place.

The energy of a chant transforms water

and through alchemy

gives breath to long dormant entities.

Pulled through the roots to re-emerge

somewhere in the back of the valley,

a fissure in time, the essence of nature.

3.

Ancestral voices speak without water

in the quiet places, the dark haired recesses

accessed by stream beds

like ancient thruways

for the imagination to invent

“What’s back there?”

Pondering from the periphery,

so black there in the distance,

like a portal, an instance of mist

is a meandering medicine on the tips of the ridge.

Pulled by the wind through the fan palms

imprinted in clouds

bloodied by sunsets and tossed

to the landslides of green moss

over primordial rock.

From a certain perspective,

you see that the light writes its history

in petroglyphs and myths on the surfaces.

It reveals the bird man to the blind,

the dog guardian in grail,

the snake that swallows its own tail.

There is the realization that in modern times

the ancient can still prevail,

can still lie here in parallel

in a world disguised by a thin veil

with symbols to decipher the enigma of their presence.