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.

Making a Painting of Memory

To process the unavoidable

in the best spirit possible,

in light of all that cannot be

so easily let go.

Childhood landmarks

for so long enclosed and tended,

like a terraced garden

in the yard that grows smaller

as you grow older

and the outside world leans closer and closer.

The oak trees that stood watch and held hawks,

were helplessly felled by the years to come.

Will there be any left to land

when houses pass hands

and open space becomes a commodity?

Progress fails to mention the casualties

of feathers and roots beneath tire marks

when expansion becomes Walmarts

on the outskirts of bulldozer scars.

What will become of our own shangri-la?

In my mind undisturbed,

the backdrop of table and rock stack

forms the rough hewn first layer of the terrace,

preserved there in this parallel existence,

weighted against the swirling impermanence

that moves in like a storm.

In years to come who will sit on the porch

just to smell the rain,

relieved that the parched earth will drink again?

Will subsequent visits find the inevitable weeds and overgrown grass

where dahlias once passed summers between the fences?

Will they still enclose all of the references

when obscured by ivy and choked with vine?

All the memories like scattered leaves

that the wind interweaves with the present,

gather at the base of the hill in a sodden pile

with no one to reconcile.

There remains some vivid colors.

My grandfather in his red sweater

that matches his glass of wine,

sitting beneath caps,

with hands folded permanently at that table in time.

Where are the kids of the neighborhood,

who made strongholds of foundations

and built forts by the old pine?

Who climbed fences with ease,

knowing every inch of these quarters.

They probably have their own sons and daughters,

strung out on screens,

did they sacrifice their sense of adventure

to growing older in the American dream?

I listen for the voices of kids playing outside.

Will there be any left to call in by streetlight?

Any dog racing up the hill first freed from the leash?

Whatever light is left can only emphasize

the emptiness of dead end streets,

shadows filling in the contours of rooms

where once paintings lined walls

to distinguish the decades,

extinguished as darkness falls.

I can still hear the sound of our footsteps on the creaking stair,

the cacophony of our lives behind the walls of Evelyn,

where our voices and movements have settled in

like a barely audible whisper beneath the passage of time.

I can still make a painting of memory

to temper my mind

into distinguishing all these changes

from what will endure.

Through the Dark Rooms of Renewal

What will come to be is still murky.

Where shadows drown, light surfaces.

In this developing dream, when the blackout shades are drawn,

the aperture is opened a fraction

and you slowly permeate the room

as through a lava cave.

At a loss and trapped, perhaps an unsolved disappearance,

the camera focuses on the cracks and seams in the mystery,

the lens examines the unseen, blends it with words.

You slip in another, leaf the river, bearing witness

you clasp clouds and soften the dissonance,

like the glow of early morning burning the fog away.

This hesitant unlocking, eyes no longer opaque

but clear and mirroring the skies,

like a celebration, an unveiling

from under hazy disguise.

This light is like a glittering shell in someone’s memory,

in the plucking of the seaweed’s strands,

it’s the underwater melody.

Pulling at a weight that trembles from beneath,

as on a fishing line,

you hope that more than just luminous,

it is sturdy enough to pull that image,

abstract and misshapen, to the surface.

You mold it in dark rooms

or let it slip back into the gloom,

more like a coin than an anchor in the grey,

to the darkest cormorant shade of forgetting.

Try as you may to trawl these depths,

getting caught in the psychic nets

spread over surfaces,

what’s left but to venerate and transform with purpose?

What’s caught, what’s lost in a moment’s remembrance?

If we can gain access to the hidden resources,

to a cache of images and associations

expressing themselves

through illuminated corridors and mines,

we initiate the infinite renewal,

see change as transcendence

the evolving acceptance that shines.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

From Fissure 8

The light peeks through the cracks

where consciousness and dreams overlap.

Coastlines and seas seep through the blind

like temporal prisms in time.

On a suspended plane, a transcontinental glide

lingering long after the advancing flame

where the memory of lava and ash will remain

ballast to what is swept away

under soft carpets, in strange landscapes

you escape while you can.

On diminishing roads and infinite waterways

there is no shelter

no air without sulfur,

what landmarks are left become unfamiliar,

inverted memories in turned over turf

give a glimpse of the glowing earth

that runs red

to river beds

in the impending birth of new land.

In the absence of all else

an unobstructed wind

would hit mountains head on

like something that was expected

but not fully prepared for.

The inevitability you seek to divert

joins in the rift from a hidden source,

from a network of tunnels, subliminal.

What words can be raised

to pave what has been erased?

to bring light to a cloud of ash?

Over development and endless desecration

an angry goddess passed.

The rupture deepens and they go up,

like offerings on a pyre,

the apocalyptic matchsticks of Pahoa

and the collapse of all structure

buoyed by  an immense ocean

is a burning unceasing as the notion

that all surfaces remain beholden

to the forces that lie beneath them.

 

 

 

 

 

Where Words go Unspoken

The old timers say it is not breaking the same.

Out there beyond the shipped in sand,

waves peel like a sticker

off a fake ocean

in a Waikiki gift shop postcard

framing sunsets between idyllic palm trees.

Beyond the manufactured images that sell vacations,

stalk the cranes

chipping away at what remains of undeveloped land.

Their insatiable beaks bent on destruction

then reconstruction,

they’re omnipresent ushers only to obstruction.

In the pretentious lobbies of plastic hotels

you hear the glass chatter of conversations going nowhere,

much like the valley roads

sought to drown out the city lights

running red through the clay

like swollen drains where flash floods bled,

where a Ko’olau shadow is lifting

from the trees like a fingerprint.

It has all the markings of a familiar hand

tracing the deepest recesses

where words go unspoken.

A chronicle of breath

as it trembles the glistening webs

between thickets of bamboo branches,

a wind instrument in motion,

in nearly choreographed dances

amongst the rain chaos that creases the fabric

of the forest’s malo folding in on itself.

Storms consume the once visible trails

where signs of struggle and uprooting

reveal partial conclusions to the dissolution,

the rest of the story is unspoken,

like the cold silence in a tragedy

slow to reveal that no one wishes to remember

but still can feel the tremors of violence

as clouds pause timeless

bound to Tantalus.

Coming from behind

the illuminated eyes of a dark profile,

morning brings a treason of light

to shatter the night like a verdict,

reverberating through the injustice,

through all the darkness enclosed in files,

filling up cabinets and dusty shelves,

unresolved in our selves

as we prop up the much larger abyss

with a loss of innocence.