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.

Myths and Whispers

Amidst the white noise and distortion

that lingers behind the transmission,

the shame and coercion,

fear’s formless shape shifting.

The future unknown,

with no bearings,

is solitary, self contained, .

set against a perpetual rock wall of options,

there remains a way.

Through the creation

of something parallel,

something that stands on its own

and often hidden from view.

Just off of the road

beyond the subdivision,

like a temple structure

existing in enigma to dreams.

Illuminating from the deepest soil,

the buried fish hooks of space and time,

a map of stars

to navigate the night and the fears.

I do not share the same

Listening with the eyes

and not the ears.

Despite divisive landscapes

and lack of balance,

the spirit remains

in alignment with motion,

the underlying current

in an endless ocean.

Something beyond the mist

and the mind

myths and whispers

moving the tides,

turning streets to streams,

without resistance it guides

a light surrender

to the will of the outrigger.

To the waves and the words

that bob up for release,

to creativity,

a sturdy craft in the chaos of dis-ease.

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.





The Sea Receives

1.

The sea receives

the masquerade of the leaves

the changing glow

of poems in embryo

born on the wind

at season’s end,

the trees are in flames.

Memories remain

the fallen effigies,

reflected on surfaces

Illumination

writes the verses downstream,

where veins and waterways

relieve their light,

filling cracks in the horizon,

like dreams guiding creativity.

2.

At a break in the coral reef

the sea of sound is a symphony,

a chorus of tiny pebbles

being ground into sand.

Calligraphy to the deepest sensitivity

of knowing nothing can withstand

Change.

The passing of time follows the sun.

Various grades of light and expanse,

you cast a line and offer no resistance

to the wind breathing life into the waves

breaking chandeliers,

those crystalized fears

amplified in the solitude

of the beach and the shoreline.

3.

Where the sea meets the sky

there is light and shadow.

A fixed gaze

mixed with sun and spray

plays tricks with the mind,

while the tide calls Aphrodite inside.

Out beyond the break,

my love is buoyant in her own stride,

those moments I agonized

over dreams lost at sea,

of last words and no goodbye.

What has yet to return,

eventually drips back to me.

Weeping behind shades,

tongue tied to eternity,

the waves will answer

in essence what the mind creates

out of turbulence,

how all that has been given

in a moment

can be taken away.

Such is life, love, loss,

scattered between the darkness of thoughts

and the light of letting them go.

The sea receives us

like leaves and tiny pebbles,

the secret source of infinite peaks

as it courses through valleys

in a suspension of belief

that becomes a point of departure.

From the cliff soars an Iwa,

that thief of time,

spreading black wings

it’s shadow and the sea in rhyme

opens a portal.

More spirit than mortal,

we journey to the western shore to find

a leaping stone

where hand in hand over the dark water,

we’ll guide each other into the unknown.

In the Aftermath of Storms

In the aftermath of storms

there is the longing to unravel illusions,

to decipher the necessity of distance,

that invisible enemy between us.

Freed from the confinement of ceilings,

where the heaving chest of the night

was a heavy wind bearing down on the windows

and rooftops like a red phoenix unfurled

in the imagination.

Highlighted by lightning, it undergoes a rebirth.

The needle point of the Hongwanji Temple

was plugged directly into the sky,

harnessing the weather, grounding the energy,

scattering leaves to run marathons

all night through the empty streets.

Nothing bends to the will of nature like the trees.

Shaking free of what is unnecessary,

you’re left with the essence and the spirit.

In the aftermath we can verify

that the riots that leave debris

weren’t merely an aspect of sleep.

Through the kaleidoscope of canopies

we see the sky is no longer in tatters.

Limbs stretched and battered,

still stand rooted to resistance.

All through the storm we cling to our positions,

like A’ama crabs to the black rocks of heavy restrictions.

They’ll insist we go nowhere until the next wave passes.

Gripped and transfixed by satellite images,

those slow moving monsters drawing near to tiny islands.

Dwarfed by the unconscious,

we’ll look to the deep to justify the fear.

In the aftermath everything is eerily quiet.

Real or imagined, the scars on the land are evident,

even the incoherent ramblings

of those who sleep in doorways

have taken their grievances elsewhere.

No cars on the road, though the gas stations never closed,

no stoplights to slow the ride straight through to Chinatown.

Looking among the markets and the overturned fruit,

following the scent of jasmine incense in the pursuit

of something material, something alive.

The once bustling city is now like a fish on ice.

The harbor ships, anchored and tied down.

Silent are the masts above gang planks

where no congregation awaits.

It’s a landscape of closed gates,

a vacant wasteland of boarded shopfronts.

In the aftermath there’s a longing

for the lively din of a cafe.

To sit and eavesdrop

on the espresso pounding words into type,

breathing life into the spaces

dominated by the headlines

if only to defy and cut through the lies between us.

They say the storm just missed us,

minimal damage but there will be another,

there’s always another excuse to shelter

and from each other maintain the distance.

Down by the shoreline the ocean offers no resistance.

Passing its amorphous border

to become absorbed in something larger

than discordant thoughts.

A suspension of will

to an entity no longer paternal,

it never insisted it was protecting.

In the aftermath of being besieged,

it is ironically the sea,

once seen as the source of the calamity,

that now brings a sense of serenity.

The sea exists somehow parallel,

and through the embrace of the elemental

it has the power to transform

in the aftermath of any storm.

Dawn Emerges

In the serenity of a mountain morning,

dawn emerges from a darkened robe.

Along the Bron- Yr- Aur borders

and ever changing folds

she tempers the coals

with the cool breath of night,

keeping hillsides from burning

and transforming everything to gold.

 

You are the marriage of opposites,

the light strands sequenced in a braid,

two faces coiling through sleep,

the sun coalesced with the shade.

In the mushroom clouds of this shifting

through the zeitgeist of these times,

you pull a blanket over the fear

that hangs in the air

as sure as the expectancy of a new day.

Your dexterous fingers turn the page,

luminous as a laser

that naturally knows the way

through misshapen clouds.

Through the Tao of sculptural precision,

you reveal the light parts,

the porcelain in night’s revision.

Bear witness to this masterclass in adapting,

the emerging image by degrees.

 

It is true that you dwell there,

though I cannot know you as my pupil.

For you taught me to listen through the distortion,

to see the crystal coursing

through every passing action.

In the crane’s graceful transitions

on the banks of the estuary,

you’re the wings of white light

ascending from the dark of the periphery.

A neck disappearing

with a feather and a ripple,

slender, underwater,

gathering in the edges

of a timeless brook

invigorating with the medicine

of soft murmurs and whispering,

breaking the noxious transmission of

virus and confusion.

 

Dawn is the calm amidst danger

that leaves its imprint everywhere.

A balm over the psychic wounds

we perceive clearer

as she pulls from her pouch a sacred mirror

smooth as an undisturbed lake.

Everything under the sky

now unmasked can dab their face.

Reborn daily, healed through creativity.

If only temporarily, this reprieve

penetrates the anticipation

without force or fist but gently disguised

in mist that asks nothing of the ridge,

all along Wa’ahila she dances.

I watch this from a distance

her entrance, these footprints,

the undisturbed parchment

where the spirit finds nourishment.

Simultaneously quick and deliberate,

she remain undefined,

opening her book of changes

with words written brightly,

then fading on subsequent pages,

always scattered by the wind

towards the horizon

as the day begins in the creases

where the night grows dim.

 

One Word Left in the Fog

Standing by the window,

her face pressed into

the primitive shapes that

the night tattooed in frost.

Her breath against the glass obscures the field,

like the emptiness before the first thought revealed

with a finger, one solitary word left in the fog,

Alone.

It is a labor to remember

the last letter

left in an empty box.

The faceless stranger,

her only visitor,

adds to the stack of morning papers

strewn in the hallway, a kind of intermediary

to the threshold she would no longer go beyond.

With a sigh she picks one up.

“This world is no longer mine but I’ll go along.”

The illusion becomes entertainment.

The passage of time, amplified at the end of life.

Like the ancient tree that loosens its leaves,

shaking free of the debris that years have left behind.

Independent? For nothing grew in your shadow.

A defining tenet, now stretched with solitude

and the absence of birds who have yet to return.

There’s an eerie quiet to the canopy these days,

like the aftermath of a storm.

The port is empty, all the boats are pulled in.

There’s barely a soul to witness

the moon stranded in pools of rainwater,

filling empty flower pots.

She could almost smell the wet soil

beneath the disheveled rosebush.

There’s a pale fingernail of light

that clutches the edges of dark liquid.

Seeking a glimmer at the bottom of the glass,

she begins to lose her grip the deeper she goes in.

Dark thoughts swallow down,

dim light on lips,  dawn’s another sip.

The will, like a lifeline,

when you’re drowning one day at a time.

Another slip into the refuge of dreams,

classical music, stained windows and high ceilings.

The angels and their voices singing Ave Maria

by morning have become the chortle of crows,

their mocking accompanies

the graveyard fingers of dead trees

scraping at the screens in the wind.

 

When movement is like a broken machine,

thoughts become mechanical

in the pill swallowing routine bouts of hypochondria.

Looking in the mirror, has her hair grown whiter?

No longer

Appointments,

she cannot go anywhere.

Is Shangri La the solace of distraction?

The statuary silence of friends in picture albums?

The light of a visage upon opening each page

becomes a surrogate visit

within the yellowing of age.

Where mouths do not speak nor expressions change.

Without new memories,

these effigies will pass

one by one

into the darkest corners of the basement,

through a door seldom used and slightly ajar.

She will not go down there anymore

for fear of falling in the dark,

what does she have left to hold onto?

She remains rooted to the kitchen table,

nodding off again.

Her face pressed up close to the empty glass.

Upon waking, she’ll view the room through this prism.

Everything still spinning, the ceiling circular,

closing in to the claustrophobic sensation of being trapped.

She sees her reflection, light is refracted but nothing is raised.

She can only bury her face

and stare plainly at her own mortality.

Through this glass darkly,

full of spirit but no less lonely,

the days lose their bearings in the fog

the ticking wall clock,

the liquid corrosion of

a dripping faucet

amplify the sensation

of time slipping away.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dusk, A Farewell

At dusk we bid farewell.

Restlessly stirring the days inside sounds,

making deranged concoctions in the clouds.

In subterranean wells, sirens are drowned by rain,

wind is amplified in the brain, sailing through sleepless nights.

Expelled into the horse latitudes of idle hours,

if only they could be painted like brilliant flowers,

a motley of colors to distinguish golden horizons

from the sea at large.

A farewell to your craft, adrift in ideas.

Eyes of red navigation,

the body a black expanse, to submerge, trawling deeply

for the coins of sunken ships and elusive silver fish.

Beneath these surfaces

the mystical coincidences are accumulated in song.

You’ve dreamt underbelly,

words radiating starboard from the hull.

From the bridge a farewell.

A hawk leaves the inlet

with talons clutching the metallic scales of an alewife.

With a glint in the sun, the imprint is seared into memory,

like a piercing cry

we’ll recall later from a different frequency.

The antennae of rooftops witness

many farewells of undetermined suffering,

almost human, the sound of the sun falling.

A bird of unknown origin,

leaving no wake as it plunges into the ocean.

The trajectory of its body, a descending shade,

with each moment the shadow increases

further into the loneliness of De Chirico courtyards.

 

Dusk, a farewell.  The world spinning out of control.

Grinding to dust all the ambition that burned cities bright,

pressed into a daily toll, a number that will always grow.

It was through creativity that we learned of community.

These gatherings are not forgotten,

nor can they be swept into isolated piles

of suspicious eyes with no smiles.

Vulnerable, the tiny flames with no kindling.

Blow on the ends of our hope

before extinguished candles become smoke

and the landscape grows cold with sorrow.

A farewell to plans, time lapsed lives

that no longer strive but are slowed, compartmentalized.

Twilight is no longer spent applauding fireworks.

The future is no longer a bright sparkler

reflected in everyone’s eyes.

The gaze has been averted to a decapitated flower

that appears so much smaller as it sits on the water

before  being taken under.

A farewell, the illusion of distance in beacon light.

A sweeping seascape of change with no compass,

the coming of an age born out of chaos without counsel,

save all those books and albums.

We’ll witness the weight of industry overwhelming humanity.

In shrinking spaces the imbalance is amplified,

navigating the collapse, like one of the damned,

with sanitized hands and covered faces,

peering into a void with no features,

like empty theaters.

It’s a tragic scene, is there any room left for heroism?

A silver lining in defeat?

Intrigue for imagined patrons

watching from empty seats?

Run the credits, words engraved in stone.

Save the last gasp for the projector,

exhausting its last reel of film alone.

 

Dusk, a farewell. Trains departing depots.

Wheels screetch, no one speaks,

voices swallowed in tunnels of what’s to come.

No parting kisses from the distance

or faces stuck to windows

like in old black and white photos,

waving handkerchiefs of goodbye.

The darkening of eyes adjust

to the damp unfamiliarity

we’re meant to breathe in.

Breathe again, the end comes to everything.

Yet, fear of the eventual end

is inherent in the fear that this may never end.

Is there light at the end of this tunnel?

Will the sun rise tomorrow over the ocean?

Will rain fill rivers to maneuver these bends

without our mouths consuming the land?

Without these thoughts can the bird songs

still hold sway in the chaos that canopies them?

Will they find the sky ceilingless,

or a desperate color

in the flutter of wings?

Will they glide on the wind

and the infinite it brings?

Time will tell, for now farewell.

The Aisling Stairs

I’ve had this dream before.

Where I am lost in a labyrinth of stairways and corridors,

deep in the heart of very old buildings.

I pause on cast iron balconies

and gaze over the lines of dim-lit stacks,

incomprehensible text to a chamber of shadows

and the recurring restlessness that pervades this place.

Whether I am searching for something or being pursued,

it is clear that not all is as it appears.

So I keep moving,

going deeper into more claustrophobic spaces.

Ducking under a shelf, there are rows behind rows of books,

an ancient elevator and further stairways to corridors

each more decrepit than the last.

The walls peeling, unpainted for decades,

with large holes in the floors

to lower oneself through to other levels.

There, in the fear that it may all collapse,

is the tenuous grasp of any concept of time or place.

In the depths of these recesses

I usually encounter a maintenance man

sweeping up the darkness. He is disfigured,

terrible to look at, with a face full of sores,

appearing like a spot on the floors

that never see the light of day,

only the artificial glare

destined to flicker and stare

here for eternity.

This specter in the shadows,

blackened as a lung full of dust,

with a voice like a guttural growl,

unintelligible.

There is always the knowledge

that he is at the bottom of or behind

this restless feeling,

tending to the furnace

or fitting pipes in a vast boiler room.

He’s in there, like a manifestation of fear,

a cancer in these cells, in the bowels of every building.

What else did you expect to find?

What do industrial noises accompany

like strange soundtracks to the illogical

landscapes of the mind?

You cannot measure the sky

or the spaces in-between

but note the temporal shifts,

like shades of the past,

bound here like ghosts.

Each is a subtle impression

or a tiny transmission

that is nothing if not familiar.

The man in the corner,

ever-present author

tosses another cigarette

to the floor

and in the impact,

the flicker of fire

is transforming

into the flapping of a white bird

now flying towards

a shaft and up to the rooftop.

Vaporous, transparent,

it is no longer trapped

but leaving a trail of smoke in its wake,

it moves through objects.

I’ll follow its trajectory

towards the edge of this wasted city.

Listless as it travels

to the periphery,

where lifting from memory,

the dormant imagery

that nourishes its flow from captivity.

This is how it usually ends.

Free from these stairways and endless corridors,

no longer bound to these cells or these selves,

no longer merely a shell

but akin to water

flowing from a source somewhere

in emerald mountains

and immeasurable distances

under brilliant skies.

 

 

 

Where Innocence Intersects

Memory,

the planted seeds of future work.

Those moments of mystery and violence

seared into childhood innocence.

In the rows of cross country cornfields

intersecting on the empty plains of thought.

You’re the point of entry

for these stalks on all sides,

until growing overhead,

you were not able to process it yet.

When what housed creativity

was merely a foundation,

fear is the forgotten masonry

that builds fascination.

Mystery,

those luminous garments

you’ll salvage from dark closets

to give form to again.

At Dungeon rock you keep digging,

finding only madness and subterranean water,

not realizing where the gold resides,

on the tips of the trees that line Cornel path.

 

Violence always had it’s place on the knife’s edge of time.

In old Kung Fu films and in the technicolored gaze

of Medusa’s severed head,

you were transfixed to the red

that emblazoned the cars of elevated trains.

From the Bronx to Coney Island

your imagination placed supreme significance

in the division of neighborhoods into gang turf,

written dimensions on a prized and ripped map.

By middle school a fear and fascination with death

found you staring out the windows

at long black hearses

ushering in St. Pius funerals.

There was no longer the safety of naivete,

friends lost parents, people got cancer,

a heart attack took Nonna

and the small panic you’ll always remember,

phone calls that announce a stranger

penetrating that tiny world.

All these recollections

sticking like mud at low tide.

Osgood eyes wet, keen on distant birds,

deciphered as spirit in the wavering trees

and in the dreamscape of the sky.

The ocean always returns to childhood

in the scent of salt marsh,

it marches back in time

to the music tangled in the cellar wires,

memories in the decay of seaweed at Derby Wharf

where all the layers overlap and you can read

the barnacled marks when it recedes.

Out from under the shadow’s thumbprint,

you’re the exposed rock of Chocorua awaiting a storm,

you’re Waterman seeking a nook on Lafayette Ridge,

Brailsford on a weighted line in Cormorant shade,

Cochran still unsolved in the fog of Swampscott.

What breaks the silence?

What moves the instrument and goes beyond science ?

Was it violence creeping in the telepathic underground?

Tripping the wires to access

the haunted tape loop of the mind?

The sudden screetch of trolley cars

collides with Garbarek’s sublime choir,

as if the bloodied petals off of Pulcherrima’s rose

were left scattered on the tracks.

You were there at the intersection

watching the passing of the rails,

standing over these remains

to note the juxtaposition

that holds unspoken significance

to what you have yet to transform into words.