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.

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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 Haualia Breeze

It comes to me half-asleep and hungover.

Like a thief, slipping in unnoticed

and sneaking away with my weariness.

It was just before dawn

when I was stirred by her soft fingers

tickling the chimes

in that time before the birds.

Dancing through the curtains of calm

transforming to a soft palm

that dabs my brow’s perspiration.

Is this a trick of the imagination?

This gentle presence,

ethereal, magical

drawing the whole valley to me.

I would later describe the experience to the ladies of Na Mea,

inquiring whether it was known to them?

Was it named in the way other myriad winds are in Hawaii?

The one they suggested was Haualia,

as she makes her home on the slopes of Wa’ahila

between Manoa and Palolo valleys.

Geographically it checks out,

but you get the sense it couldn’t really be pinned down

and maintains an air of mystery

as it tiptoes softly between the homes

adjacent to the overgrown alley that leads to the sea.

Haualia, blooms from out of cracks in the void

where creation unfurls like the opening of a flower,

the slow motion advance of lava

that is in no hurry to disturb the silence.

This unseen energy is happy to remain invisible,

becoming evident through all that it touches,

penetrating awareness like a scent tied to memory

that in the transition between day and night

is a reinforcement of all that is light.

A white dove loosened from under a jade thumb,

it comes from within the definition of rock,

welcoming the passage of water.

She is unveiled in tongues of mist

that whisper to each other the secret language of hills,

the longing of lovers separated by the precipice

and left with only the enchanted expressions

in the absence of form.

It passes down like a gift from the sky

tied in ribbons of wild streams

and all the beautiful reflections

are the fluttering visitations

in the permeable realm of dreams.

Trembling on the edges of water,

it moves down valley

like a breath followed by the lili-lehua rain.

A passage so delicate that the webs of the forest

can withstand this passage

and hold in suspense the awareness

of hidden pools above falls

where all the floating white petals

are moons that maintain their serenity

despite all of the movement beneath them.

It seems to soften everything it touches along the way,

all of the loss and pain of separation,

reinforcing the idea of yielding

to the unbroken continuity of creativity.

It inspires no resistance

in the subconscious bridge at half-light.

Your first thoughts, awake again

and never quite alone.

Aware of this benevolence

as she roams through,

illuminating the feeling

that you are no more than

a blade of grass along her ridge,

just a vessel for the privilege

of visitation that comes in many forms

but comes to you in this way.

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.

 

 

 

 

She Stepped out of Time

A solitary white shoe lies at a fork in the path.  Who it belonged to was nowhere to be seen, not since July of 1941, when at the corner of Chatham and Marianna she stepped into a black car and out of time, leaving only questions in the decades of search that followed a torrent of remorse.  How the image of a forlorn shoe on a forest path can act as a trigger, pulling at the material, smearing it with mud and neglect, unraveling the mystery of an overly active mind as it searches for resolution among the empty bottles and other remains.  Years go by and the story gets drained of its lustre, paths leading only to dead ends. Just off of that road that twists through the pasture, infamous for its bends and with a reputation that lends to the atmosphere.  Thick was the surrounding wood and swamp alder. A solitary white shoe illumed by moonlight on the forest floor, fallout from a black car, like a prop that would suggest much more of misplaced trust than anything else as it tiptoes into time’s tragedy.  Like the dog-end of a cigarette, it is strewn over the psychic wound in the landscape, inanimate object from the distant past still holds a powerful resonance as its cautionary tale is suspended like headlights in the fog.  Keep your loved ones close, or at least hold on to that illusion as that car draws nearer.  It appears ancient and square-backed, what sets its wheels in motion also seals shut the heavy metal doors.  As it passes, all of life get reflected in its windows.  You’ve only a moment to notice the details, half-asleep from the passenger side.  Some roads are bumpier than others, like it or not we go along for the ride.

How many miscellaneous articles like this one are destined to the fate of evidence, that this individual once existed?  Now merely a pine grove stone for remembrance, with no loved ones left to maintain.  While the shoe will remain in a police cabinet or where it was left to the elements, to the corrosive rain.  Memories can live in attics and lover’s lanes, dilapidated sheds and sometimes in plain sight.  We can distance ourselves but they do not disappear.  You can hear their tiny footsteps like frequencies along the webs the imagination gets tangled in.  A white shoe shimmering in a forgotten corner, belonging to the ghosts of fading yearbook photos.  She would have walked with them through the halls of English, spying the tower down Oakwood as you did but in a different era and over the expanse of sea and night, like a coastal beacon casting its light, shortening the distance suggested by time, so there in the forest it lies, a solitary white shoe and who it belonged to subtly reveals something of her essence again.

 

In Memory of Frances Cochran

 

They Come Dressed in Feathers

That was how the spirit left the scene,

with one feathered wing dipped in the ashen sea.

The moment becomes a window,

the photo an eternity to gaze through

silhouettes

becoming signs, rippling to find

where the child once stood,

so that the saddened would be assured,

as they gathered along the shore

beneath oak and behind shades,

that this was how he made the transition.

The next phase of the journey,

no longer earth bound,

contours cast off and scattered to the deep,

commingling than expanding

to include these wings

and all the moments that are arresting.

We can find you when heavy clouds accumulate,

as the light that breaks through the sorrow,

as the wisdom that all is temporal.

The ways and the means we mill over

must appear smaller from up there,

ant-like and in miniature.

The shadows that surround

can levitate from the ground

when the sun moves them,

when all the white homes

appear like a runway of bones for those in flight,

passing with flashing talons

to penetrate the dreams of those inside.

Clear as the glint in your eyes,

I remember the whole trajectory,

as you cross the sky like an Egyptian deity

with one feathered wing dipped in the ashen sea.

 

Up north the family cottage grows cold.

The once glowing furnace of the potbellied stove

emits no smoke from its chimney beneath the trees.

Yet the floors still creak

and something beyond the elements speak at the edges,

with the spring of your essences.

It moves beneath everything,

even when no one is listening.

The sound of cracked ice on the lake

reminds me that the ancestors will take

the surroundings given and speak through them,

moving the pine’s limbs to shadowbox with the wind,

they make themselves known, if only briefly,

outside the pages of that great mystery

unread in the cobwebbed dust of your library.

Our lives are the layers in the walls they built,

slivers of glass in the windows and lamps they fastened

another stitch in the tapestry,

that which completes me, speaks through me,

through the imagination, peering from a darkened sky,

projecting light on the pillows of the dream’s eye

like a moon wrapped in sheets of cloud

on a winter’s night.

I hear you most clearly in the quiet hours

before anyone wakes,

when the lake would ripple its way to the pier

and two loons draped in mist would appear,

skimming the water’s gaze

over the length of the great Birch,

they’ll materialize and search

through my guise, at once familiar

in white tunic and shoes of leather,

they’ll come dressed in feathers,

dipping one wing in the surfaces of memory,

moving what preceded me,

deconstructing but giving breath to me,

an extension, their living entity,

poised between worlds.

These Wayward Notes Roamed

Peering over the edge of the half opened drawer,

you’re afforded a glimpse

through the void

of a former life

whose mind structures and stacked spines

were wayward notes roaming

undefined decades ago

through the oldest quarters of Paris.

What was left unfinished, the letters like lamplight

on the avenues and the pinched parallels of Marais.

What do they say of mystery?

Of being buried alive?

One fist seizes the light

seeking breath to break free of binds,

experience in hindsight

relegated to a page in time,

to squeezing sentences of quintessences,

dissolving these contour lines.

Mystery,  in the wake of transport

what can it take of the forgotten?

That which is no longer mentioned of moments

overwhelming the air of another postponement.

The bell’s chorus wakes the wasted ideal,

an incarnation through atonement

beneath the shell of inaction

reverberation towards something whole.

Mystery, that melancholy departure

pressed into the fibre of indecipherable spaces,

twilighted in notebooks

that grid and translate the travel,

blurring the towns in-between.

Still it remains pliant,

rounding out reason’s edges.

Along the border of the Seign river

it is under a saintly finger

as it dabs the transparent clouds

shot through with light

and by dusk spewing blood.

Mystery is the host

holy enough to reveal no wounds

from the dogmatic wars,

it makes it through without scars

without cracks in wonder

it is a stained window in a cathedral,

a marble current in the Parisien sky.

There’s a subtle door in the repetition of poems

unlocking the divine,

a cadence recognized in dreams and visions

sinking softly into a receptive mind.

Mystery, pulled from the void like a rebirth,

sets a glow over the changes,

encouraging new curves in the regiment

of the sensitive imbued with luminous purpose,

to illustrate and turn further pages.

 

 

Light Seeps through the Illusion

Through what I’d perceive in the sky’s mirror,

the sea was a ragged mariner

cast on the jagged rocks.

All the debris i would carry with me from the past,

the horizon could no longer forecast

or keep from floating away

from some logical ideal.

The line was a separation,

sea and sky

silky and undefined,

an impenetrable teardrop,

weightless,  impression of color

in a superstitious and darkened course.

With no compass it flows over the sides of the canvass,

like an art that is infinite in its reading,

it depends on the witness.

For all who need to wander and father words,

further imagination, the borders are reinforced

than blurred by travel.

The intuitively known is murdered in bloody sunsets,

red robed in the glow of twilight

thrown across the liquid’s edge,

like a veil from the eyes

the westernmost ledge is

illuminated.

From there it is one step

inward to perfect

or join the drowned by shipwreck.

All the blind and rudderless,

with their mangled craft lodged in the sand

like a sullen crop half buried

in the perennial mystery upon which we stand.

It is a precarious position

when a landscape of fear

offers no sanctuary from

being pulled into a perpetual wasteland.

Not many know the history

beneath a city.

Soiled reflections stare back

from clean facades of steel and glass,

vast monuments of shadow

creating the illusion

that no sweat and blood were shed

during development’s colossal intrusion.

There are moments you see it clearly

as a shaft of light whose

passage holds a thread of jewels,

a glittering sequin to the narrative

where the brightest of all, the moon

becomes a beacon in the darkest canopy

to see me through.

Truth, From out of Darkness

Truth, an abandoned office

whose walls peel away the layers of the last occupant,

as if everything was left in haste,

cabinets were flung open

in searching the darkness

spreading between files

that should have remained closed.

Be careful what you search for.

A forbidden glance lays the groundwork,

accomplished beyond human labor,

chains that hold the vision together,

so Mana could gather on platforms

illuminated by lightning storms

reflected in the mirror of marshland underneath.

Truth, we receive brief flashes.

From out of the darkness, Ulupo stands

monument to the mystery,

paths lead through the enigma

of how it was built in one evening.

Stone by stone, this ancient lineage

fills in the blanks

as fleeting shadows break

from torch-lit Lauhala.

The Ko’olaus are infused along the rim

by the light of the moon

so you can drink it in

from the Punchbowl to the palace ground

there was no sound, no words could do it justice.

Truth, like a liquid,

slips from out of the cracks

you cover with silence.

On the far side of the Pali

the white seminary would glow outerworldly

from the base of the mountain

where you take that bend sharply,

all the way to the old drive-in theater

to where they found her car,

abandoned on the far end of Kapaa.

Answers were elusive, like hitchhikers,

pick them up at your own risk,

lighting cigarettes with only their fingertips.

a glance in the rear view mirror and they’re gone,

the last thing you’ll see

before the trunk of a tree meets your windshield.

Truth, like a false grill light,

is a masquerade of questions,

What happened that night on the way back from town?

Would a moderate light guide through the fog that surrounds us?

The search for order

along the yellowing border of stories with no closure,

it gives a sense of place to the present void.

Taking pictures in the dark,

spiderwebs positioned for our breath,

the wet forest glistened

in the breadth of our flash.

Finding the path,

muddy steps murdered our pant legs

while cat eyes acclimate

to the darkened shapes

dangling in a tattered landscape,

the sky behind clouds,

suspended there like truth,

dependent on what can be seen, felt or heard,

or so they say.

The scraping branches on Moiliili rooftops break the reverie.

You had fallen asleep in the empty lot

behind the now derelict office

of the late Dr. Grant.

His name still visible in a dangling placard

that hangs and sways over the doors

that led you to all these dark corners.

Truth is never condemned

but rather transformed

for each subsequent generation,

it depends on the receptivity.

Distracted by carefully constructed facades,

know that some places remain,

through the tunneled mountain

at the very heart

of what cannot be divulged so plain,

the day will be drained of light

and night in its scented bloom

will resume at Ulupo

where it always has been

for those who seek it out.

One more Ripple in the Rendering

In scratching the surface suggestion

seeking out a picture,

a glimmering impression of what has passed.

Through the dirt, rumor and broken glass,

the shards of a half-formed story

could be grasped and pieced together

until momentum would collapse the edges

into jagged gaps that

set streams to bleed over wrists in motion.

There’s always a diversion to twist the truth,

new evidence to lift, to unburden the proof.

There’s the sneaking suspicion

that no more is known now than when first ushered in

to the forbidden forest of what is lost.

In scratching the scars over the memory’s repression

the traumatic depression

of rock fall or article,

the writing on the wall

that is a faded scrawl

in the downward spiral towards oblivion.

To comprehend the texture of this revision

requires one’s own muddied thoughts

to be tracked through here again and again.

Confronting the silence between lines,

between the tied up chimes

and pictures in a collective mind.

There’s a conscious untying of the strings

to hear the wind sing

like birds above the oppressive ceiling of forgetting.

The claustrophobic wringing of this fine thread

leads to a dead end

where dried up palms

sound like snake rattles disturbing the calm

of surface waters with phantom paddles.

The cacophony of singing shells

in the shadow of the Pali dwells

from cool heights where they fell

to twist and unravel over a concrete

that knows neither streetlight nor renewal,

only decay in the memory of its evil,

imprinted like tire tracks,

degraded in overgrown cul de sacs.

Imagining the outlines

while the jungle assigns a new border,

a derelict gate to mark the edge of this haunted quarter

where everything unfolds in the fog of half-truths and disorder.

Bit by bit, each detail is fed to the collective fire,

like reams in a typewriter,

the legend has been tapped into the consciousness of the whole.

The rain comes in sheets

to prompt this release,

to dab at the wounds and proceed

even gently

past the banyan sentry

who seems to guard access to the heart of this mystery,

that secret source that will inspire

one more ripple in the rendering

of a story that knows neither beginning nor ending.