Milky Way Cove

If all light is born out of darkness

and the land returns to the sea

carving new dimensions

restructuring the boundaries

and the demarcations of time

that starve dreams of their totality.

To search for significance

in emptiness,

embracing the sun,

the unseen fires beneath

salty layers where creativity is born,

where the ancestors and their manifestations

are afloat over a sense of purpose.

Pulling islands out of nothingness,

these dark shapes

dimly aware of climbing

from the shade to another plane,

no longer steering

but yielding to the way the material mingles

with the concealed.

May the wind be guide

daybreak the first breath

to begin again,

transitioning with the tides.

Another wave of the hands and the lowering of oars.

A bend at the waist was the horizon,

the edge of the desk

permeable and stretched

over this limbo, waiting for signs,

for the stars to allign.

Drifting towards the

milky way cove in

an explosion of foam,

immutable forms

scattered in ink

disintegrating into

the awareness

of the furthest reaches of

a palpable silence.

Beneath everything

in a vast stream of consciousness,

you seek direction through undulation,

solitary passages from

a recurring dream.

Upon this craft of words

built for navigation,

you make circles in coastal fog,

piercing like beacons

these poems of the disappearing dark to light.

Each year feeling further from land,

from all the goals and plans.

The emotional resonance from

the past reveals

love and pain as two sides of the same

cloud shadow and raised coral,

seen from above

perceived through that mirror,

where is the boundary

between the light and the sea?

The immovable star?

The guide pulling me further from sleep?

Emptied of what is and isn’t necessary,

a blank sheet daily

for words and becoming complete

before night sweeps in

to begin it all again.

An Expectant Exile

An expectant exile

in circular patterns,

a clasp in the necklace

fastened by chance and distance.

What is left unfinished,

an art that is never completed

in the endless reel

of this motion.

The tide receding

the stars fleeting,

pinned like sea salt

on the slick surfaces of sky .

The expectant exile,

journals in the blanks

left on the trail.

Words weathered,

soaked through with rain,

the wind turned pages

in the book of changes.

A deep ancestral resonance,

chanted into the grooves

and in mountains

a distant profile

textured in stone.

Sunrise over Ka Iwi

the coast of bones.

Black are the remains

of an ancient flow,

like charcoaled veins

for a jagged running

narrative to time.

These silent sentinels

revealed in first light

at the border between worlds.

The edge of the sea was

an armor over the distant glimmer

perceived from the ridgeline,

a single drop in the universe

to nourish the thirst

for horizons.

The expectant exile

of sturdy trees felled

from far away forests.

The storms turned to driftwood,

made errant to currents,

to wash ashore

on far away beaches

with the lullaby of soft violence

that shapes these expressions.

Gods carved in effigy,

their likeness

carried off to war

or kept at temple entrances

to ward off the restless,

even harbor those protective

in places of refuge.

Shifting seasons,

Ua Koko,

the heavy rain

brings blood in

the tragedy of rivers.

Their curving knives

down clay hillsides

filling artesian springs

with an ecstasy

that sings through the rock

of expectant exile,

when clear waters are expelled

into the brackish grasp

of the unknown

who cast it adrift

to begin again.

Who Else Weeps but the Sea

Spitting Cave, sacred and sleepless

under the sheets of the sea

turning ,murmuring,

in the impression

that even the most solid of walls

dissolve eventually.

A breath goes in and sometimes death comes out,

with a tremendous mist

like the projecting of a myth,

a requiem for the unfortunate of fate

drawn to the edge of this place,

only to recede back

then double forward

like the delicate dance of the tide.

They are as bold as they are blind,

concealed in an earthen fold,

not muted by time,

something of them remains,

a spirit expressed in spray,

a raised image in salt

the ocean cannot wash away

the residual scar

raised like a plaque,

sunlit and speaking of those

who never crawled back to shore.

How reason turns to rock here,

madness in the spectacle of leap.

The rush of adrenaline,

one plunge into the snare of the sea

luring from within the energy

of internal proving grounds.

Young men mostly,

coming again and again to tempt providence

but without victory,

they become victims to the same trajectory,

tiny ripples in a massive wave of remorse.

In the mind’s eye all of Argos can collapse

into darkness, into the recesses of cliffs

where white rocks of deposit

are like ancient offerings to a coming crest

when history repeats itself

from pools of unspeakable depth.

Brief, our comparative windows,

the difference between life and death

just a shade or a hue,

cloud shadow and a stranded moon

mark the fleeting presence

on the edge of this precipice.

Another massive spray paints the perfect surface,

where we can glean something

from this museum of lost souls

sucked back into undulation and gone again.

The early light,

makeshift wife to empathy,

reeling from decades

of supporting something fading.

Time sets them free in the end

and with only memories, we’re left to grasp at air.

Cliff diver, into the sky you disappear,

your crystalline skin like a cracked lens,

roseate at the edges of traumatic moments

we piece together bit by bit.

You can still see the fateful flight,

how it surfaces and replays

for you alone this morning,

for no one else weeps for them but the sea,

cascading down the cliff’s face

like a torrent of emotion

symbolically stirring

in the watery graves underneath.

The Returning

The moon, held suspended on a cloud

like a jewel in an outstretched palm

that clenched its fist

over a creative instrument

that prisms the light to beam through the sky.

From this vantage,

see the night thaw into a fleeting image

of my own willingness

to let the past be prologue

and memory become notes in a ship’s log

bound for East Point

painted on the horizon

like a raised birthmark over a darkened skin,

it’s set in its own isolation.

Through the El Greco sky of the mind,

unsteady in the swirl of shade and light,

poles teeter on the edge of each other ,

delicately dancing in the glow.

Where it beckons you’ll follow,

tracing lines to their inevitable ends,

leaving a progeny of words

strung against words

like a procession of lanterns

engulfed by waves

extinguished candles of breath

that craved oxygen,

building up only to give in to collapse.

All the thoughts and differing shades of meaning

shifting the gleam to tide pools cascading

from an overarching theme,

where everything is passing through.

For a moment the moon holds true,

weightless and suspended in a bubble of foam.

A perfect circle, timeless, eternal,

always returning home.

All that is Concealed

The poem was like a silhouette

that waits for form,

a subtle weight in white sands,

it baits the creator

to express shape,

to conform to something

beyond the illusion of escape.

What is is what will change.

A beach, a set of words,

being released to the storm surge.

There was no scale to measure

the drawn drapes of a blue room receding

only to resume where there is no longer land,

just a moving wall and a disappearing man

dipped in ink

crossed out in dreams,

a rapid eye, a blinking screen

enclosing all thought

in static explosions of surf.

 

Into the drink, the before birth,

all liquid comprehension.

The gesturing wind

was an extension of limbs,

trees and inaccessible forests,

mangrove, black river cypress.

All that is concealed eventually sees light.

All that is consumed within a vast appetite,

the regurgitated words, the message often missed,

the pools beneath falls hold the tears of the mist,

like a lament for all the passing moments.

Clouds draped shadow over the valley walls,

slowly it crawls, this spirit revealed

in shifting hue,

in subtle song,

how it quickly withdrew

but remains long after the form is gone.

With the Deep, an Alchemy

There’s an alchemy

between what you relieve

and the unknown that receives.

Seek to see (sea) what would symbolize,

pools from wet feet

mythologize the deep

with careless streams seeking re-entry.

Gazing out

the Moks were still as sentries (centuries)

sphinx-like and stark against the sky,

crouching tigers

protecting what they would harbor,

all the dark secrets

weaved into a carpet of moon

bejeweled

the light that levitates

imbues the surface with significance.

The night,

through drunken illumination,

reveals its spirit through creation.

Patient waves of inhalation

break eternity against rock walls

briefly revealing

the watchful pause (paws)

submerged entirely.

Let it slip to the coral bottom

like loose fitting rings,

the fleeting moments

sucked into a shadow,

released through blow hole mist.

Recover a Grecian urn

of all that is often missed

in the passage of time.

Through inspiration

construct this edifice to the sea,

something impermanent

something enshrined

while currents in a turbulent boil

sweep all that storms relieve

into the alchemy of the deep.

A Distorted Image that once had Symmetry

You never seemed closer

than when the winter’s mirror

showed the moon through a window

we no longer shared together.

It had moved beyond the frame,

outside of the domestic pressures

to come to a consensus.

Arresting me now

from this unsteady position,

appearing marble over sculpted edges,

it succumbs to the falls.

For a time you receded

into the memory of travel.

What we felt was fixed

seemed to unravel

into a distorted image

that once had symmetry.

It was a shared architecture

balanced perpetually over water,

on the far end of slumber

we’d pass through Alhambra.

Light and shadow a shifting mosaic

perfecting the illusion of order.

It shades the gypsy within

a forgotten square,

somewhere the faint sound of strings

that know no completion.

All the poems resting in woven shoulder bags

share their scraps of awe,

untidy and retreating to far flung places.

There the moon is watching,

like an ancestral eye,

witness to the chaos

that in time plateaus.

It sees these windows are cleansed.

What we had closed is now flung open

as it ascends the back trellis,

cold sheets over the flower beds,

the moon is a punctuation of silence,

a trial that comes to completion,

an illuminated mile to float on

as time allows us to revive a dead ocean,

an unfolding dream

an unbroken seam,

as it coils around the wave break sound

to the far horizon where eyes bid farewell.

If this is my last view,

if today is a good day to depart

with a subtle wake,

it would always be worth it.

Between the Sky and the Sea

The void spreads,

wandering for an echo.

Its silence shaved into a profile

Kanehoalani

keeper of the caves and underground springs

a labyrinth of burials

through which the wind speaks

its porous volcanic chants

this eternal dialogue with the dead

tufts of valley grass at its feet

regenerative pools of red petals

the scent of blood

born of ancient battles

resonates its decay,

blesses the sunrise

upon which we’ll walk this day.

The sea heaves you into sleep

collapsing in a heap of disfigured sheets.

Half nodded you note the details

from the table’s edge

to the depths at your feet

disassembling into archipelagos of dreaming.

The rain, rhythmic

dissolves the moon in Po Kane

mostly shadow, one blade of light

accentuates the featureless

paths of flashlight finding the abandoned places,

Luakaha, Tantalus, the remains of Luakini

under brush strokes midnight.

The muscular miracle,

the movement of your wrist,

the meandering river of your veins in motion

your parched and dried up words find an ocean

smoldering like a morning fire

a smoking illusion, the disappearing night

transitions into chalky white streaks

patterned on black lava rock platforms

where the dead are lead to edges

and waves of worldly concern ripple away.

That opening in a cloud of spray

was a swan dive through which endless night

sucks the last soul through.

No moon lights this procession,

put your ear to the blowhole

and take down its confession.

Track the mist, spreading in the absence of form,

the void, blanketed between the sky and the sea.

Nothing like being Suspended

Five hours in flight with nothing to unglue.
Five hours suspended in cloud chewed through
by a sky of insight
that would imbue with light
the teary beads of precipitation
hanging in the windows of anticipation.
The illuminated trails yet to arrive,
strapped in and forced to set distractions aside,
cultivating nothing of importance,
nothing blogworthy,
but this will go up anyway
and that is the irony.
As we rise in elevation,
resigned to rapid penetration,
a ragged correspondence
will compensate for being connected to nothing.
Red eyed relationships of leaving
equilibrium
losing nothing if not the illusion of balance,
the luster of newness,
the lust for her turbulence,
memories tripped up on the fading trust
spurring a glance that asks
“Where have you been?”
Exiled on an island,
writing to the infinite and the sensual
within the harsh borders of coral.
The weight of an ocean will hold up this craft
but lend nothing towards its escape.
Below us an endless graph of salt
clay stillness with the occasional squall
breaking the monotony,
a storm surge over the real possibility
of being caught in its momentum.
Rips of wind tilt the within,
pulling at these compartments of recollection,
an internal state like a projection on the horizon,
a spotlight glow
beyond the seascape of shadow
and definition, a prison we’d never find ourselves in.
Excitement and apprehension
towards an infinite well the dark was sucked into.
The ocean veiled in textured clouds
that were like razor reeds
to sharpen the sleep of the waiting deep.
The melancholy of what you leave
meets relief at being in motion again.
Reluctant acceptance courts disarray and distance,
rekindling old strands,
those gypsy strands
that caravan the sinking sands
of just reward
punctuated by renewal’s lonely chords
sliding into the nothing you were descending towards.

Passages

The sun and sea comingling

with sand and thoughts

that sweat into words

running off of the skin

like beads that begin

to evaporate in the heat.

Words repeat

clinging to the mind

like a tangle of vines

on the decrepit walls of a decaying palazzo.

The ocean fills the spaces between passages

and you go down,

not quite damaged but exposed

in that precarious spot

between restless pursuit and painful waiting.

Pens heavying for a vital point,

compulsively clouded in inky residue,

it is dipped again to anoint the end,

recording a passage in time.

Talk gets swallowed by the quiet forms,

now dry and windswept words

parched in the longing for rain.

Questions arise to be kept in the silence of wards,

starched white inhabitants, restless and insane,

have you moving this instrument again and again.

Like the snail’s trail that glistens over the fragile leaf,

the pen moves like a thief over delicate pages.

This subtle movement, persistant,

takes hold of eternity.

Carrying it for awhile,

it goes unbroken,

if only by thought and daylight,

words fill the empty spaces

once occupied by love.

It forms devotion,

holding up this crumbling land

once was an ocean.

It’s flow had no obstruction,

against it rock merely rested,

there was nowhere it was not,

all was invested.

Down by its edges,

passive, pensive,

up above the wellspring of words.

That through the ages

have become sunken,

calling out for inspiration,

while you rendezvous with vacancy.

Secrets may be revealed,

one passage at a time.

Over rock walls

down stairways,

one salty luminous rhyme.

The hidden coves of coral inlets

hide myriad beaches

to leave temporary footprints.

The cool dive in the morning mist

pulls out a beating heart

dripping from your fist

and though waves constantly besiege,

Shangri-La won’t resist.

The sea revealing its mystery,

on the underbelly

the scars of its history

that will continue to endure.