Outer Islands 9780824888107

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Outer Islands

PACIFIC POETRY SERIES

Outer Islands Gary Kissick

University of Hawaii Press • Honolulu

Outer Islands was selected by William Stafford in the 1983 Pacific Poetry Series competition

© 1984 Gary Kissick All Rights Reserved Manufactured in the United States of America Library of Congress Catalog Card No. 83-050639 ISBN 0 - 8 2 4 8 - 0 9 1 1 - 4

Poems in this book have appeared in Aloha, Bamboo Ridge, Hapa, Hawaii Literary Arts Council Newsletter, Hawaii Review, Hearse: A Vehicle for Conveying the Dead, Manna-Mana, Poetry East-West, Poetry Hawaii, Poetry Now, Prairie Schooner, Rolling Stone.

The author is deeply grateful to the National Endowment for the Arts for a gift that made many of these poems possible. Special thanks to special friends: Ann Yoklavich, for fancy footwork; Dana Czapanskiy, for always having been so; & especially to my wife, Yukiko, for not burning old poems while inspiring new.

Contents

dedication, for Yukiko I.

IF STONE WERE RAIN a pact with spirits 3 if stone were rain 4 Kohala 6 dawn at Halape oasis 7 hiking beneath Holei Pali Pololu Valley 11 Kapaa, Hawaii 14 at Paliku 15 Waianapanapa 16 Hanakapiai Valley 17 Na Pali 18 rain quietude 19 night rain 20 my open eyes 21

II.

A LITTLE WINE

vii 1

8

25

What harm can a little wine do? Kalalau Valley 28 I was swimming 29 my mantra 32 shimmering 33 Yukiko 34 become someone 35 in a bamboo grove 36 gingko leaf 37 Honolulu 38 Paiolo laundromat 39 Manoa Valley Theatre ghosts on sleeping with kittens 41 after sleeping with Evelyn 42 last eyes 43 Flambé Amore 47 anyway 48

vi III.

LOVE & MOLESTATION

49

royal flush 51 four poems for Lucretia 52 death in space 56 downtown hotel, Saturday morning sometimes 59 the child molester 61 the werewolf 63 65 what I like about a blindman I knew a woman discontent 66 an attempt to console (for Eve) 67 poets will marry anything 68 IV.

S O PERFECTLY F O R G O T T E N

69

why the eyes close in love 71 an autumnal conclusion 72 toward green 73 prelude 74 peach petals 75 for my sleeping wife, who insists I study F O R T R A N 76 cat 77 in the Senckenberg Museum of Natural History (natron) 78 in the Senckenberg Museum of Natural History (formaldehyde) 80 Pauline 82 trying to remember her name 84

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dedication, for Yukiko I want to make something beautiful; therefore, I speak little, I move slowly the bells of my awkwardness.

I. IF STONE WERE RAIN

a pact with spirits It is a pact I have made with spirits. They will not reveal themselves. When I turn to examine an echo, I'll see no old Chinaman forlorn in an overcoat worn thin by moonlight. When I sleep in the woods, I'll hear no ancient songs, no women where there are none. The desolate babies in the graveyard will be cats. The clack of bamboo only that. Coat hangers will not rattle in the closet, the lock will not come undone, nor will the rocking chair rock of its own accord. I, in return, will believe in them.

if stone were rain In search of moths and lizards, hungry ghosts press their rotten eyes to the window. All a mortal can see is rain, a few drops sliding faster than others. The wind gods create mad love and sleeplessness, pursuing voices and visions. In bed, in rain, in Volcano, I draw my legs through the cold sheet; I pull my blankets over my superstitions, and listen closely to these in the dark: a gecko tail thrashing on the wooden floor; hushed cries and low curses swept along the roof; the rain spout; dim, scattered hooves of goats alerted to danger; the widowed sound risen from a distance in search of something lost that it would regain, but will not. Once in this place it rained fire, a pure molten glow in the open mouths of men, women, children whose footprints still run bodiless in long strides across the lava near my home. Those ashes that floated serenely in a smoke and blue aftermath for days were the people of King Keoua.

Now it rains rain, black wax dripping from extinguished candles, pine needles dropping to the forest floor. Red ohia leaves crystallize in darkness. Lehua flowers collapse. Time passes this way and almost speaks. It is what petroglyphs would be if stone were rain.

Kohala Two shadows. One disappears by walking away. One flicks its tail at the fog.

dawn at Halape oasis The night has worn out. It was my blanket and consolation. Whenever I opened my eyes, the dark was thick with night sky stars. Whenever I turned my body, makai or mauka, it buoyed my body with darkness and constellations. Of a multitude, one star remains. The calm pulse of its light beats in the tidal pool.

8

hiking beneath Holei Pali I.

Cloudless An empty wind over lava. Goats won't live here. Shadows barely survive. I bend my head to the dark side of stone like an animal at the edge of water. I have none. The tank at Halape was foul. I've grown weak without it. Smooth stone and a pillow of shadow like sleep, these fit me perfectly.

II.

When I awaken, my throat is a broken jar in the desert. The sun persists. Wind blows over my fingers, unearthing bones as if relics. M y own voice chills and dispossesses me. Start walking. Once this had all been molten, lava flowing to the sea, trapped trees bursting into white, incandescent flames. Now it is whorls, ripples, sparks of light—fire enchanted into stone, starlight sequestered. A cool whirlpool of sleep surrounds me, whispers discouragement, knows friends who have died. I sway as if forgotten—derelict, forsaken. Just stop walking, and stop thinking about walking, sink to my knees, go deeper a quiet death if I drown.

No. I hate enchantment: eternity disguised as sleep, a wolf in sheep's clothing. Petrified miscreants and lovers. Hina in a pale moon. III. Late afternoon, I discover a flower. Start laughing. The madman in the desert discovers a flower, and soon a flower, and yet again a flower. He dances like a crab before waves, cheered by his fondest fears. At sunset he lies upon Chain of Craters Road, having lost count, and having forgotten of what. Now pahoehoe is gray, cool, a sluggish beast soon to move. I rest, then follow the road severed long ago by lava. Tomorrow, surely, water. IV. The first star descends a growing darkness. In long grass, dreaming, I float like stones reflected in mountain pools. At times I awaken in the ocean breeze. When the cold zipper of my sleeping bag touches I mistake it for sudden desire.

10

When I awaken again, it is to stars dense and molten, crowded in too little darkness. Mauna Ulu tosses like troubled sleep, a distant cauldron, a lake of fire. Comets make me wonder if they were only birds in starlight. At dawn, the sky is extravagant, and lava leaps from the pali to devour, by nightfall, my bed.

Pololu Valley morning The steep trail zigzags to beach and stream below. Hala leaves spiral and jag, broken like crab legs by the wind. I can see for miles—far down the coast three thin white lines down sheer stone are bellyless and falling. The ocean. The sky. I grow dizzy above and beneath them. Black rock-risen islands keep time, grow dark, nest birds, and are always there at morning. The waves drift like eyelids past dawn.

12

noon Long-tailed birds, white and without the name we have given them.

13

evening The moon is full, and has nothing to say. Crickets are empty, but chatter incessantly.

Kapaa, Hawaii All night at Kapaa, my dreams fanned like long hair around my sleeping bag, ghosts awaken me. I see the stars, but the moon mostly. The coast is stone, and I hear it. No breaking branch, no disembodied laughter, no dog, no warrior, nothing to fear. I know this. I am glad to be alone at Kapaa. But I am not.

at Paliku At Paliku, after a night of somnolent rain, ama'u ferns make me long for delicate features, thin limbs, perfect hands to pass through light. When I lean close to pilo berries glazed with rain, only my body keeps me a clumsy man.

16

Waianapanapa The coastal wind, gray, pu hala. A scowling, a mist, wet lava. The shape of a shape at sea. Haleakala, clouds. The cows move like fog. On a day like this, I walk to ancient places—heiaus, cliffs, shiny wet kamani leaves. Once I sat in a cave for hours, in the sound of the sea, sheltered from storm— a princess hiding forever from an unwanted husband. Often I walk to my cabin in the rain, remove my wet clothes, and walk naked and slightly chilled on the wood floor. A cluster of papaya grows in the rain, just off the lanai. Firm, green, but one ripe streak. I am a lonely man. On clear nights I speak around the moon.

Hanakapiai Valley Mountain. Mountain and mist. A tree's branches barely. You see a woman once, from a distance, and never again.

Na Pali All day I have hiked through these woods, the scent of guava, and the seedwork of light, to a high place where one may fall silent. All night the guavas plop in grass or split open soundly on rocks. And what rustled last night in the moon is here again.

19

rain quietude In sleep made of sleep and remembrance, a few raindrops sound in the dark. Like a chieftain, the wind moves through leaves, then the raindrops fall. But I am deceived by other nights and desires; these are only small hands shaken from the sky. No rainfall follows the path through the woods, the night is clear of its sounds, and I can hear the ocean open like a palm among small rocks. I think of days when some ghost undulation moved through stillborn rain on the ocean. I have seen that same blown curtain in the changing tones of sea seen from a great height on clear days; and in clouds paled by wind on the pali; and in a woman's distraction, when buoyed by love past dusk to darkness, she finds an unfamiliar light illuminates a world still moving, but moving less, as she lies wet and hesitates to wonder what love will remain when she has handed it down to herself through the years and those hands have changed it, when even now it is strangely unapproachable, an arrangement in perfect balance, and, offhandedly, she says, "I think it's going to rain."

20

night rain The first drops fall flat upon the roof. Mushroom. Secret. A path of fat toads. Moss covers fenceposts: green, red. The night shakes out sudden rain: stars scuttling over the rooftops of sleep, crabs snared by the eye. Ohia roots in tree fern and lava. Smoke in each branch. Rain in each lehua.

my open eyes Dream-love awakened, I reach for myself, a shell cast up from the ocean. M y open eyes are a sound in the dark. So are wet guavas falling in the jungle. The mist is a sleepwalker. Ghosts sit in branches. I'm sleeping in a valley where I've never slept before, beneath a tree of restless leaves. I tell myself—this is me, here, this hand upon chest, this only body. But it lacks conviction. Hala, ohia, kamole, wind orchids. Crimson and black 'apapane. Ti leaves on ancient terraces. Stone walls I dare not disturb. I have bathed in cold mountain streams, and at Queen's Bath, and floating on my back have watched the rise and fall of the roof in the sea cave at Kalalau. I have known the secret place inside a wave, and have passed through the green light found in the arms of rare women. The scent of white ginger has made me forgetful. I've watched the mountains gather clouds from darkening air, heard the wind

21

22

cross Kaau Crater—through the lemon grass, through the thimbleberries— and wings pass through that air, and small songs. In a burial cave high in the Koolaus —sand, skeleton, kahili, canoe— a five-fingered wind has silenced me. I've seen Pele in a face of fire, tears in stone. And once, foolishly, dreaming a life in the sea, I swam in praise of my body, broken by light into bits of blue weightlessness. Then I saw him above m e — malignant eye, slit mouth, white belly— and this I swear: his body curved slowly, endlessly, so that I had to rise for breath before his full length possessed me. At night, when my arms and legs ached and my fears were blood in the water, he still swam silently—circling, disappearing suddenly tossing my body in the wake of close passage, black fin cutting blackness.

23

Not until lanterns moved upon the water and friends called out my name did he depart. N o w I cannot look upon opihi, or lehua, or the smallest fallen leaf, without feeling they are enormous and I am swimming in darkness. I lie awake in the middle of the night, m y sleep an ancient stone. I w a n t only to rise and fall like a boat in quiet water. Instead, I remember things.

II. A LITTLE WINE

27

What harm can a little wine do? Li Po drank it, and now he's famous. Drank it like moonlight, straight off the vine. Told the Emperor, "I'll come tomorrow; I'm too stewed now. Your humble servant is a god of wine."

Kalalau Valley I'm bored. The trees are old ladies who have done their washing in the stream, and the sound of the stream is muddy. I think of all the young women I've ever loved. A few shameful sorrows turn my head to the ground. And that stops me dumb, an open mouth beneath stars— the most I've ever seen or hope to see. How very far away I was from this green, scattering galaxy. Baby frogs on black mud.

29

I was swimming It begins in the green sea, rising on a green swell, falling, swimming, kicking. I ride the waves for a long time, like unscrolled centuries of Chinese poems. Ancient jade, they break with me within them. I'm alone but unlonely, naked inside and out, enchanted, deceived, afloat off Hanakapiai, white clouds above the distant falls basking, too, in their weightlessness. The sky has never seemed so blue, so much a mirror of simple dream. Hala, ohia, guava and ti shake pleated shadows from silken sleeves, open a fan of lucent green. The hills rise like a dark tiger. Bamboo cages light and releases it. W h y must you cross the Seven Hills, Li Chan? Stay and drink wine. Let the petals fall. Let the moon rise. What salty delirium! Each wave rhymes with another. Each bears a different emperor, a different dynasty. Where have I been? What have I done? Nowhere and nothing. I'm here now. It's time to ride the next wave in, to rest like a beached weed in sunlight, as a crab never does, sprawled and indiscreet. But the dour great sea is rushing the other way, has other plans, has not consulted me. Water draws me from beach, from valley,

30

from egret sliding through sunlight and shadow, and I turn, frightened, toward the horizon. G o o d G o d Holy-Mother-pray-for-us Hare Krishna sonofabitch! O n e beastly, prehistoric, inexorable wave gathers before me (I'm sorry, I'm sorry, it was presumptuous, I shouldn't have come), rises to a sheer leaning precipice (I'm nobody, flotsam adrift, forgive me Father for I have swum), then falls, pterodon folding wings over prey. This beast dashes me under, knots my screams, churns me with sand and shell, bruises and buries m e — nose, mouth, salt, a lifetime of unworthiness . . . . And the lights are going out in my body, a small town in South Dakota, first the gossamer extremities—desires, fingers, toes— then m y feet, my palms, no mail will ever be delivered to my door, no oxygen to my arms, my legs, and the sound of a door closing in my heart breaks it, and my brain is an old cleaning woman shutting Venetian blinds in a hurry, and in that dark room I see: a little b o y on a pony (the pony is self-assured; the b o y is not); a tea stem floating in a cup; the pale Midori, beauty of Kyoto, probing my pubic hairs, discovering gray, and saying, "These here, Gary-san, they must worry a lot, yeah?"

Then she leans to kiss A n d all that's left is some life in my lips, a small fish rising or sinking through turbulent darkness to this, this particular darkness, which I always knew would be terrible, when sudden air parts them, washes my face and through i so that for a moment I am unveiled, thrown like a coin into a blue loitering sky, spinning on my incredible luck, laughing, gasping, crying, drawn through yet one more sea in which I did not k n o w I was swimming.

32

my mantra M y mantra is a lost city, a Vedic temple, a quest without question. M y mantra is rain dripping from rain, a blossoming moon, a bowl of sleep. M y mantra seemed a stranger at first, a detachment, the handshake of a buried mystic. N o w m y mantra is bread rising, tea steeping. Just think, a pure w o r d unsullied b y ink. That's m y mantra. M y mantra is cryptic, hermetic, the key to my navel, a lock of my hair. Lips that touch reason will never touch my mantra. Do you hear that, the sound of the one hand that doesn't clap? Look out, here comes my mantra.

shimmering Shimmering like the halo of an angel lost in impure thoughts, the water next to the goldfish is gold. When I touch my hand to your cheek as lightly as possible, a saint feels disconcerted by a sudden nakedness.

Yukiko Did I imagine it, her shadowed thigh, its motion like the sigh of a book left open, alone for hours? You touch a leaf through which clouds have passed on their way into this world. Or water stills, and a cloud below makes you look up.

become someone Maybe I can fall asleep dreaming, become someone, even make money. All I have is the woman I love. All night the tide performs small tasks for my hands. I awaken a lazy man.

35

36

in a bamboo grove Alone in a grove of bamboo, and it's snowing. Perfect, symmetrical flakes melt in my hair, and on my cheeks, in my open hands, and on thin, pointed leaves shaking like something asleep that would not be awakened. Suddenly, a dark creature darts across snow—shadow to shadow. And here, now, in an unexpected sweep of sunlight over the white prints of its paws, bold crystalline stars fill the smallest measure of its passage. When I lost my youth, I thought I would weep forever. Is this a winter breeze or only my hair turning gray? Alone . . . and it's snowing, falling quietly cold, no stalks clacking, and even the animal only the steps of a dance for which I imagine the quietest music— white, on white, on white.

gingko leaf I pick up a gingko leaf, and drop it where it pleases me. Now I must leave Japan. The sun has sent a white moth of light to the forest, in a world without regret has opened a bamboo fan. Sometimes you'd stoop, gathering your departure in silken sleeves, in ink black lacquer, and your kimono would drift from your breast like winter.

38

Honolulu How quiet it is at the edge of these city lights, distant traffic beating like the pulse of a small bird once thought extinct— an almost green red-breasted bird with amorous ringed eyes and wings that shimmer.

Paiolo

laundromat

I told her I loved her too many times. My wet, heavy sheets fill my hands but make me feel poor. I am poor. And every time it was like not having enough, like being a child and asking the lady —What can I get for a dime? And this cruel, cruel hairpin is less than a penny change, and means— Not a goddamn thing, Kid.

Manoa Valley Theatre ghosts Going to Manoa Valley Theatre? Treading on graves for the sake of a play? Well, if you must . . . , but don't be dismayed when festering ghosts surround you. They'll complain, "We've seen this one before. Always the same. Such a bore. They all die in the end, you know." They'll flirt, "Come here often? All alone? We'd love to run our bones through your hair, rattle our chains through your bones." They'll despair, "We're hungry. No one feeds us. We've grown transparent, thin as air. Plumeria wafts right through us." When they mutter their famous aside—"We think all burials premature, don't you?"— do what life does: ignore them. Simply thoroughly read the program. They'll depart, begrudged, to the balcony, where dying conditions are overcrowded (yet they prefer it to private loges). Don't fear them. Don't fault them. Their plight's grave. Their plot's eternal. They don't stand the ghost of a ghost of a chance. When the curtain rises, they're the sigh in silence. When it falls it raises the dust of defiance.

41

on sleeping with kittens All night, attacking padlocks on a deep, sound casket, cats rattle my feet. Graverobbers, shoes thick with mud, spades clangorous as trolleys, they pay no homage to my sleep. They dance on my stone, on its hopeful inscription: HERE LIES A TIRED MAN. MAY HE REST IN PEACE. Their touch is wetter than worms and cold as dew, and the morning wind risen in their limbs swings my dream on a rusty hinge.

after sleeping with Evelyn I turn my back on the sad-eyed dog who loves me and would be consoled. Guerrillas in a country where the capital's crumbling, fleas traffick his body. I can't stand the way he smells. In my perfumed sheets, a windfall of gardenias has made me particular. I clutch my pillows all night in desire and disorder . . . . But they prove skinny women. At dawn, despicable time of day, the streets fill with commoners none handsome, none beautiful. "Death to the sensualist! Off the libertine pig!" It must be Sunday. I refuse to open my eyes. I can think only of Evelyn, of her legs, of . . . .

43

last eyes I miss you. I miss the rain that fell around you. Long winter rain, nodding like an old man's sleep. I miss exclamatory notes in my pockets— hearts, flowers, clangorous chains of love!—innocents adrift on the treacherous sea of your hand. I miss the light of your television, lonely, as if it shone from a bachelor's refrigerator or undiscovered face of Jesus. I miss the headlights sweeping across your ceiling and down the walls. I miss the pleasurable thud of fatal accidents, the splash of shattered glass collapsing. I miss seabirds at dawn floating within themselves like ashes. I miss crabs tapping the windows where black cats sleep. I miss your clothes on the piano, that quiet tune. I remember your underwear as I remember certain impressionist paintings. There's a white rectangle on the wall. Something's missing. Weren't there lilies and the kind of light café winds shake from parasols? I'm missing a toothbrush. I miss improving your vocabulary systematically, and with unsuspected perversity. Astraphobia, Ataractic, Atrabilious. Fear of thunder and lightning

44

pertaining to calmness and peace of mind inclined to melancholy. I miss your eclectic dinners: Lychee & asparagus, Tofu tuna, Kim Chee surprise. I miss rabbits making rice cakes on the moon. Those soft, dirty paws. I understand now the bloody deeds of your ancestors, the interment of the living with the dead. I understand how the red fox deceived your grandfather, how the few precious coins in his hand turned to fine, nothing-but sand as the young woman howled and vanished. I understand why Chi Tzu planted willows to soften your Choson hearts, and failing that, ordered earthenware hats. Nevertheless, I miss you. All this iridescent love is a fish out of water— wide-eyed, still in the habit of breathing. I miss awakening to your lips and tongue inciting my cock, which was never your name for it. I miss that blue kiss, compulsive fingertips, and the black contagion of your slightest glance.

45

I miss the pale smoke rising from the bed at dawn, like fog on Inwang Mountain. And as for your new lover—each of his rotten teeth grinning— his gloating's a worm in an onion, a gleam in an eye in a gluttonous rat in a trap, and I don't know how you can bear to let any part of his leprous body touch you where I've touched— so lovingly, with such devotion . . . . Love, it's desecration. Look! I'm an old lover trembling, I'm moonlight disturbed on a lake. Look at these hands, bent and misshapen— small hunchbacked tailors miserly with their measurement of your body. They miss you, they still harbor grand designs. They're no substitute for you; they've lost the scent of green-throated ginger tumbling from black hair at midnight. They dread a lifetime of solitaire, of naked cherubs peddling through a swamp. I wake in the morning to angel buttocks receding in the ceiling like cattle. I'd rather be unearthed by your touch as if a teacup buried for 3,000 years. Give or take a lifetime. Once, last night, as I drifted toward sleep, the curtain brushed my forehead gently,

46

the curtain brushed my forehead gently, and the brief shock of that simple touch sent missing-you convulsing through my body. It was just too much. Falling in love . . . . Fuck it. It sounds so accidental— a loose step down steep stairs, thrombosis where I thought my heart was, the scalding splash of hot wax from your last, most angry disparaging eyes.

47

Flambé Amore In my dream we are dining on palm of black bear cooked in oil. We have drunk elephant trunk soup. We descend a gold-rimmed plate to a light-strewn room. You smooth me like an old photograph. Our clothes unravel. "Here it is," you say. "Here we are." And your tongue in my navel ignites blue flames. "Be still," you chide. Lips devise a kiss to soothe me. "I've been unfaithful and unkind. I'm aging." "Forgiven. Forgotten. It's for the best." We open each other like letters, like sealed confessions. All is white. All night our bodies fall as snow. We awaken adrift in each other. "Will there be anything else?" Our white wine reddens. The glass stem cracks. The maitre d' has the eyes of a taxidermist.

48

anyway Well, what is a poem anyway? A small moment, right? For example— Lifting my wine violently, thinking it still a stein of beer . . . . That's true, you know. They ran out of Primo. And I was so morosely overjukeboxed, with no hope for a haole in Hilo, all the white girls as skinny as something going down the drain. Missing you, you know. Anyway . . . .

III. LOVE & MOLESTATION

royal flush The crow folds his blue tail blackly, a royal flush, deep in the forest, where trees breast their darkness. Your hands carry the smell of the woman you almost love. You go to bed, assured of sleep, but all the covers fly off you. They are past lives, or illusions. You reach for them, it's cold, but larger hands are already shuffling the deck.

52

four poems for Lucretia one Midori? Kukui standing in the forest, light sinking into pale green leaves, pollen falling from the high flowers to the low. You? Tigers' claws dangling in the wind.

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two Like a man raised to a monastery by a rope, I say I love you. I can't sing, I can't smile, I can't breathe the smoke of those black, impertinent eyes.

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three If all the men who kill animals gathered together in a ring, would you wear it on your finger, scratch my back with its harsh black stone?

four Nothing yet. Too much familiar. Sheets the color of jacaranda falling through a wintered sky, stained from loving better than having never at all. And the room a half-smoked cigarette . high in tar & nicotine. And the mirror a private eye, a paid regret. I miss even the knife honed on careless remarks, the pin in your hair for my heart.

death in space Once, the bare back of my lover curved away from me, and her hair hung away from her neck, and I tried to fit my body against that perfect sleep. Here there is nothing to hold, and the stars open my mouth. I have been cast into space, and below, the continent of Africa is swept by clouds.

57

downtown hotel, Saturday morning Neither girl is awake. I breathe on my back, between them, doing nothing, a sort of TV. I hear a powerful engine raising something from the ground. It's building slowly among small shouts. A door slams down the hall. Barbara pouts in her sleep. Her precipitous lips still move me. The night has darkened her hair, or its disarray has turned the pillow white. Karen treads a lake no man should awaken. The sheet drawn to her cheek shudders with each step. Her eyes are naked when asleep. Cautious when the goddess of love is multi-limbed, I quietly rise to examine my face. It's the same face: large nose passed down through generations of desperate, grateful fucking, thin lips, weak chin, puzzled eyes in which ancestors sometimes swim.

58

I turn on the tap just a little. But it's louder than a lot. I run a wet finger around m y gums. T h e light keeps stuttering. I'm hungry.

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sometimes It sometimes happens, the woman you meet in love with is strange. She takes you, hot nights, down a shadow. The shadow of a ruin from which bats flap at midnight. The dungeon of that shadow. A distant comet gleams in her eyes, intimate as superstition. Her hair is a cloak across starlight. When she leans to address you, in a whisper, you're suspicious. And now come those leeching kisses, that guttural thirst, that curse that this is. That voice of a ghost cold and boneless rising within your throat. It is a story told by demons who live in the caves of kisses. We seldom listen. The lacerate bliss takes, then we give what was taken. Experience is slow . . . . We do what we do, then know it. Like a map of the moon, I unfold, resigned to facelessness. Those wings beating about my ears are love murmurs, rites, obscenities. But rather undone than undo. Rather mutter utterly, like a helpless virgin compromised by love, "Darling, don't . . . ." It's easy for her, death runs in the family,

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and her kiss is as subtle as my mistakes. It's hard for me, my will lacks won't. And nothing bleeds quite like devotion.

61

the child molester Sobbing. Cotton swabs in the heart. The sound the rain makes when it's going to rain harder. Tremor of flesh not yet torn. Soft horrid throbbing. Sobbing. So I lie for awhile beside her, admiring her tiny shoes and socks, delicate knees, and clean white dress. But then I must touch the silken spot that so distresses a little girl, be just one finger naughty, cover her face with kisses, taste her tears that have come such a long way through the woods, feel again her whole convulsive bodybreath beneath me, muffle her sobs with my chest, and say, and whisper . . . everything's going to be all right, all right, all right. If her fear were only sobbing, a red boat rocking on a dark, troubled lake . . . . But it breaks like a drowned child rising, snaps like a razor in an apple. They call me the child molester. Little girls call me Mister. They wonder who I am. Cannot conceive I love her. But surely at times they understand:

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when sunset reduces their bodies to less than clouds, when night disperses their faces, when they speak of fate and its hand.

63

the werewolf When I was a lover, with a heart disfigured by love, ill with love's distemper, even as I envisioned utter surrender, a part of me turned as the moon turns, as a corpse turns, like earth turned blindly by worms, and in my kisses— this darkness always. If my lover came away with a mark of love —a seal she treasured— I only thought, as all lovers think, of passionate teeth sunk in flesh, no more than berries found in deep moss, no more than fenceposts that lean in snow embankments. Now my kisses are lost in the deaths of my victims. They are like the first advance of fire, when a leaf curls slowly, as does love, around its absence. Now, when I see myself, it is in one of three unavoidable mirrors: the deer trembling, the cur cowering, this woman's wide eyes widening, ablaze with sight of me, her screams igniting the dark in every direction, trilling my own throat as I kiss her in that same peculiar ecstasy with which I once wrenched hot whimpers from ladies of high degree, twisting their hair and whispering vulgarities.

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Now, mad as tanglewood, swamp, thicket, loon, I babble with hands that resemble desire— large, coarse, covered with animal hair. I was once a boyar, a patron of the arts, a civilized man who never drew blood from love. Now my life is a ruin overrun by moonlight. And the bell, that giant cobweb tangling fog with forest, is only the villagers cursing my name. I burn, I weep, I believe in God. With one hand, I arch her back; with the other, draw her hair from still, startled eyes and trace the veins of a perfect neck. We are always found at such altars, creatures and beasts like myself, tracing the lines of some hymnal, some ransacked song we cannot sing. That's when we howl.

what I like about a blindman What I like about a blindman is you can stare him right in the eye, the only extinguished light by which we see. And if you freeze, breathing quietly through the you can smell the dust of that eraser perpetually voiding his face. It's what gives him his pallor. Then you can trip him. Trip him and run away. And if a blindman also suffers that disease that deadens nerves, you can creep to his bed at midnight, touch those eyes so disturbing by daylight, those cellar doors left open, unfinished tomes of blank verse, heartless poems. And if that succeeds, if that goes so well your fingers come away reeking of darkness, perhaps you can pass your hand before your face and not be born at all.

I knew a woman discontent I knew a woman discontent in marriage who complained to me without shame, crossing her legs in an outdoor café. I had too much happiness to give her any. Too thin, too brittle—her legs, each complaint. Envisioning my own love's body, I found this wife too blue, imperfect in her veins. Envisioning my own love's body, I knew, like a driving rain, her long black hair if she drowned.

an attempt to console (for Eve) Walk around it, ignore it, let it lie. Avoid unnecessary expenditures, be frugal. Say the same words over & over, let them fill your hands, hit things, throw them across the Those are your dark eyes fallen through a face of snow. You are older now and will surely die of heartbeats, diminish madly like hooves across an open space. Your lost sleep carries a candle through Shakespearean plays. It keeps everyone awake. An old song called sorrow, never really sung. Be done with it once and for all. Be done with it. This love is a sad thing; we beg what we borrow.

poets will marry anything Poets will marry anything—stormcloud, willow, black cloak swept with extravagant gesture. We'll fall madly in endangered love and share the moon's umbrella. We'll forge new hearts for each fire of our lives, write desperate haiku in tenement rooms, or strip a derelict of his tattoo and wear it to the wedding. And when we fall from love we'll mourn the storm, the calm, and the illusion, for death's the kiss with which we're born, heritage and foregone conclusion.

IV. SO PERFECTLY FORGOTTEN

why the eyes close in love A kiss that rolls the moon in my mouth. Strata of time before man, of sediments now shale, sandstone, coal. A fragment and a fossil. A coiled nautiloid. A mineral taste sometimes caught on the breath of close women. Warm air wafted through tunnels of stone. Secret sources of cave breezes. Diatoms, crystals, plankton. The underside of a leaf after rain. Blind, chemical, first forms of life. An uplifted fault once a swamp, stone once animal, the shape and shadow of that elusion where grass meets dark water. Sometimes I find the woman in my arms, forgotten for the thought of light tattered on the sea. Sometimes the moon turns its hidden face and I dream the world awakens.

an autumnal conclusion Love, you cannot do this, hold autumn in a jar with a wind in it. If not pallbearers, who will conduct the seasons? All things die, as they live, without reason. But some things rhyme.

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toward green Why, you ask, do some trees lose their leaves while others are ever green below zero? That's easy, love, even rhetorical. Some, in the spring, try their branch at creation, strive for a miracle, bloom or die. Others gauge the mercurial climate, find it no surety, opt for long-term cones and security. And which am I? Well, I've always admired budding talent, respected deeply the autumnal palette. Still, with each winter colder than before, when the bravest poetry won't warm the soul, I look to the strong pines with envy— find in them, even, a quiet nobility— and lean, increasingly, toward green.

prelude A few snowflakes falling, like ashes south of Dachau. More a visitation than a storm, or snowfall, or even, merely snow. It is as if we are not supposed to notice them, as if they are invisible and call no attention to themselves. In fact, I alone seem aware of their presence. No one looks up, no windshield wipers are in use, no one speaks of snow. No one asks, in regard to these flakes, where have they disappeared to, are they gone yet, what were they doing here?

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peach petals I have never seen peach petals curl on purple waters as dusk dismembers itself in tiny, exact pieces, and the day, like a man who closes his eyes to think, and is led into sleep by the thought, turns black, and birds in flight grow nervous as geographers who sight the end of the world, which they dare not reach, and must turn back.

for my sleeping wife, who insists I study FORTRAN You are what the elements do well, make beautifully, your closed eyes a story lost to a sleeper. It's a tale of a road and wanderer, hardly perilous. For every endless horizon of snow, there's a light in a window, a path to the door. The sleep drawn to your cheek bends a pine bough, stills chill air. Not even quivering white rabbits outside the window so deeply resemble the weather— ideally suited, always appropriate. And yet you get, I think, sometimes, a bit hysterical about the coming child, and world financial collapse, that shaky economic indicator called my job, and my commitment to work a miracle, to give this up and learn at last a language more technical, therefore practical, but (imagine—the snow must reside in clouds like forgotten names, lost data, white moths beating soundless wings) far less lyrical.

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cat In a while, it happens once: the cat cries cat cries and cries. He is a genius of cats, quick to devour weak children. Once, trees grew branches in obedience to cats, shadows unfurled from the sides of cats, twilight arose from the eyes of cats, and cats were held sacred in Egypt. Now cats are nothing. They find themselves in trees at the end of some vague desire which has deserted them. The fire department is sick of their illusions. This cat yawns, or stretches, or paws some toy dull as the world itself. But unworldly shadows cross his black path, ambitions not easily suppressed by yawn, claw, or arch of back. More fleet than bird or mouse, they elude him yet. He clutches at all things moving, grows discontent when they finally relent and die. He conspires in solitude, a lonely Sphynx, yet in darkness strikes—with tiger, cheetah, leopard and lion; with serval, panther, puma and lynx; with all creatures bold and feline—that vision of empire consumed in eyes of fire.

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in the Senckenberg Museum of Natural History (natron) Beyond the stone filigree of Jurassic lilies and crocodiles fossilized in the same sea, beneath the stairs leading to Tyrannosaurus, Iguanodon, Triceratops, and Mastodon, lie glass cases of mummified children from Thebes, seemingly misplaced, yet worthy of perusal. Above a Pharoah, below a Queen, preserved in their teens and unwound that we might see those eyes time erased, those drawn nostrils, those lips devoid of anticipation, and—having unearthed all we can from those faces— the pitted skull to which shreds of red hair still cling (in the case of the boy), or from which strands of red hair still flow (in the case of the girl below), the collapsed flesh beneath the ribs, the genitals stripped of gold, arms and legs mere papered bone, yet perfect hands and toes that could seemingly dance. Grandchildren of the Gestapo, and of the utter shopkeeper, new as hothouse plants, lean as close as they dare to face and red hair; squirm, and groan, and shudder— suspecting this is the gist of dust to dust, ashes to ashes, or is a way station along that path; and soon turn their attention to the embalmed crocodile, ibis, falcon, c a t — all diminutive and neatly wrapped guardians of the royal sarcophagus.

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Vibrant orchids of clean clothes and satchels, they do not ponder, as I, the baked resemblance of Thebans to Jews, nor do they run a cautious tongue across the surface of one gold tooth.

in the Senckenberg M of Natural History (formaldehyde) From the dinosaurs, now extinct, we turn to increasingly smaller things: the stuffed dead of the Frankfurt Zoo —elephant, rhino, hippo, moose, marsupials, monkeys, rodents, shrews— insects disguised as leaves and twigs, butterflies with varied wings impaled in spectral order, and rounding the corner a lion, no larger than a quarter, bagged in transparent amnion. And here, like progressive ivory miniatures, pickled dogs, opossums, rats, and an exquisitely embryonic—paws formed, eyes unawakened—litter of cats under glass. I turn to find Yukiko dangerously transfixed by a wall of our own unborn dead, each appearing to float, yet actually affixed to a plaque by a screw to the head. This one prays in diaphanous shroud, his mother a pound of flesh. This one unveils her delicate skeleton, strikes the pose of Indie dancer, eyes closed to dreams they might express. This one's a newt, this one's a mystic,

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all go to market, none stay home. I peel her gently from this display like a bandage from wounded eyes and lead her down a dark corridor of mammalian dioramas, but it proves a cul-de-sac and we must turn back from fox gnawing rabbit, mongoose rat, past once again the forever unborn swaddled in palls of formaldehyde, to a hall of avian taxidermy, where I invite her to admire the fork-tailed sunbird, the horned Satyr Tragopan, the three kinds of kiwi, the purple agami. And while she wonders aloud if, given the choice, our parents would have kept us, I lead her to that most treasured of birds: the Dodo, or Didus ineptus.

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Pauline Those eyes, lilies adrift, have deep roots that touch nothing. Those lips, barely parted, no longer fog the pane. The breeze draws her curtain to the window . . . . The breeze is a delicate proposal . . . . From the window her curtain's blown, mere breath in space, less belly than expectation. And over her bureau of lace and musk perfumes (the bottles are small and almost empty), and over her protestations, the curtain moves again, and soon again slowly, like the breath of that angel stirring black hair fallen on left shoulder. Spring. All things tremble: ferns now coiled in their spores, cotyledons to which the earth still clings. Yet she dreams an orange forest, each tree a chandelier of light, each flower pollinate dust. And she no longer directs her prayers with two hands pointed skyward as one. She no longer believes moonlight deforms the body. Now she clasps her hands like an old woman weeping. Now she'll sleep naked, furiously bathed in light.

Suddenly, in perfect, delicate balance, the curtain is still . Then it falls toward the window, a sail in the wake of wind, a journey begun with no money, a somber cortege of rain descending a distant ocean. Like the curtain, she sighs, what is it, this listless uselessness, the whole spring so sadly accidental, so strangely bodiless, imaginings in the shape of a whisper which she whispers to herself.

trying to remember her name Once her eyes were closets I locked myself in, and love was heavy breathing. Now I can't remember her name. Only that it was peaceful: like mejiro hopping from high branch to lower; like the last line of a poem, spreading its blanket as if life were a simple sleep. Now it's just one more passion I can't convey, a chime with no wind, a green cloud in smoky, fallen light.

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Suddenly I remember what was once so perfectly forgotten.

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Gary Kissick came to Hawaii to teach at the University of Hawaii after earning an M.F. A in poetry from the Iowa Writers Workshop. He was a founder of the Hawaii Literary Arts Council and an editor of Hawaii Review. His poetry has appeared in Esquire, Poetry Now, Prairie Schooner, Rolling Stone, and numerous journals and anthologies. In 1981 he was awarded a fellowship in creative writing from the National Endowment for the Arts. He is also an accomplished photographer whose work has appeared in publications such as Munich's Foto Magazin and the Sierra Club Calendar. Gary now lives with his wife and newborn son in West Germany, where he is writing a novel set in Honolulu and Volcano.

Production Notes This b o o k was designed b y Roger Eggers. Composition and paging were done on the Q u a d e x Composing System and typesetting on the C o m p u g r a p h i c 8400 b y the design and production staff of University of Hawaii Press. The text and display typeface is C o m p u graphic Palatino. Offset presswork and binding were done by Malloy Lithographing, Inc. Text paper is Glatfelter Offset Vellum, basis 50.