July 11.1991
After the naming of flowers
– Plumeria, Yellow Ginger, Ixora –
the garden of lava and white coral scattered like bones
fell short; you imagined it wrong.
You had not counted on rats, poison, sweat.
And being with family was difficult; beneath the joking
there was tension.
But if you came for the eclipse you caught the excitement –
arrival, then the crowd
anxiously moving further north, further south
watching the cloud ominous as nightfall
hovering over the mountain to the east
in the predawn dark and no stars. And this
is paradise; shop signs say it is so.
Here among the bougainvillea.
Here, out past the hotel’s gas-burning torches
where the Kona Aggressor
rocks in the bay’s wavering blacklight,
yellow diving tanks set in rows like unlit lanterns
and someone
– man or woman, you can’t tell –
sits hunched-over on a piling
or where the seabreeze dissipates over the keva
once black with blood
where hibiscus and wild orchids root on volcanic rock
pumice, ingot, filaments of “Pele’s hair”
the small hard obsidian of “Pele’s tears”
– a paradise you can’t be sure of
where everything is captivating, the gecko
clinging to the ceiling, his wiggle, his devouring,
the proud little shrike impaling his feathered trophy
alive on a thorn.
*
If you traveled inland over broken lava-flows,
if you left behind the thin line of town, tight beaches
culled from ash-black chaos of rock
where among the remains of violence black crabs
crawl downward into shadow
if you turned your back on the Pacific’s gloss
and headed up the shield, its slope benign
sleepy as a shack with its tin roof,
leaving behind the refuge – creamy velour petals,
pinks, scorching reds
hau tree, Heliconia with its tense claw-like leaves,
the nearly empty condos with their humble repetition,
the rented room with its ticking ceiling fan
if you went inland and north toward the volcanos,
climbing the raw flank, blackened
or brambled like barbed wire scrawled over a battlefield,
you wondered that the coastal effusion had taken hold, had
flourished. Remembering
when you swam back down into the aquamarine,
ignored by feeding goatfish with their luminescent scales
rose-golds over restless gravel and the shoals
where you were taken up, hauled back
toward the one green – beyond you, immense, inhuman
irradiated with erie light and deepening
deepening but not ending
you wondered, What did it mean – paradise
where God walked, and could be seen?
*
This is the least desirable, this crater-land
where the tropicbird –its ribbon-tail twirling like a toy –
flames white over the crusted crater floor
a streaked bone-dry lakebed
fissures raying out from its rim like crooked spines
like cracked earthenware,
an occasional woody plant.
And they call it paradise. Because nothing
can be left out, because it is quiescent,
because steam wavers and rises along the rift then drifts away,
because there are signs of the molten core, of eruption,
signs of devastation and remorse,
and the geologist and seismologist agree it’s mostly over
only one more major event
– the menace has moved south, underwater.
*
In the Shower Tree at dawn finch families
and a dove with its tiny head roost
waiting to be sure – this time – this is day,
as if nature can be alarmed by its own maneuvers
then the squabble begins.
You lie in the already too-warm room
listening to the fan, to their flighty “chip chip”,
then – an unheard-before mellifluous song
and what you had worried about, waked and in the mid-night
brooded over, seems more bearable.
You are persuaded to a modest well-being,
less vindictive about your past,
less afraid of suffering, of the way it mounts in waves
that can’t be stopped
– compelled, almost, by the song with its plaintive
disturbing beauty, like Keat’s nightingale
if it could sing in paradise and in daylight, hidden
not by darkness but by too much green.
When you ask the others
no one knows what you are talking about,
no one heard it
or you cannot describe it properly. Then it seems
you were the only one who heard, or overheard
so you dare not trust what came, and if it comes
unassuaged, it will overwhelm you
– a sea-surge that hauls you tumbling
shoreward, heart
in your mouth, salt in your eyes.
*
In the minutes of totality with its corona of starburst
when the sea-horizon and white pleasure boats
dropped off the earth and the infra-red hillside
went blank and dull, campers, over-nighters
vacationers with their semi-interested, too-early-in-the-morning
sleep-disordered look,
the photographer with his costly ensemble,
the friend next to you who stared, chin up
lips parted – do you remember? everyone
even the kids holding their breakfast beer
fell silent
then lost themselves, sighed Ahhhh!
startled by the blinding flare, the diamond-effect
when the shadow edged off and the star broke free
exploding brilliance
and you forgot to hide your face.