Weijia Pan | Poetry
Listen to Garrett Hongo read “Three Poems at Seventy-Four.”
Semaphores of silver flash on the cyan sea,
And I’m seventy-four, doing a heel-and-toe in my own processional,
Powdery sky a blank blue outside the wraparound window
With its view of the dread bluff of Cap Canaille
Reminding me of Kaena Point and its stern announcement
Of landfall after eternities of voyaging across the Pacific,
The first people of Hawaiʻi grateful for deliverance.
I think of returns today, all the lost and forgotten
Far from home called by voices raised like whitecaps
over a rolling sea.
My father, fifty-eight, died having never accomplished return,
His last breaths at the doorway of heaven, the long river of stars
A fletching of lights overhead, no ka ipo lei, whose face
Shined like burnished wood through all my early days—
Crowned asphalt streets, rats scuttling in the ganja locks of palm trees,
Blocks of nondescript apartments with Hawaiian names,
Cars with ’50s taillight fins and Hydroglide, push-button gears—
Home in the islands only a gleam in the rayon threads
Of his rakish shirts my mother hated as “showoff.”
These past sixteen years have been his gift to me, ease in my soul,
Affirmation arrowing in gladness through my flesh,
Blood infused by his continued sacrifice and blessing.
—
A pod of swimmers frog-kicks in the cerulean sea
Below my window, and I’ve got Gabby on the earphones
Singing of all the lush places of my childhood—
Ponds full of watercress, a lagoon easy for hunting tako,
Mists on the happy mauna of a nascent desire.
I’m seventy-four today and have said goodbye to hapu‘u
Three times taller than a man, canopies of ‘ōhi‘a crested with lehua,
Raging plumes of lava fountaining from the floor of Kīlauea.
What I have instead is the swelling eternity of these waters
Far from home, a companion of late-life consolation.
Silver sophistries of sunlight philosophize across its surface.
Have I now come to arrival somehow? Does Kubota call to me
From the other side of the river of heaven? I gaze at the sky
Like a blue blade sharpened on the strop of the horizon.
It cuts any answer with the edge of its indifference,
Dragging a careless razor across the wave-stubbled sea,
And I’m isolate in my own life and its tonsure of abandonment.
—
I’m listening to Hawaiian music today—Gabby and Marlene Sai,
Falsetto and contralto voices praising misty rains and mountains
Of my childhood in Kahuku and Hauʻula along the North Shore.
The weather here, seaside in Cassis, so much like the islands,
Glimmers of sunlight perforating the unrolling scroll of sea.
Small crafts churn through the bay out toward
the pristine beaches of the Calanques,
And I don’t know why I feel like I do here, French cheeses
For breakfast, Corsican coffee, and my desk with its window
on the Mediterranean.
I watch bathers on the rocky point assess infinite shades of blue
Sliding under the white-bearded prows of tour boats and fishing skiffs,
Count the integers of gladness multiplying from the abacus of sky.
Kubota counted stock in his plantation store,
racked the days of his confinement
In hundreds before the DOJ released him back to Lāʻie,
Disgraced to his neighbors and own family, emptied of pride
Before the court of common gossip, shunned under a green shade
By the impassive cliffs of the Koʻolau, collecting resolve as tribute
To the gods of talk story, imparting to me the narrative of his travail
Amidst Navajos and their dusty lands, the chuffing speech
Of his imperative a constant breath in my blood ever since.
I acceded to the unfinished karma of his life despoiled by the laws of history,
His wish that others be schooled in enlightened betterment,
The jen of each plantation child released by responsible
Confucian lessons in a fine literacy and its concomitant ethics.
Now, at seventy-four, I feel his warm shadow furling within me,
Murmuring words from a work song in mixed Hawaiian and Japanese,
The strummed harp of my heart plucked by strokes of bounty at last,
Grateful for the passage from green fields of waving cane
To this prospect over the pleasurable blues of a rolling sea.