THIS GUY

Feet like spatulas, turned outward.  Maybe
he danced on his toes, on point.  But otherwise
there is nothing about him I remember.  He passed,
and that was the sum of him.  Much of Hawaii
was chimerical, the startling waves at the north shore
perhaps cover the rocks now.  One plants oneself
in a prism of light and changes color with the years.

My time in Hawaii brought me near to the palm trees
I knew in L.A.  After effects of the melancholia
that traveled with me could be seen in the gray face
people asked about.  I had to assure them
I wasn't dead.  Coming home, leaving the palm trees,
which grew only in tropical rooms in large houses
in my high-desert city, I recognize the blood I've lost.

He danced the way he walked, within a Japanese
backdrop.  Why I think of him at all, without meeting
is one of the tricks of memory, an outpost in the mind,
left unguarded.  The trick of memory is to make sense
of such extraneous matter among the gray flies that thicken
the quiet depression.  I welcome back those colleagues
and students who laughed at my humor, unknowing

they saved my life by their visits to my muddled zone.
My cheap car carried me to the Ala Moana shopping
mall and others as well.  The neutral people were
helped in the gradual correction of my synaptic lobes,
and soon I could hear well and feed my mouth local
candies.  My grad students read their poems in class,
and I could hear the wellness of their words.  By the
time I leave, the clear morning will last all day.

EXILE AMONG PAPER CLIPS

As a place of exile, Hawaii would be
a form of orphanage. To be young again
in this culture, a man like me
could learn the value of swimming trunks
and the defeat of too many questions

about my birth parents. This America, this
other place, surrounded by water
everywhere, a somewhere much other
than my birthplace, exists as an unexpected
foreign desire. Born in New York, city

of sequestered intellectuals, I could not
shape the reason for my exile, except as an
interlude between home and further discussion.
My parents were no longer the question,
but a decision ingrown, a factor in my adoption

by a warm winter. I could not have imagined
that being reclusive had heightened the gift
of shock in my new circumstances. Life
might be a shadow I could lift above my head
with such strength I could not have believed

beforehand. I was foretold that new friends
would lead me through this Paradise, where
I would have something to write home about.
Exile discovers a reach into water that clears
the mind of exigency and rumor, washes

away the frail curtains fronting old thoughts.
I would meet in Hawaii a hand that would
squeeze the warmth of the longing for fresh depth.
I am writing home. A short memoir like this
insists on flowers, the honorary lei, an instinct

for the method in which a particular luminescence
acquires the gain of captivity. Where to go
in these Islands? I am temporary, lost
in frequency, in poetry that is the heart, still in
the beat of home, and of Hawaii, fragrant orphanage.