ALL RESPONSES |
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listen to the bamboo grove
voices in rustling leaves
speak to the spirit
see truth in shadows
greet faces in wood
there is purpose in the path |
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the moon
is
like a
refrigerator light
as I sit (ghostly)
down
in the middle of
Snelling
Avenue.
It is
Impossible for anyone else
to be awake.
Outer space has
replaced the concrete, warm
with a coldness so quick
it burns,
burns like time
when the sun is sleeping.
Like a fortune teller
i place my palm
on the road's white line.
It shares its
cool
with the egg moon.
Yet, I feel the somehow
heat
already!
A sleeping fire!
A blue coal!
how it will
sizzle once it cracks against
the concrete
griddle of the horizon
popping spitting
gas smells
until the dawn
yolk
breaks…
I see car lights
appear down the road.
the avenue
stretches, yawns
says it needs
a traffic massage
says
that
my body was a nightmare
sitting cross-legged
on its
chest.
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Walking through vertical lines,
walking through infinity,
I am you; you, I,
or we are someone
we don't know.
Yet we keep walking
through anonymous stalks of bamboo.
The entire world is green and wild,
is completely ordered disarray.
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She loves the rainy season foods
deep fried bamboo worms
mushrooms big as umbrellas
rambutan with heavy red shells
mangosteens with their funny tops.
While she talks she drives
a snake road through bamboo leaf tunnels.
Then sun slivers off rice fields
off the creases in the skin of water buffalo
until soil turns red and wild bananas
dot the roof of the world.
The hill tribes use the big banana leaves
for cooking and for clothes, she says.
Immigrants from Burma who live in the hills
have to wait ten years for a green card.
Some are illegal and their children can’t go to school.
A covered pick-up full of children passes us.
They come down to government school
in Chiang Rai every day, she says.
The smart ones get scholarships and never go back.
No jobs, only bamboo and bananas in these mountains.
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Have you ever come to a point
where you expected the sun
to be just a bit brighter?
Or the foliage a little more lush?
And even after not finding either,
you keep walking deeper
and deeper, expecting
with each step it might happen—
Just as there is a limit, I suppose,
to the number of consecutive
evenings one can spend alone,
there is also this overwhelming
thought that although you are
sometimes alive and curious,
you are also impermanent—
why not celebrate?
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Men with dogs, hunting rifles, fists full of pheasants,
a stringer of trout. The sun that lit
their scales and feather, the beauty of death.
Dirt roads, dense woods, the glint of blue,
blue water or sky ahead. Snow and ice and wool,
their words that felt like all of these.
Hand cut boards from their own trees,
Rough to the touch, weathered and gray.
Heat from burning, heat from work.
Root vegetables shaped like
the stones they were buried with,
Bitter-skinned, pure within.
The hands of women, strong and veined
Red from washing and from worry.
fingertips pricked by pins
Finger and thumb that could feel when the needle
was threaded, when the fruit
was ripe, when the fever came.
Amber glass and the drink it held.
Cigarettes, shots of whisky, pints of beer--
all the ways they could forget, I remember.
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The sleepy hallways of the bamboo grove
seduce a walker like Thoreau's pond
with their shades of green and gold
and hints of sunlight that shade
the path one follows. |
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The woods’ green veil.
The road, soft underfoot.
The genius in the living eye
for making a path curve
into disappearance
with promise
more lies ahead.
The hunger for color.
The texture of air,
slight to the body,
gargantuan to passion.
Solitude and desire to be
in a woods on a path.
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Not in a stand of pines
conifers ancient and silent, save
for the wind
nor in a field of peninsula-lavender
jutting spiked purple perfection
carried across Puget sound
on a whim
not in an orchard of apples and plums
playful at
color-wars and flavor-favorites
but in a parallel place protected
from the noise and haste, here,
I wish to stand. To stay. To simply
be.
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reset
restart
move ahead
ride the energy
of the road
contemplate one tree
calm
straight
true
walk with
a promise
made
to oneself
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my son called
he complained
that the japanese
trim all the leaves
off the trees
along the street
he’s missing minnesota
autumn
i told him
to go for a walk
in the bamboo forest
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The woods’ green veil.
The road, soft underfoot.
The genius in the living eye
for making a path curve
into disappearance
with promise
more lies ahead.
The hunger for color.
The texture of air,
slight to the body,
gargantuan to passion.
Solitude and desire to be
in a woods on a path.
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earlier now it seems to be blending
changing skins too early
bleeding in and out of leaves
needles prick her skin
every pore a tear
washing away the very last dance
“won’t you join me dear? It’s our song”
“no...well that’s alright...
it’s in my head”
mother moonlight falls to the floor
laying beneath shadows at the doorway
climbing fire of candles heathen dance
“that dream you had about the bamboo path”
said she as we evaporated from the bed
“do you remember anything else?”
“I was a flea to be swept away
by your hard comb...
your body was a narrow path that was unending”
light fell through our hands
as we sang the last melting refrain
love is a murderer, lover is a murderer |
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Sunlight through a picket fence
makes stripes across the ground.
Zebras use loud stripes to hide,
to disappear in the haze of sun. |
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It was supposed the heaven. But they were late for to the airport and arrived rushed and sweating and if only they’d checked cause the flight was delayed. Who should have called, her or him? The strategy to save their hunger for the plane rather than spend money on overpriced airport fare was poorly thought, since there haven’t been viable meals in coach for years, and they paid five dollars for a box of crackers and potato chips. So it was before they even landed that a sense of dissatisfaction set in, that, and being taken.
Sometimes an argument isn’t made with words. Sometimes it’s posture, or hands, the way fingers migrate to assure even a paper’s width of space between his and hers. They turn in their seats, trying to sleep in the noise and the chill with growling bellies and clammy armpits, meticulous in their unwillingness to touch; more deliberate than the avoidance of a stranger.
But it’s still early when they land, and the sun is bright and the wind is blowing, “Trade Winds” they overhear on the shuttle to the hotel, which sounds romantic and reminds them why they’re here; why the saved for this, and that dreams do come true.
It’s still light, early enough to see that the view from their “ocean view” room is mostly of another enormous tower but yes, there is a sliver of sea. The window opens two and a half inches, just enough to blow their near-empty plastic cups from the desk, spilling small remnants of iced mocha coffee (double the price of home) onto the pale berber carpet, creating yet another stain.
The restaurant is too festive and they are too tired, though they try. They drink expensive fruity drinks, well, him one then back to beer, and order sixteen dollar nachos that come with pineapple and ham. “Tomorrow,” they say, still awkward with each other as they return to their sea-sliver view.
She wakes early and notes the crowd on beach already, at 6am. Anticipating the warmth of the sun, she dresses quietly in her swimsuit, looks in the mirror, then covers up, pulling the robe tight around her throat and telling herself this is only because it’s always chilly by the water.
She keeps her robe on in the chaise she paid to sit in, thankful she brought a little money down with her. By 9am she is starving, and forced to remove the robe to use it as a “placeholder” cause she doesn’t want to have to pay for the chair a second time. She heads up to the room where her husband is dressed and furious, no idea where she’d been. She’d forgotten to leave a note, or deliberately neglected leaving one, depending. She calms him, in reality glad to be off a beach peopled by the slim, fit and young. They decide on breakfast away from the hotel, after last night’s seventy-five dollar tab (plus tip) for more or less nothing.
Hawaii seems even less glamorous away from the hotel, where tired streets remind them of the part of town they grew up in at home, but don’t go to anymore. They find a Denny’s. Breakfast is thirty dollars and takes nearly an hour. She is thinking about the money last night and now today, the costs she was budgeting for the trip – meals, tours, souvenirs – already failing to work out as planned. $150.00 dollars (with chair), she’s picturing the surround sound system they’d been looking into, breaking that cost down into Hawaiian days.
The sun is hot but the breeze is cold. Not breeze, wind. It’s windy to the point of sand lodging in your teeth if you smile. The sign in the lobby has rental cars starting at $25.99 per day (based on three, with a nearly equivalent amount of taxes and fees involved, but of course the sign doesn’t say that). They rent a car (though the clerk pushed the jeep) for $45.99 for one day (plus fees and taxes) and buy a $6.95 map. On the road they soon learn the cost of Hawaiian gas. But climbing the coast road she could, in fits, forget the prices and the way he talked to her this morning when she had just lost track of time – it was an accident – and really one based in benevolence since, she said, she was trying to be nice, letting him sleep in; she could, in fits, forget how she felt in her bathing suit.
The roads bends again and they are suddenly in a forest – just like that, a blink, no sign of rocks or sea. There’s a place to pull out and other cars parked there (mostly jeeps); it’s free. They joke that at least something in Hawaii is. There are three young people smoking marijuana in the parking lot (or so it seems). Her footwear is wrong for the trail but she stays quiet about this. The air smells good, like a certain kind of perfume and she suddenly understands why they call certain scents “green” - she always thought green meant grassy, but this is different, fresh and wet. The woods are loud with birds that surely must look exotic but somehow can only be heard, not seen.
Suddenly she remembers: The chaise, the robe. She forgot all about it. The chaise is one thing, but the robe! They’ll probably charge them sixty dollars; how will she explain that on the bill? She is trying to keep herself from crying.
Her husband reads aloud a little plaque about how bamboo is really a grass. So she was right about that smell after all.
He reads aloud how the bamboo forest responds to adversity with a determined ability to renew itself.
He looks at his teary wife, takes her hand, kisses it. |
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Bounding up into the emerald atmosphere
All the rising stalks of tower-reeds
Mooning at willows would be American
Bamboo is so much softer on the eyes, made
Of patter atmosphere, and
Of I-do-not-know-where |
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The path was clear.
Tall bamboo grew orderly
on each side of the path,
different from how mother nature
would have it arranged, as in Maui,
where I saw it growing in tall clusters
of small flexible stalks.
Overpowering in its natural habitat,
the beauty
of the Japanese bamboo grove in the photo
is both haunting and regal.
A green canopy
gently meeting in the center
as if bent to please mankind.
The end of the path isn't in view,
but as everything else
is gently coached into a bent,
leaving me to wonder
what other beauty is hidden behind it.
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