LITTER FOR THE TAKING

My dream life started in L.A.’s concrete world,
a cityscape of cheap apartments and palm trees,
crowned asphalt streets, blacktop playgrounds aswirl
with immigrant, Black, and Asian kids, a wheeze
of asthma in my chest, missing Hawaiʻi
and my playmate cousins, the sighing seashore
that had, in foaming curls of white stories,
given a pastoral and all its lore
to paint my daydreams, vanish distress,
and bring back the lost words of pitching waves,
itinerant sellers of kulolo and fish,
evenings of porch music and windward rains.
I had these the way Muir had his Sierras,
a splendor alive in all my waking,
a green mural of folded cliffs, plumeria
blooms on patchy lawns, litter for the taking.

Throughout childhood I had my secret place,
a splendor of mind amid urban squalor,
palimpsests of imaginings to trace,
while a car wreck screeched from the corner.
I conjured yellow hau flowers, tofu shops,
fishhooks baited with pink shrimp in waters
tumbled from mossy stones, slate bells of clouds,
the rippled silk of tradewinds in blue tatters
woven across a lagoon’s upturned face.
A shut-in, latchkey kid, after school,
I made games of cardboard, string.  A sheet of foil
was a silver pond where white egrets raced.

I’ve since taken survey of other lands,
parades of volcanoes, museum halls.
I lived for pleasures that came to hand
the way sea-run fish school by a waterfall.
I learned of purple wines and their terroir.
I gathered postcards at a stop-and-go.
I hiked along a narrow road one summer
chasing the ghosts of Sora and Bashō.
Another, my daughter ran on cobblestones
down a winding, Kafkaesque street in Prague.
Alarmed, just five, she’d found herself alone
while I strolled ahead, my mind in a fog.
It moved back, at work on a fantasy,
something to do with Florentine lunettes,
or a late spring snow at Kinkaku-ji,
a lace-chain of smoke from a cigarette.
Imitations are what I’d sought, innocence
I had as though a child’s—a saint’s chorus,
unaging wonders taken from guide books
that might beguile and blaze to magnificence.

A copse of oaks, a lawn of fallen, umber leaves
are refuge, my home is now my nation—
walls of Chinese art, rugs of Turkish weave.
I’m content with quieter intimations.
What do I do these days of idleness?
Fugitive thoughts pitch up, the mind’s coronas—
an affair among redwoods in Inverness,
a summer shower, ponds gold-lit in Laguna—
from memory, phantoms and their auras.
It’s as though I took a road up-mountain
through fog for watercress near Waimea,
Wham! on the radio, then steady rain,
while I dreamt an image, an idea
that gave a moment’s comfort when it came.