Poetry

In the last grove of ohia, mamane, and gray-green koa at the top of the Mauna Loa Strip Road, we met a ranger coming down. He had been hunting a feral goat that had broken through the fence. Such animals destroy the forest understory and native plants, and spread weeds that drive out the more…

1. The Hero He travels on impulse like oceans, thinks nothing of survival. Is one body. Keeps a log. “Dangers fly back and forth over us, sometimes descend.” His job is to keep the ship whole, keep it from scattering the waves. To hold onto the cargo, increase it. 2. Travel The ship's christened Resolution…

These thorny ferns are what Kama-pua‘a, the Pig God, looked like when he wished to disguise himself. When he took this form, he had no visible eyes but he could see, no nostrils but he could smell, no bristles but he could feel every sulfur wind that touched his reddish fronds. He looked exactly like…

In my dreams Buffalo Bill busts down my door with his furry voice. It's like summer lightning, but the strike and the brush fire—the oily sparks of buckskin, sombrero and crimson shirt— shriek to the floor and fizzle out before the hungry calm sets in. I am empty as a mountain, choked with scree and…

That great acacia's not growing anymore, the rats are on the limbs, the heartwood diseased, the fallen leaves show rot has replaced the long-lived green, like an emotion that cannot be recalled sufficiently. Yet it stands where it's always been, where the incredible horses graze. They seem never ridden, serene there, only combed and released…

If you expected a recital of weather, wood, water and grass, or a photograph of me, cheeks whittled as peach pits, forgive me. For all I've seen is Indian women gathering flower seeds, their dark arms reaching, their movement as monotonous as the Sierras themselves. All I've become is a mineress: I've washed a pan…

They make pleasure their first food in the morning, They take their iron wings from under the bed And strap them on in the sun, they grow hotter Than the noon light on the Mission. Afterwards they bathe in snow And dress in feathers of mercury—. Each day is the front of war, With its…

How could I foresee what was ahead while looking back seven centuries, one rose in the crystal vase in the room where she stood before me, legs slightly apart, golden dusk all over us when she told me not to go on talking as if I were dreaming, arguing the Summa Theologica's proofs that God…

When you're in the mountains you feel the desert air. Waking to fog on a salt marsh you taste the empty boulevards of July. The earth shifts with you, one road hooks to another— a travesty of coins, shards of amphora, a trail of carnelian, things to palm at a riverbend. Words in the hand…