Güd wrtr

(Keoneloa Beach/aka Shipwreck Beach, Kauai)

Every big leap entails a huge risk,
but the literal ones have us gasping
as we watch young people hurling
themselves off a golden cliff
into the sea some 40 feet below.

Still, we walk up top to see the view—
not least the turquoise and royal blue
water where ginormous honu swim,
doing their finest rock imitations,
flippering effortlessly in the surf
to nibble on limu on the real rocks
hugging the ocean floor.

There they are, the brown saucers
huge even from four stories up,
and we smile, our day made.

A young woman hugs the edge,
deciding whether to take the leap
as her boyfriend in the water calls up
encouragement from below.

Don’t do it! I want to say. Never take
a leap for someone else—only if
everything in you insists that you
must leap and your heart leads you to.
Otherwise, stay put.

As she debates, two young men
come up barefoot, clearly ready to
make the jump—college kids, if I’ve
ever seen them. Vacationing from
Utah, they tell us later. They seem
ready, confident but not cocky.

We offer to watch their fanny pack
cradling their phones while they’re
gone; they grin and thank us,
move to the edge. Logan stands,
back to the water, makes a graceful
backward arc into the water.
Preston says, “I’m a jumper,”
and leaps, arms in the air.

Both land safely, wave happily
as they bob in the swells,
Preston calling, “Turtle! A huge
turtle!” as one of the larger honu
swims near. We laugh. They can
grow up to five feet long and live
some 80 years—

as one of us at the top of the cliff
has done in his eight decades
on the planet. Together we gaze
at the big fellow in the water,
wish him an equally long life—
with no leapers landing on him—
and all the limu he can eat,
easily found.

•••

• honu: Hawaiian green sea turtle

• limu: seaweed in Hawaiian

(for Kai Owens, our seatmate on our Nov. 19 flight to Hawaii)

They start them here young,
as little as two or four,
on boogie boards in swells
so small they barely qualify
as waves.

But that’s how you learn,
my rangy seatmate on the plane tells me,
as he heads home for Thanksgiving.

“Pitched, pummeled and pounded,”
his dad likes to say about surfing—
a risky sport—but I’ve never met
a surfer who didn’t happily
embrace the thrill and try to
ignore the potential for harm.

He’s 18 now, going to college in
Northern California, but he can’t wait
to get back to Haleiwa to throw himself
off the tall rocks at Waimea today
and tomorrow hit the predicted
6 to 8 footers.

He’s just beginning to maneuver
through the world like he shreds waves,
for the first time filling out the required
state form on the plane by himself—
though he’s forgotten his town’s ZIP Code,
transposed two letters in his middle name
and signed his name with a squiggle
because his handwriting doesn’t
lean to cursive.

He reminds me of some of my
former students, so raw and unformed,
so sweet and earnest. Yet I have every
confidence that this young kane will
get home, wax his stick, set the soles
of his long feet back on warm sand
after too much time away,

and be riding waves with his buddies
every day for the next week, sliding
into zippy cutbacks and elegant kick outs—
salt in his eyes, gratitude in his heart—
perhaps getting a little pummeled
in the process, storing up aloha
for the rest of the semester.

•••

kane (kah-nay): Hawaiian for “man”

When the rain lets up,
I walk to the next block,
stand beneath my favorite
ginkgo in a neighbor’s yard.

I knew its former caretakers,
but they are long gone, which
happens when you have lived
in a place going on four decades.

I’m leaving before all the leaves
fall, but they’ll be gone by
the time I return.

The new people aren’t home
today to see me admiring their
tree, pilfering gold fans like
coins from their lawn.

I forgot to bring a bag, so I
scoop up as much treasure
as I could, feeling the sweetness
of new drops on my palms,

and, leaf thief that I am,
walk home with my
bounty, carrying a whole
season’s sunshine,

feeling ever so rich.

(for Gerald and Lauren and Henry)

Out past mown farmland
sun crushed by rain-weary clouds
reflected in shallow pools
of emptied fields—

I have a trunk latch that needs
fixing and a generous nephew-in-law
ready to help, so I make a round-about
circuit, the back way

to reach him. The bonus is getting
to see my niece, the new mama,
him, the new papa, and their
grinning, toothless boy,

five months old, happy and
content to have arrived on
the planet after his long gestation
in the cosmos of his mama’s

universe. Now he’s in ours,
and all of us gaga grownups
cannot stop looking into his
blueblue baby eyes

taking in the world as a newbie,
his gonna-be hair the fawn color of
sweet grass shorn close to the earth,
his irises the shade of the last light

of the day reflected in those
spontaneous ponds dappled with sky,
full of tomorrow.

You’re a year younger than I, which might
account for your youthful… well, everything,
from your spectacular figure and eye-popping
blonde sheen—

not that I’m jealous, though OK, I was,
just a little, long ago—but honey, you
clearly have a whole team of pros keeping
you poofed into perfection. And that’s fine.
You do you, Barbara Millicent Roberts.

That’s the name you were given in the novels
I read about you when I was growing up.
It’s a long way from your hometown of
Willows, Wisconsin, to being a
full-fledged movie star.

Look at you, headliner of your own summer
blockbuster. That’s gotta be a bigger wow
than the best Dreamhouse ever. I know
you’ve been in films before—love you in
the Toy Story movies—but now you’re
up there on the Big Screen all pinked
out doing major dance numbers. Yeow!

I’ve imagined being your friend since I
first held one of your earliest incarnations.
I never mistreated you—pulled out your
hair or drew on you. I didn’t want to be you,
exactly, but I admired your can-do spirit
of adventure.

I’d love to hear what you’ve been up to,
now that you’re approaching sixty-five,
and I’m squarely there. What if you lower
your heels—the ones on your feet, I mean—
and we grab our tennies (not for tennis,
though I bet you still have the cute outfits
for it, not to mention a tightly-strung
racquet), and do something radical,
like go for a walk-and-talk?

I think it’d be fun, us two sexagenarians,
to stroll and laugh about so much in our
lives—sure, a bit about the men—
the long term (looking at you, Ken)
and the short term (hey, surfer Blaine).

But we both know those guys were only
part of our lives. I want to hear about
you flying planes, rocketing into space,
driving race cars, delivering babies.
You evolved so much from your initial
black-and-white striped bathing suit
self.

I knew you then, with your pointy
boobs and impossible figure, a real doll.
But in the decades that followed
so many other girls like me watched
you grow into more of a real woman,
as we do, if we’re lucky—

some of us as moms and professionals,
as scientists and mechanics and teachers
and veterinarians and singers and writers—

and some of us also blessed with a
perennially killer wardrobe and fabulous
legs that go on for days and days and days.

And August leaves of abundance
must abandon the trees of November
descending to stark silhouettes,
graphic and grey and attentive.

—from “Orchard 1,” Kathryn Hohlwein

•••

And now they are on their way
to that state of bare attention—

we see them tall and skeletal
even when modestly half-clothed,

their bones poking out from
the now-thinning opulence,

mourning the thriving canopies
that cooled us all summer,

the murmur of wind ruffling
so many leaves we couldn’t

count them. Now we can.
Like thinning hairs on a

sweet head, we see what
we’d rather not—the tender

underside that calls for
compassion, the opposite

of intolerance. They are
the innocents holding their

stripped arms in the air,
exposed, defenseless,

our longstanding neighbors,
worthy, at the very least,

of our concern, our care.

•••

(In honor of International Day for Tolerance, Nov. 16, 2023)

My life,
you were a door
I was given to walk through

—Jane Hirshfield, from “The Asking: New and Selected Poems”

•••

What was that opening
that I walked through

before I could walk
before I was fully formed

before I felt like me?
An opening into listening

this human life wrapped
in skin, scaffolded in bone

not ending there but
flowing into the rhythms

of the world as a being
of it and not of it,

walking through on
feet shod with wonder.

On a day of coincidences,
my order for the to-go
poke bowl came to
$19.58, and it took till

I’d gotten into my car,
backed out of the space
and hung a U-ie on
Fair Oaks Boulevard

before I realized, Hey,
that’s my year, when
I made my debut on
the planet. I have long

said when a bill comes
to 19 bucks and change,
That was a good year,
even if I was not yet

on the planet or, for
many reasons, don’t
recall much about that
12-month stretch.

The more years we
accumulate, the fewer
specifics we retain
because, I like to say,

the hard drive is full.
I had an older friend who
often declared, There are
no coincidences, honey,

which made me smile as
I drove into the now-early
dark, my boomer self and
the hula hoop craze both

born in July 1958, which made
me want to head home, find
mine, and give it a whirl
around the old hips,

just because I can.

Maybe you need to write a poem about grace.
—Robert Hass

•••

All I know about grace is that we don’t
deserve it, this unmerited favor that
humans can’t earn,

that it’s kindness freely given, nudging
us into a state of being we can’t perceive
until we land there.

As I did today, rising earlier than usual,
moved to part the blinds and find
the morning

flushed with the call of a male mourning
dove swelling its chest and exhaling a
signature coo,

seeking a mate—a reminder that just
because I rarely hear or see them in
my yard,

birds still adorn branches, flock to trees
like so many benevolent winged
ornaments.

We are awash in grace that feels like
a gift tenderly offered, and, with our
own good will

and open hearts, let us accept the love
extended, no questions asked,
again and again.

When we can no longer walk together—
a long time from now, please—

circumnavigating your park-like
homeplace abundant with trees,

so many of them now loosening leaves,
littering the crewcut lawns with

every manner of foliage from hefty
blushing trefoils to delicate gold fans.

You have seen eight decades of autumns.
I have six and a half decades of falls.

Mostly we have managed to remain
upright. But as we see others fall in

their late seasons, and have weathered
a few ourselves, we know well not to take

any of this vertical time in the world for
granted. So we linger over light speckling

through canopies that will soon stand bare
or beam a starburst right at us. I never tire

of watching you aim a tiny device you
never would have called a camera in your

younger years at a luminous moment
from a small bridge, at fountaining water,

taking in the reflection of what the trees hold
for now. For now.