The Truth

             I

We are not in God's hands.
You closed your fingers into mine, reached
To be held. That was our safety.
But that's not enough now.

By ourselves
We drove as high as we still had space to turn
And left the car, then locking hands
Began hiking up gutted macadam,
The city below us, a vapor
In front of the slab of light the harbor had become.
On one side of us a mountain rising.
On one side, a green fall
To a wilderness of many-shaded leaves,
Their wet breaths roaming up to us.
You gave me sweet berries ripening at the road's edge.
I gave you bruised guavas to bite open and suck.
Higher, the wind roused through green poles of bamboo.

Higher even, we climbed above the wind
To a moist embrace
With the power in the everlasting mountain
Who walks in another world
And keeps safe whom it will.
We came out at the last height
Ringed in white ginger and circled by the mountain
In the one place we had chosen to hold.
I loved you best last, and that was the last,
A final rain wetting my face and spattering your warm back.

        2.

I've been to the great heiau at Pu'u o Mahuka
To lay hold of whatever lives in the death crusted walls
Above Waimea Bay
Where the rale of summer rasps in the sun-smeared weeds,
I've pulled leaves from a ti stalk
And taken a stone
To wrap and set back in the wall,
My mouth dry with a truth
I will not give words to.

So our hands close again I gave
A stone wrapped in warm leaves.
So you come again I will not
Stand white-ringed in ginger.
So you go with me to the last height
I gave the truth.
Again and over again
I give back the truth.

        3.

What I have done is closed.
The rain begins.
Once more the everlasting power gathers inside the walls.
You will come back to the mountain.

　

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