Heavenly Bodies

My Brother Is Moving to Hawaii

68 My Brother Is Moving to Hawaii Now in the night there must be lizards, and bats with orange eyes, a scent of ginger and perfume, and flowers dropping petals on bare earth. Sweet air, the taste of conch, a pool with swaying lights below, and here—a barbecue! Smoke and sugar, meat and salt: the milk of coconut, and chlorine blue, so easy on the eyes. Inhale once more the oldest dream of Europe, world that never knew its own ennui, the vastness of its lust for luxury—the bite of sugar on the tongue, sweet pang of slave-song sung to stars —until teas from India, jewels and silks from China, gunpowder, gold, tobacco, rum, seduced like opium, and sent the continent on a buying spree. We all are masters now, and sons of kings. This quest made manifest, to traffic gold and flesh, and sail us, land us, after centuries, here. And here the world is blue, the air like water lapping, water the color of tiles, these thorns on the spray of meadow pandemic flowers hooked in my hair, like particular desires. Comes now the bride of illusion, bearing a platter of baked schoolteacher fish, garnished with snow tire root vegetable puree, of which I eat, and pronounce myself free. I’m here to forget about thirty bad years. Pass the bikini salt and brown thigh dressing, subtle on the tongue. We have been dreary too long, lingered in climates best suited for preserving dust. Here paper rots. A blossom damp and crumbled on the ground. 69 I will not work today, or work tomorrow. I will taste mango and papaya and roast pig. I will not sleep alone—the night is full of moving bodies like my own. I have left my life, my bills, my forms unfilled. I will not pay, or tell them where I am. I have some hash, a pocketful of pills, this lizard is my friend, my son has changed his name and gone away to school. My former wives and current creditors can all go fuck themselves. I like that I don’t know the names of anything that grows here: jasmine, tuberose, hibiscus. Words that speak forgetting. Frangipani . . . I’m glad I shipped my truck so I have something to drive around in under these whatever-you-call-them palms. Scent of blossoms and sweet ocean breeze, the sound of my guitar plucked, single notes like fruit falling, soft. Language of vowels, caressing me: never two consonants together. This I know, from my wahini: Ukelele means leaping flea. Aloha means love. Haole is devil, or foreigner, white man. Pupele is crazy. ...