Pacific Progression: An Oral History
- Pacific Progression:An Oral History
The Thief
For its safety the axe was hung by a rope, and the rope was hung from the necks of two old women.
She never relied heavily on faith because the grey chicken still lingered years later.
The greatest trickster waited for the night to pass and stole taro, sweet bread, tapa, and poi after the heavy sighs of sleeping thieves chorused in half dark.
We talk about family as if it is the only way to describe something.
A female pheasant hunched against heart-faced taro as the next wave of rain passes, as if there is shelter.
She taught the creation of the in-between.
Walking across shards, layers of shards, of lava rock rings like rubbing glass or fine sand or water turning.
The chief woke without his sheets of tapa.
Shark King
Half the beach is washed away, pressing folks against palmed tree line. [End Page 28]
Hog Child
A rumor passed between park rangers and it was misspoken: he made a bridge over the valley with his pig-body; a Nënë trapped inside a pit toilet; bright rubber flowers of banana trees like forgotten wombs in the grass; the child was born dressed in boar hair; track years by counting the tears in the epidermis; they bound his hind hooves; when vog pushes from the west there is no distinction between sky and sea.
Stretching Tree
He made a canoe out of his body. [End Page 29]
Fish Houses
Red is the first color absorbed as white light passes through water, thirty feet deep u’u appear black.
A sandpaper skin drum, a knee drum played on the knee. Three makes a chorus.
Because women cut their wombs open to birth daughters from pandanus root fathers.
Catching, catching a fish by hand, skin doubles to scale and is nearly misremembered as a heaving gill.
The lower eyelids have salt glands, remove excess from the body.
Sharks chaperoned the first Hawaiian migration, shape will reduce friction and drag through salt water.
Husband tried to regain her love by swimming past isle of silence, covered in red purslane.
Canoe
He made a canoe of his body. [End Page 30]
Kapu
They hauled outriggers out past the horizon where ‘opelu bloomed thick out of the shallows catching light like glass.
Two roosters were shipped overnight express in cardboard carriers.
If you make something you can see and feel and hold in your palms the hours run off your shoulders.
The wooden men slept standing with mussel shells for eyes.
Slick green bodies of newly flowered star fruit, hang with edges folded around themselves like sleeping bats.
During the war, fifty-one were interned in Hā’iku behind the post office. On Sunday the grass would fill with picnic baskets and children and if you looked from a distance the fencing was overlooked.
They filled up the new house with spirits and burned it to the ground.
Coconut Palm
Claim the blood tie. The blood tie claims migrating people. The blood tie links migrating peoples to an original ancestral line. [End Page 31]
Plantation
Pocked trunk, sliced light, low sea, shore cold, surf set, zip line, plumeria, plumeria and every neck is skin, an island is a gold slash of koi fin breaking surface and duck feet, a ruffling back a ruffling beak over.
A ruffling beak over. Sugar again, over thirty feet and the muted whistle, there are flags in fields but you can’t see the men and you can’t find corners. This is rooted.
Tiki
He made a tiki out of his body. [End Page 32]
Bougainvillea
Pink lipped, paper bloom, presses pink on water, bloom of tail feathers, duck beak, lipped paper, gang rape, green head jostling, head pressed under, tight lipped, paper murk, loosed bread, pink dress blooming at the edge.
Big pineapple
She called herself Hawaiian and learned how to get big tips from big white men. [End Page 33]
This is Paradise
Because the midnight mixologist made Mai Tai’s and Blue Hawaiians and because Beach Babe Browning oil is cheaper than SPF 30 and because McDonald’s serves SPAM and...
