arly morning. A floating cackle sails over the slapping water and through the blanket pulled over my head:
"Wow-Wow-Wow!"
Eyes closed, I remember I am no longer in California. I open one eye and look out to the waves of Puako Beach.
"Wow-Wow-Wow!"
That caterwaul was no dream. A mystery pulls me out of bed. It's six a.m., my first morning on the Big Island, and I am jet lag alert. David snoozes profoundly.
"Wow-Wow-Wow!"
Who or what is sending me this surreal message? I get up and go into the kitchen, start some coffee. On the other side of the kitchen is a closed door. Behind it, Katie and Jerry are asleep. The house creaks like a ship in the wind. Three sleepers in the hold and me alone on deck.
The living room's twenty different window panes show twenty different pieces of thrashing sea. The windows rattle and moan in July's trade winds, let in the abacus-clicking sound of the palm trees. Despite the noise, such stillness.
Four of us will share this rental beach house for two weeks. Four refugees from the midlife grind, four people ready to explore and erase. We have traded our square-shouldered world for a sluice of days dropped into water.
"Wow-Wow-Wow!"
We will be living with that amazing bird call. Only in Hawaii is the sound of awe audible. Is it a bird, a plane, a super-hero? I begin to ransack the library of guide books, then when coffee is done, take my cup and a bird guide out to sit on the sea wall. Made of lava rock, it divides our patch of grass from the sand.
I imagine my Wow-Wow Bird will have foot-long purple tail feathers, a red crest and a black apache stripe under each eye. But the book describes no bird with a call remotely like what I'm hearing.
The sun peers over the distant volcano. Down the shore I see a dark silhouette, a large bird standing on a rock. Flipping through my book, I identify him as a Night-Crowned Heron hunting the tidepools. He studies the water with a chess master's concentration, observing schools of infant fish that winkle through the hatcheries. Wings folded back, he looks like an Old World gentleman's gentleman, but his down-curved beak is ready to hinge voraciously into the sea world.
I do not want to see that beak slice into living flesh. But neither do I want a magnificent bird to starve. Even in paradise, the same old thing, beauty dogged by death. Usually at this point I would pick up a pen, but who wants to think about such things on their first morning in Hawaii, as dawn's silver sheets between the palm fronds?
Impatient with my mind, my legs swing onto the black lava sand and crunch me toward the water. It feels cool at first, then perfect as skin. A lavender sky overhead, swaying with frond, wing and wave, I no longer care what a heron achieves.
Silver flashes around my knees. While I am pondering hard truths, a wild world swarms. The heron flaps into low flight and lands farther down the shore, still hungry. I wade back to shore toward my own breakfast.
If you sit still for even an hour, your mind becomes the Magic Kingdom on the Fourth of July. Images and proto-thoughts pinwheel through its shallows. Images fling themselves like acrobats, passing hand to hand. On the sea wall I sit and stare at the horizon, but I am really watching all this activity.
After an hour, the fireworks subside and I begin to see way down to the emotions, dark and whale-sized at the bottom. All sorts of orange and blue spotted ideas dart above them, but there is a strong downward pull. This is another point where I normally would pick up a pen, but today words have melted in the soppy air.
I know that, in order to be able to write anything, I have to hook something, gaffe it on the points of words. On the sea wall, I am floating luminous with the minutes, exquisitely alert, but I have no energy. A poem lurks down there, and I hardly care if I catch it. What's wrong with me?
The absence of opposition has unpenned me. Evanescent sense-impressions are so fulfilling that posterity can go drown itself off the nearest coral shelf. But I have a deal with my muse never to ignore a received idea, to write down whatever comes, however inconvenient it may be. I am free to discard later, after it's written.
I lie back and watch sea vapors drift overhead. I have probably fallen asleep because I startle up, grab a pencil and note:
white plumeria blossoms with gold eyes: a dozen shy Hawaiian princesses
Wow-wow-wow! A day's work.
My vacation companions present skewed portraits as they emerge from the house for breakfast. Jerry the businessman went to sleep, but here comes Jerry the pirate, wearing pareo and puka shells, carrying a telescope. Katie comes out with her watercolor box and paper, wearing a dashiki from her daughter's Cameroon Peace Corps stint. David, my architect husband, measured every mile from home with anxiety, but he sits down to breakfast wearing a bathing suit and a snorkel mask pushed back on his head. I imagine he intends to measure every fish in our bay.
We gather over our meal on the lanai, but almost as soon as we begin to eat David spots a sea turtle down the beach, resting on the salt and pepper sand. We tumble over the sea wall and race across the sand toward it.
The turtle lies with his flippers outstretched on the sand, sun-bathing. He seems not to notice us creeping up until we are close enough to touch his spotty, wrinkled legs and bald head. He looks like an old man who has crawled painstakingly along the sand and then collapsed from the effort.
I am wondering if he is alive when the fist of his eye pops open. A black marble orb regards us. Something happens that often occurs when living creatures meet eye to eye, a probing and a seething together. After this awestruck interval, the eye of the sea drops shut. Somehow I feel enormously honored.
The sea turtle has had enough sun and he heaves himself up, stretching out one horny foot and then the other, shambling toward the water. When most of him is cradled in the ocean, his motion transforms into ballet. He is now a green, spotted dancer flying through the sea.
I have the strong impression that the muse has just invited me into the ocean, but I cannot shake my fear of the water. When I was five years old, playing on the beach at Playa del Rey, a rogue wave snagged me off land and whisked me out under the surf. I still remember tumbling around, then lying on the bottom and watching seaweed drift over me, perfectly at peace. No plan of getting up. The next thing I knew was a rough hand and then vomiting sea water while my father shouted.
Now when I pull down my snorkel mask and lift my feet, I panic, breathless. Katie has come out and she gets the hang of it fast. She helps me try a few more times, then I give up, too embarrassed to keep going. David is already out at the deep water buoy.
As penance for my humiliating failure, I assign myself to observing the tidepools. I will specialize in the transition between ocean and land. Maybe tomorrow I will figure out how to snorkel. I wade ashore, go through a reef guidebook and then wade back out to a submerged rock and a placid, deep pool fully illuminated by the sun.
In water clear as a snorkel mask's view, I see miniatures of many Hawaiian reef fish. The striped convict tangs are translucent when young. I startle a spotted boxfish out of a crevice and he goggles at me with his sideways eye. Miniature butterflyfish startle with their banana yellow. I even manage to step on a flounder buried in the sand. How fast a fish can move!
Sitting on my rock, my legs in the water, I am absorbed by the babies. They bump my legs, swirl around each other in what surely is play. I can almost hear their tiny gibberish minds going like whirlygigs: "Food? Play? Run away! Run away!"
Yes, there are stupendous sights like volcanoes and black sand beaches here. Yes, coconut palms, sunset with a green flash. Yes, all the pina coladas you could ever drink, and ancient temples and shooting stars. Lush jungles spilling over cliffs. But for the island's best, I cast my vote for the giant sea turtles. I have not yet written their poem, though I wade and float among them every day. A couple lines come at dawn:
Sitting on the rock sea wall dawn spills over my shoulder, a lava of light.
I on the sea wall I aim my camera and snap seven shots from right to left: a panorama of Puako's shoreline view of curving coast and ocean. I plan to paste the pictures together to make a two-foot picture postcard for the wall over my computer. A lot like the overlap of images in a poem, you work for a smooth alignment of what's given.
Today's experiment is in listening. They say women are especially good listeners, probably because we often exercise the ability. I want to really flex my listening and description muscles, to figure out how well I can catch and convey sound in words.
People often refer to the ocean's soothing sound, but I disagree. I grew up near the ocean, where people fished it, used it as a highway, rode its waves, lost lives in it, lost cars and all kinds of things in it. I find the engine of ocean over-stimulating, almost enervating. It is not a single sound, but an entire language of spit fricatives, gush and thrum and sputter. An occasional deep glug -- a coconut dropping into a pool? Drinking, splatter on rock, dishwasher tumble.
The sea sounds begin to resemble the cacophony of my mind: feelings and ideas in a frisson of nonsense. Roiling surf where poems emerge on an open thematic shell. Maybe my poem is swimming closer amid the push-pull between iteration and association. Maybe it will eventually let me swim alongside, like the sea turtles.
Katie, at the far end of the wall, water-coloring. She looks up, attempting to capture the dangling palm fronds. I surreptitiously take a photograph of her. She turns and aims her painter's eye at me, picturing a portrait.
Little olive birds with white rings around their eyes flutter through the gardenia hedges making a sound like crumpling tissue paper. A myna's fluted cackle comes floating over the trees. Even the birds sound Hawaiian, their calls rich in vowels, punctuated only by occasional consonants. No more Wow-Wow Bird calls today. It's a dawn cry, I have never heard it past eight o'clock. I have combed the bird books without luck, still don't know its name.
I am writing in a purse-sized notebook where I keep maps, directions, lists of restaurants, flight schedules. I like mingling the practical with the imagined. I like turning a page of directions to the island's best snorkeling cove to find a five-line poem on the stale air at thirty thousand feet on an airplane. What differentiates a poem from the day's grocery list? Angle of vision, I would say. And music.
Yesterday the sound of the palms fascinated me. I lay on a chaise longue and peeked through half-closed eyes at the sun winking through their slats while I listening to the rustle. After awhile it sounded like a Cuban drummer's brush, or the sound of skin burning. Suddenly, a few lines come as clearly as if someone has spoken them. Their impact on me has more to do with their sound than their meaning:
Short as a thumb, he has breaker blue scales and gold fin-to-fin stripe -- startling between the reef knees
Last night as we ate dinner on the lanai, the sun disappeared under the sea and a peachy full moon rose over the house. We were finishing our coffee when the almost cloudless sky turned on all its faucets. Elephant rain poured on the patio roof. We sat listening to its musical splatter on leaves and clunk and swish of rain racing in the gutter. It drowned out the sea. Words seemed useless.
Later we lay down on the chaises and watched shooting stars: sparklers for our last night at Puako.
The four of us stand under the driftwood arch at water's edge. It's our last day together. Four sea turtles float in the shallow water near our feet. David and Jerry joke while Katie and I make the noises you make watching puppies. One by one, the turtles raise their speckled heads, look at us, then paddle away with that flying motion.
Our friends are gone, and we return to a last island afternoon. David goes out snorkeling -- Captain Snorkel, we call him now. From the lanai I watch him float, a blue speck in a sea-hammock. He wants a few more glimpses of raccoon butterflyfish, parrotfish and pinktail durgons for his memory book. I am still hoping for a glimpse of my poem.
Every once in awhile David stands up to clear his mask. I can feel ecstasy spray off him and careen through the air. Suddenly four words intrude:
crackling syllables of sea
Surprised, I sit up and grab a pencil. Hardly a lot, but it has the definite pressure of words going somewhere. I lay the words down on a blank page and sit back, exhausted.
Captain Snorkel swims back to shore and wades in, water streaming off his shoulders and hair. I can see from his speed he's excited.
"I saw a moray this long," he sputters, his hands a yard apart. "It popped out of a hole in the reef and just looked at me, opening and closing its mouth. Then it turned and slid back along its own length into the reef, came out a hole in the other side. That's when I decided to float away."
David describes its white mouth lined with needle sharp teeth. They both had startled looks, he says. We get the reef guide and he identifies the creature as a white-mouth moray eel.
"It looked like it was going to take a bite out of me, then turned on a dime and went back into its hole."
"Maybe it just came to look at you and say, Wow-Wow-Wow!"
Months after our return, I go into the store to buy coffee, order a pot of Earl Grey and sit down on a wobbly chair. On a nearby shelf is a turquoise fish that reminds me of the tiny Hawaiian reef dweller with the enormous name. The object is a one-cup teapot.
I begin writing as if from memory. It's been hiding in there all along, a moray eel happy in its hole until someone floats by. Watching turtles can teach you patience. I'm glad I waited until today to write.
Of course, I bought the pot. As I put this down, it sits on my bookshelf. Here is the poem:
A Pot of Humuhumunukunukuapua'a In a store I saw a one-cup teapot shaped like a fish I once met under the waves at Puako Beach. Short as a thumb he had a name longer than the curving shore. Breaker blue scales and gold fin-to-fin stripe, startling among the reef knees -- that and his painted eye under surf as frothed as kettle-singing water. I took him home and filled him with leaves and bubbles. He ruminated until the tea steeped me dark enough. As he swam away, I pressed a silver fin to each eye, lifted my cup and drank crackling syllables of sea.© Rachel Dacus