shut everything out

shut everything out

to be able to turn

and finally focus on the universe

I tried to engineer bliss

during our trip to hawaii

by waiting to break out AVA

more than 20 years earlier

I had come upon carole maso’s lyrical novel

by accident at cody’s books in berkeley

while waiting for my girlfriend to finish work elsewhere

I pulled that book down at random and discovered

something I would love for longer than I would love her

so much is ephemeral

even that seemingly-stalwart business

which closed that location 10 years later and then for good after two more

the shelf that held the copy I still own is empty

and so is the floor that supported that shelf’s bookcase

and in fact so is the whole building eight years further on

google street view from several months ago

shows a sleeve of plywood over its plate glass windows

a sense of permanence endowed by the whimsical mural painted upon it

that at least is more tender loving care

than can be found on most of the empty commercial properties in olympia

that I chronicled in my photography book building ghosts

a mural or a book though

they’re just different sized band-aids on the past’s failures

those wounds whose throbs are a measure of time’s passage

life’s successes are the melody

written across those bars with no regard for octave limits

and with a syncopation that defiantly seeks the downbeat

for years I’d deferred rereading AVA

reasoning that to do so would require

an extended length of time and the perfect setting

thus I packed it for our trip last may

and even then didn’t break it out

until we began to visit beaches

yet on the black sands and long volcanic rocks of hilo

I just held it in one hand and my camera in the other

as I followed my family from tide pool to tide pool

it wasn’t until the end of the week

on a white sand beach on the kona side of the big island

that I finally cracked it open on top a picnic table

before I had finished the first page though

dawn called out to me to bring our stuff

closer to the water

as she brought maggie out of the surf

I waded out to join robin

in catching a glimpse of some sea turtles

the next day it was the same

at the appropriately named magic sands beach

where I took command of a table in the shade

after a quick visit to the water however

I found dawn talking with an older woman

whom she’d invited to share our table

she was happy to stay there

working on watercolor sketches

while the four of us played together in the waves

when I returned for my camera

I found her reading AVA

and I told her to go ahead with a joking nod to my constantly-stymied plans

I eventually learned that she was from california too

and that while she hailed from burbank

her soon-to-arrive friend was from oakland

what can we do with a coincidence so strong

except to allow it to pierce our lives

like an indecipherable message from a far off star

as we were packing up to go

this woman from my hometown showed up

and our exchange of pleasantries revealed even more uncanny connections

she said that she was a real estate agent there

and that she lived near lake merrit

which made me immediately ask if she knew my father

his name didn’t ring a bell for her

but the odds are still high that their paths might have crossed

since he was an apartment building landlord for a decade

more to the point though

the place he owned the longest

was a three-story one close to lake merrit

of course maybe that kind of real estate isn’t her specialty

and maybe it’s not houses either

but in fact commercial properties like the old cody’s one city over

it’s only now that those spinning possibilities

are occurring to me

for then we had to hustle back to our condo

we were hungry and tired

and dazed from the sun

so we ate and had down time

it was our last full day on vacation though

so soon enough we changed back into our swimwear

and trooped down to the condo complex’s pool

no one else was there

and that plus the lack of plans until dinner

made this the perfect place to cash in my long-delayed gratification

my bookmark

a strip from a brochure for pu’uhonua o honaunau national park

shows that I actually made it to page 24 of AVA

while I was studying and savoring each set of poetic lines

that still wasn’t far enough for me to get

to dispel an incorrect memory I had about that book

I had long carried the impression that it was about

a woman on her deathbed who was of retirement age or older

like the two vacationing friends we’d met at the beach earlier

but a quick glance at the author’s website just now

affirms what I could have learned had I looked at the back of the book

the fact that the titular character is 39

thus someone with an inclination to reflect on his past

with a random, fractal-like approach

was reading about a woman just two years younger than him doing exactly that

and already the compulsion had begun for me

for it wasn’t just my daughter’s repeated entreaties

“daddy, you can come in now” that led me to put down the book

it was also the fact that I was already mulling over

the poem I would one day write about that moment

and my eyes were frantically trying to note details of our surroundings

poetry is the shorthand

for that which pours on us nonstop like white light

and it embraces the impossible

in optical physics

certain surfaces can bounce images back to us

because the light waves make their tightly-bound electrons vibrate

the perfect moment

is that whose elements connect abreast yet each oscillate so much alone

that one hundred percent reflection is achieved