Ehukai Waters

Sunny Pleasures

Haiku, written during the Billabong Pipeline Masters 
surfing contest on the North Shore, Oahu 

ehukai waters


envelop, curl, 


and swallow;


sun-drenched shore


 to tease.

When The Train Comes In The Morning

Sunny Pleasures

Lil’ Boy. That’s what his mother called him, growing up, and what she and his friends continue to call him now that he’s a grown man. I like tagging along with Lil’ Boy on his Saturday morning walks.

Shall we go? I ask eagerly.

O, sige, Lil’ Boy says, yawning.

It is a dazzling sun-drenched day, with little cottony clouds. The sampalok trees are flooded with wondrous light. I feel buoyant excitement as we cross the alley toward Aling Sisang’s store, then stroll straight away in a weekly self-replicating stretch up the wooden bridge to Geronimo Street.

We climb up a small hill from where we can see the serpentine head of the railway tunnel. With one knee drawn up to my chin, and the other leg dangling over the side of the largish rock on which I have chosen to perch, I look over the housetops, the flapping wash on clotheslines. Lil' Boy and I sit motionless for a long moment, as though we've been suddenly bronzed. Wherever we look, there is something beautiful to engage our eyes.

Then I hear the familiar sound of creaking and jerking. 

Lil’ Boy, train’s coming! I squeal in delight.

The train comes in very slowly, as though aware of its own charisma – a faraway circle of light moving in, growing bigger, pulsing a little in the dark air of the tunnel, and then behind it a lumbering line of coaches, big, gray, dusty, and hooked together like elephants in the circus.

Lil’ Boy perks up. 

He begins his recitation of an often-told story about how his father followed the railroad track and walked from his northern provincial hometown all the way to the capital city of the island. 

Biding his time, he tells the story from the beginning. He doesn't rush the proceedings along. He chants a psalm of pride, passion for adventure, gratitude for roads taken, and despair for those not traveled.

You only need to follow the path, as your heart tells you to, he says, arching a knowing brow at me. He makes it seem like there is no one else in the world, the way he is talking to me.

But you can get lost! I say, bewildered.

He gives a short nod of understanding, but continues on thoughtfully. The tracks will lead you. He seems to know a lot of things before I can even think of them.

Oh, Lil’ Boy! I say breezily. You always say that.

Suppressing a smile, he hoists me up from my perch before I can say anything more, Let’s walk back home.

I never admitted it, but I've always thought about Lil’ Boy’s words. That counsel has become part of me, while life, the changing view, streams by.

Maybe someday I’ll concede with an approving glimmer from under my brows that the admonition has sometimes stirred me to thrilling destinations; that it has inspired me to detour down another trail far more arduous, but nonetheless a thousand times more interesting.

Someday, perhaps on an auspicious day like Father’s Day, I’ll tell him, Dadee, what you said about the tracks, it’s true.

Princesses In Flight

Sunny Pleasures

As the weather gets warmer, the air gets magically filled with what look like tiny, floating white clouds. When I asked what they were, I was told, Princesses. I've since then learned that these are actually the characteristic seeds flying off the cottonwood trees. 

Precisely the least, the softest, lightest, a lizard's rustling, a breath,

a flash, a moment: a little makes the way of the best happiness. - Nietzsche 

My eyes open to the warmth of the morning sun. I watch the radiance push through the window, and I wonder about how the night had enveloped the day in its womb of darkness.

Now, day is here - illuminated by faintly sparkling layers of air with white light. 

Then, as if what is happening is not real at all, but a lucid dream, woven bits of impressive, fragile fluffs parachute down and across the tranquility of the blue sky. Like God's fingerprints, tiny balls of cottony wisps gently claim their mark all around.  

Princesses, I whisper in a hushed voice that I have hitherto reserved for promises and secrets.

I allow my eyes to take in every inch of them bathing in the morning luster - a pointless exercise, I realize, but I'm loving it. Carried away by their impatient and perpetual buoyant urge to go on and on, they seem like they're following the enticing summons of the likes of the hunchbacked flute player Kokopelli, the universal Pan, Spirit of Music.

And so they float - merging into a point of nothingness which is untouched by illusion, a point of pure truth, a point of divine spark.

The sweet, invigorating smell of the peony and rhododendron embraces me, surrounding me with a deep sense of comfort. I pause, stranded in an ocean of intoxication, a moment of mutual glory, for I know intuitively that everything hinges on this time when the eye notices the small things, and nothing will be the same again.

I ponder freedom and paradise as I walk away with the intention of talking myself into a less excitable frame of mind. 

Today I feel light.

I can move.

Like a Princess, I will float.

Vernazza On My Mind

Sunny Pleasures

There must be an awful lot of folk searching for a Brigadoon

--even if it only lasts for a couple of hours.

The place is deadly still. The enormity of nightfall has rendered everything blank, utterly blank. The darkness has a quality of inexorability and menace as though it will never lift, as though without anyone noticing it, the dawn of the day before has been the beginning of the last light ever in the history of the world. 

Then the sky brightens, imperceptively at first, puncturing the murki­­ness with pinpricks of light. Against a backdrop of pale stars, I stumble upon Vernazza. My Italian Brigadoon...

(OK, I know I'm mixing metaphors. Vernazza is neither mysterious nor Scottish. It also doesn't appear for only one day every hundred years. But I like imagine-playing, so there.)

... It is one of Five Lands, Cinque Terre, sloping down on a rugged coast along the Italian Riviera.

The sun slides slowly upon the off-kilter silhouette of colorful, old houses stacked haphazardly on top of each other on the edge of the terraced hillside. The first rays of dawn filter through the olive groves above and in the space between rough stone steps and loose rocky surfaces. A web of golden shadow spreads over narrow, crooked streets and dirt paths.

Sound breaks through the silence - first, a short ding; then bong! – a long deep sound, followed by the excited peal from bells ringing from the two clock towers.

I hear subdued conversation from women hanging laundry on a corded washing line stretched between veranda rails. Morning stirs with the hum of children's voices drifting from the grounds. Footsteps creak along the passage as men go for their espresso and gather under umbrella-shaded tables. Greetings of Buon giorno, signifying a good day, abound.

Shops overflowing with baskets, Majolica dishware, leather shoes, and intricately-embroidered clothing open up. Under makeshift stalls, vendors preside over baskets of various herbs - parsley, yellowish-orange saffron threads, bunches of thyme and rosemary, grapes, sugar beets, corn, tomatoes and citrus fruits. 

Itinerant vendors hawk their goods to the gathering crowd. Limoncello, anyone? Freshly-squeezed.  Ah, that sweet, tart, and refreshing drink. People haggle over prices; money changes hands. Would you take five euros for this?

On a sandy strip, fishermen emerge from docked boats to sell the freshest catch of sea bass, sole, and anchovies - and beyond, the open stretch of the Ligurian Sea. 

Any time now, I can feel in my heart that a tourist, or perhaps someone from a neighboring town, is about to fall in love with Fiona...

(Who's Fiona, you ask? She's the young woman from Brigadoon, who else?).

... I wait for it.

My isolated feelings, heretofore restricted to a secret niche inside of me, are everywhere exposed to the ruddy glow in the east and grown so large and firmly fixed that I cannot separate it from the landscape and the sky.

I will swear, I can swear...

 Why, it's almost like being in love.