WILDNESS IS THE LAST WORD
Kohala 6-3-26
Wind pushes screen door back to the latch. How can I ignore this contrary dance partner on my kitchen threshold, pulling and tugging the door open again. There’s a swinging everywhere I look. The Nōren lifts into the kitchen and floats back inside the Geisha Room again, its tails together neat and tidy as you please. A small engine weed trimmer in the distance on the windward side of further than I can see is too far to be anything other than “in agreement,” in long, comb and paper vibrations, in this orchestral morning...mmm...mmm...mmm, one note fluctuating in an easterly breath, pushing through the teeth of morning—morning, close-lipped, pre-literate epoch of the day shortly after dawn.
To this moment birds arrive vibrating and hopping, pecking through yesterday’s fallen seeds or shoulders-down, intent on finding love in curled up leaves and sodden blooms fallen from the six-petal gardenia. The red-headed, white-breasted, gray-blue backed Paroaria capitata—known in the islands as the yellow-billed Cardinal—not even a distant cousin to my winter memory of Northern Cardinals in Indiana— here they are, bold amidst the spotted-doves who busy themselves commuting from kitchen to kitchen, too tame a setting for the melodious thrush and too early in the day for Java sparrow who will fill this space like an elementary school field trip with no chaperone, keeping to their flock of like kind, defining the moments in fragments of Bruegelesque-apades, three on a branch in synchronicity, hopping to the tips of tender leaves until their wings engage and disrupt those bent to the seeds who in turn rise up in bursts of fluttering intersected by swooping and gliding and general crowd cacophony that only the brightly colored leiothrix can upstage, but that’s another memory, a two-days-before-the-rains-came recollection of a glorious intermingling of bird families—only the warbling silverbills missing, and the common waxbills, so small they can perch in number on the tips of grasses, swaying like troupes of acrobats, unfazed until you raise the camera to your eye—then, elusive… and through all of this, confident as you like, self-contained, content to follow you far afield on fence-wire, or closer to home, stitching together these moments outside your window with their yellow comings and goings, the saffron finches…
…but where were we? Waking up. Nursing a short Americano, long cold in the cup.
Quietly reveling under a blue sky and sunlight. I am the inquisitive mynah at last, here to pick up the pieces and make something out of it, use my words for birds, leaves, seeds, the shushing of trades in the trees breaking in tops of bamboo and casuarina like the ocean on the shore, which is after all, not far away from this spot—and all that is unseen, the chattering, the whistling on in-breath and out, the unpleasant snail at the bottom of the pot, the one gold-orange fish in green water and…
…truth be told, on the other side of all this, a small pain in the joint of the thumb, an ache growing at the hinge of torso and legs, a growing restlessness, all the pains that come with a life, the long pressing awareness that this moment is its own island in the world of getting and spending on the dark streets and dank corners and roaring of airports and motorcycles from the canyons of Waikiki to Central Park, a different oil-fed population of vibration and intersection with its own weather system and never-satisfied mouth—sitting here, I know this, and rearrange my bouquet of thoughts to make room for it, knowing I am not it, knowing this is why the melodious thrush lays low and spends its daylight hours skulking from shadow to shadow emerging occasionally into dappled light, while more often than not, loosening its lusty song over our heads down Pratt Road, or outside a window, always a surprise, always a sense of reawakening of an older language, a wildness that will, I believe, have the last word.