Feeling sick this morning. Hopefully, it is not what Lynn and Aiden had... I hope it's just the standard fare, sinus inflammation, eventual clogging of the throat pipes and the lung basin, cough cough etc. Nothing INTESTINAL... Although I've had ominous signs this morning, a mild pain and creaking in my gut (really sounds like I've swallowed a toad), and, well, if not diarrhea, at least semi-urgent Smoothie consistency shit (sorry to offend).
A friend sent some CDs over, and as he is an avid Radiohead fan, I trust his judgment. The CD is by "Wilco," a band I'd heard about, and even heard one song from (it's on the Beetle commercial, the one where this guy breaks into and temporarily steals this girl's Beetle, and then, presumably because of the transformative effects of the drive, has a change of conscience and parallel parks it exactly where he lifted it, leaving the keys in the very same place). Anyways, I was listening to it as I dropped Willow and Aiden off. I like it all, but third song was nice.
It's called "Impossible Germany [Unlikely Japan]". You know how you hear certain lyrics and they stand out, and you're not sure if you get the real meaning of them, because you weren't listening to everything else (you don't know the context)? Well, this stood out to me:
"This is what love is for
To be out of place
Gorgeous and alone
face to face.
No larger problems
need to be erased..."
... also had a mild brainstorm for a poem ... a couple of poems, actually. One about coral. Partially inspired by the whole "coral" posting I put up earlier, and related to the crappy Alzheimer's poem as well...
I wanted to write about Ewa. That's where my grandma lives, Ewa Beach. It is a really dry flat area. It used to be covered over with sugar cane, but with the whole West-side development push, now everything, and I mean everything, is new cookie cutter houses. Not that that's a bad thing at all, I mean people need to live somewhere, but it's just a transformation, that's all...
One thing distinctive about Ewa (similar to what's distinctive about Mililani) is the color of the "soil." Ewa used to be all under water, so its ground composition is primarily white coral. In fact, people build white coral walls in Ewa, in the same manner that people elsewhere on the island build walls out of lava rocks.
Coral is an evocative image for me. All those tiny creatures, communal mouths, dying, and their miniscule skeletons collecting endlessly to form monumental structures... And then the coral "dies," the sea dries up, and what do you know? New people, human beings, doing the same exact thing: building structures upon the dried and dessicated skeletons of coral, structures to house their dreams before they dry up in the leeward sun...
Also: I might be wrong about this, but I heard that there was a flightless bird that used to occupy the Ewa plain, a bird similar to the dodo that was hunted to extinction by the ancient Hawaiians (who said that native Hawaiians were squeaky clean and divinely "eco-friendly?")... The fossils of this bird were only found in Ewa... FLIGHTLESS BIRD. EXTINCT. Again, an evocative image.
Also: there was a license plate. EWABND... I think it was supposed to read EWA BOUND. That's the typical description of traffic headed towards that side of the island: Ewa Bound traffic (usually gridlocked by 3 in the afternoon). But you can read that a different way: Ewa Bound, as in tied to, restricted to, Ewa...
I wrote something about my grandfather, how he suffered from Alzheimer's, and one day wandered off, and was halfway to Hau Bush before the police found him... All of these images, coral, flightless bird, etc. to me are trying to tell me something. They are trying to serve as symbols for, I don't know, the inescapability of the earth contrasted (?)/simultanous with the effacement of memories...
No comments:
Post a Comment