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Agusto Before flying off into water-glass skies toward the International Date Line A potter wasp with white and black banding, one of the vespids, rides the back of a glaucous green-black cicada it's sucking dry Mounted intensity a death act parody of sexual frenzy In its furious way as dramatic as switchbacking down four thousand feet of gray volcanic slope to the ocean below Kilauea To stand over the chaotic surf crashing against the cliffs at the black Holei Sea Arch and see three soot-black Tristam's storm-petrels dancing on the wind just above the spray Elusive birds darker even than the eerie colorlessness of the ash-gray lava everywhere in their mysterious flare and dash Metallic ocean, iodophilic pitching surface horizon away in mist and coastal fog Sea birds without the lava's fresh sheen, storm-petrels, the Oceanitidae, dramatically kinetic before the sizzling papaya incandescent magma spilling out upslope The smoking flow of lava toes, super-heated air shimmering above, noxious gases drifting in and out Walk carefully on solid crunching black pahoehoe with its glass needle shards, that which flowed a couple of weeks ago still warm below Molten pools beneath channeling through whatever is organic and can be burned out, root systems, organic pockets filling up Occasional muffled thuds of methane explosions of these pockets from the earth below the flow Now and then throwing dirt and bushes high as it from a demolition charge From a dirt bank a few yards from the sinister surface front's advance and watch its seaward advance Through grass and light brush As the surface ahead heats towards the two thousand degrees of the orange-red magma, grass flares, bushes and little kapuka trees wither Ground cover burns in pale yellow flames, weak, pale combustion flickers against the orange-red mass of swollen, wrinkling lava behind The upslope land being remade directly on top of what is here An alien dangerous force that kills instantly Its ineluctable advance recasting the surface in the Kilauea complex's east rift zone, enlarging Hawai'i's south coast Spilling onto an ocean shelf that it itself extends Snaking around earth outcrops and filling in ravines Throwing toxic clouds of laze up as it hits seawater Laze, the mix of steam and hydrochloric acid laced with bits of glass from the magma explosions as it comes off into the water in sizzling chunks Sulfurously vicious black Lava quenched when meeting water on the black-sand's swash still glows incandescent Small steaming blobs lifted by the wave wash in and out on the immedial sandy black The whole kinetic power of it proceeds oblivious to any biological or human constraints or considerations Volcanic time not our time and not within any time that has anything to do with day, night, seasons, growth, decay, stasis, renewal Inland, back upslope from the volcano's east rift zone, magma spills from its reservoir two miles below Kilauea's caldera to ooze seaward Leaving pahoehoe cooled into bulged, thick and endless futon of wrinkled hide, walrusesque In places like a squat trunk of a fallen copper beach where its bole first limbs out, left, right, fat, piled, gray Squat Kilauea dwarfs steep-sided Mount Rainier in height and mass Far more than flooding, landslips, dune migration, avalanche reconfiguring of the earth, hot lava being laid into black rock confounds all terrestrial assumptions It negates inherent stabilities Flowing lava dominates absolutely Whatever stands before it dies or gives way Gasping in the searing pain of its sulfuric gases, agape Dogs sulk away from it, birds avoid overflying it, people walk toward the lifeless, smoking line of it as at a romeria Visiting vulcanism as a pilgrimage Like a trek to Olduvai Gorge, to the Acropolis, the Forum Romanum, to Chartres, Kyoto, Tiantan, the Forbidden City But no reference at all to anything that we have ever been Volcanos rise with no ties to human time and possibility We have to go to them Flying there The curve-of-earth routing from Newark's urban "skies of water-glass" to Honolulu cuts directly over Detroit's Lake St. Clair, Lander in Wyoming, then across the Wind River Range A clear summer day across the continent, a kind of pilgrimage itself Over Pennsylvania's green-hill serenity, to the Great Lakes, then the prairie states' and high plains' Land Act quarter-sectioned grid Over the Wind River lodgepole pine and sagebrush, the Pass Creek Fire fifteen miles west of Lander burning through its second day Off the left wing from 34,000 feet in brilliant sun The smoke a rich-cauliflower white up top Raging black-gray at the base Flames even visible When working hotline the flames spark, sputter, seethe Flaring up, searing faces, forearms up, move back Move up, move out Cutting line Eyes scratchy dry Coughing gape at the flare-ups as at a fast snake or lunging dog Backs aren't turned to fire moving fast through brush, thick tree growth or even grass Smoke sometimes worse than heat as duff smudges and billows up so densely that wet bandanas and goggles don't stanch well And strangely when pulling back from hotline, before eating or sleeping or even sitting down, quietly stand long minutes staring at the burn Staring at the Pass Creek Fire in the same way from 34,000 feet through plexiglass It topped out at thirteen and a half thousand acres after it ran for a week A phlegmatic Bureau of Land Management woman in Lander on the phone a month later had trouble remembering the numbers Past the Wyoming Rockies on across the Great Basin and the Sierras to leave the Mainland at Point Reyes For the grand Pacific span Cross the California coast, the halfway mark, Newark to Honolulu Twenty-four hundred miles more, the flight's second half, all open ocean To the most isolated island group on the planet Land of Waikiki schlock, glottal stops, Portuguese sweetbread, ukuleles, great coffee, a spectacular climate and W. S. Merwin Landing pattern over Pearl Harbor, the USS Arizona Memorial with the USS Missouri tied up down channel in perpetuity City bus into town over Nuuanu Stream through Chinatown at nightfall to find a room Then down Bishop Street to the commercial port Two muumuu magnificent women in yellow, one with ukulele, the other with acoustic guitar, singing "Sweet Leilani" and then "Aloa Oe" to the Norwegian Princess just casting off from Piers Nine and Ten near Aloha Tower Imaging the stature and demeanor of Queen Liliuokalani nearly exactly, with good audio Singing up to the decks of the lofting cruise ship as if out of the spiritual presence of all Polynesian women all time, keening to parting ocean voyagers not to be seen again Queen L. herself wrote "Aloa Oe" O'ahu, the first morning sitting in the Iolani Palace grounds, Bermuda grass lawn, the aerial roots of the banyan trees' welcoming maze Liliuokalani's mood still pervades, her statue a cynosure there in dead-center Honolulu Under the mango and koa trees a sharp-tailed sandpiper, java sparrows, common mynas, zebra doves Marisol's stubby full-front statue of Father Damien, the Belgian priest who stayed to work with Hansen's disease patients on Molokai, d. 1889 of leprosy Across Beretania Street's spine from the Marisol to a bus out to the Bishop Museum in Honolulu's back reaches Hilly bungalow streets like a tropical Berkeley Princess Pauahi, the designated heir apparent to the throne down the line through the stunning Princess Kaiulani, was bypassed after mainland haoles, those thin gray Christian trimmers, overthrew Queen L. in 1893 Instead Princess Pauahi married one, Charles Reed Bishop The spacious deeply dark-brown varnished Bishop Collection is Princess Pauahi's and her husband's legacy On the O'ahu transit dollar-fifty bus around the island, great frigatebirds, common waxbills, spotted doves, cattle egrets, house sparrows "...the good winds were back // the trades out of the northeast coasting along the ridges" North Shore windblown big surf O'ahu and across past big Dole pineapple fields, past Schofield Barracks and Wheeler where the fighter planes and bombers were clustered wing-to-wing on December 7, 1941, and destroyed So small from the air, these places in cross-hairs that began that war, Pearl Harbor itself like a boat basin, Scholfield like a WPA camp in 1941 with tan clapboard barracks' dusty grounds So different now, the freeways and electronics, the flagrant affluence of the rich zones of this jetport world Hawai'i University football fans charter off to the away games on the thirteen-game schedule, to Cincinnati, Colorado Springs, Tuscaloosa, Provo Hawaiians fly as readily as Europeans jump a tram Ultra-modern Honolulu laid along the Koolau-crested coast, Ford Island to Diamond Head Fly across the Kaua'i Channel to Lihue through puffy cumulus that hang there as though fluffed and gardened by the trades spotting the coruscant light and shade Shadow and sun-patch empty wonder westering with distant Japan the next thing beyond Kaua'i and Ni'ihau Before Boeing, inter-island ferries breasted the vicious channel currents of Hawai'i, some of the worst waters in the world Simultaneous pitch and roll In the vast, empty central Pacific the islands' volcanic profiles are absolutely alone out there Brazilian red-crested cardinals on Kaua'i, and in the same coastal zone northern cardinals in their usual foraging pairs Wedge-tailed shearwater chicks in burrows of the north shore bluffs of Kaua'i A Newell's shearwater far out beyond the surf off Tunnel Beach just west of Hanalei Red jungle fowl indistinguishable from feral farmyard banties, a wandering tattler, chestnut mannikins, nutmeg mannikins, desperately motile Japanese white-eyes in protean flocks Lesser yellowlegs as migratory visitors Hanalei Taro ponds Na Pali Makana Mountain above Limahuli Valley where 'oahi, the fire throwing, was practiced for centuries Dried out and light burning logs lofted from Makana's peak into the night trade winds that lifted by them to soar far out to sea trailing sparks in their seaward arc An inversion of Elizabeth Bishop's "frail, illegal fire balloons" against the peak behind Petr—polis north of Rio "rising toward a saint // still honored in these parts // the paper chambers flush and fill with light" Brazilian Catholic rituals, Polynesian rites Sharkskin hula drums Limahuli Valley on north shore Kaua'i one of the first settled spots in all of Hawaii, the first canoes arrived at the mouth of its stream over fifteen hundred years ago "to live in the falling before time until the first canoe // appeared in the west and only the birds saw it" They brought breadfruit, taro, paper mulberry, bananas, kava, turmeric, sugar cane, ti whose waxy leaves were used for thatch and wrappings And found, already there, screwpine (thatch and sails), loulu (a low palm), lama (an ebony), papala (the light wood of the fire throwing), ohi'a (hardwood and esteemed flowers), and koa (the great wood of the islands, huge-trunked trees that made sailing canoes and furniture) They came from the Marquesas, later from the Societies, and traveled to the coasts of these islands in seagoing canoes Green coconuts strung on their outriggers, pigs and chickens riding in the hull Searching for windward green For valleys like Limahuli to make their terraces of taro ponds by tumbling streams A complete society in a paradisaic locale that without invasive Europeans could have gone forever, that in some ways still does The bounty of coral and lava reefs with the open Pacific behind, abundant rain and tropical sun on rich volcanic soils, ancient Polynesian savvy and sophistication And the corresponding parochial brutalities of clan and tribe and seething war-canoe, spear and battle-ax war "the merciless web of caste and ceremony // of ritual and dread and sacrifice and coherence // the kapus that maintained the power of the war god" Until Cook searching out taboos in his justaucorps and what trailed after him arrived Changing everything in the lives of all in the whole Polynesian triangle, Hawai'i to Auckland to Easter Island With disease, moneycraft, hooch and Christianity While the ocean, the climate, and the birds and clouds perdured White-rumped chama, white-tailed tropicbird, Hawaiian duck, common moorhen, golden plover, red-tailed tropicbird, red-footed booby, black-crowned night heron, black-necked stilt, Hawaiian coot, beautiful red high-elevation apapanes, sort-eared owl, Erckel's francolin Waders on the Hanalei Valley taro ponds Kilauea Point's seabirds and nothing between their black cliffed surf of Kaua'i and Kodiak Island on the Alasakan coast The nenes, the exotic, probing, serene nenes Up on the conifer-encircled mountain meadows of Koke'e on the Waimea Canyon Road Coming down at dark, the heavy deep dusk flight of one after another after another short-eared owls The locales of Merwin's epic of Pi'ilani and Ko'olau, of West Kaua'i, of Hansen's disease, of The Folding Cliffs Of Na Pali from above "...climbed to the sharp ridges and down into // the steep green clefts where water was running on the rock walls // through curtains of fern... "of canyons with white wings circling a vast distance below them // drifting across blue shadows and the far red rock face grooved // stained split with age where the white threads of waterfalls // hung swaying in the silent sunlight..." The high Alakai Swamp with the last of Hawaii's exotic birds, thick moss on all four sides of everything that grows, the wettest place on earth Mountain tops, all across the islands are mountain tops above a windward bed of clouds Windward, leeward, the constant Trades You climb from the welcome balmy coasts toward summits adding layers as you go so that on the upper slopes of Haleakala on Maui in the winter where sometimes there is even snow Volcanic mountains define Hawai'i The myriad birds enhance Kalij pheasant, Hawaiian hawk, housefinch, red-billed leiothrix, elepaio, wild canary, yellow-billed cardinal, melodious laughing-thrush, canvas back But the nenes are the emblematic ones At sunup on Uwekahuna Bluff overlooking the Kilauea caldera and its sulfur-yellowed cliffs the steam vents still condense in the chilled pre-sunrise air A pair of nenes low out of the night mist through the steam with their low moaning calls landing farther along the rim to walk the lava fields Lava fields that lead downslope eventually four thousand feet of elevation toward the ocean where the advancing glowing magma swells Garrett Hongo's querencia Lives along the Volcano Highway above tsunami-exposed Hilo Minka cottages Broad eaves, the constant rain Old plantationland Lavaland Orchidland Hawai'i that was formerly Sugarland Hapu'u that starts as a small fern in shadow and with light and luck grows in forty years to a tree fern of seven or eight meters before finally top heavy it topples Ubiquitous ohi'a, the tree shrub that's first to root on lava flows A thick, matted profusion in the rain Orchids, vines, aerophyte roots Old dry lava fields down the long incline toward Kau into the leeward side's desert the other way The intense green profusion of the Big Island's windward side along the Kohala Mountains to Upolu Point where Hawai'i ends at the Alenuihaha Channel But Hilo, Asian Hilo with mildewed stucco walls, wide eaves and its old Japanese bayfront gone from this last century's big tsunamis, 1946 and 1960 Fifty-foot waves in over the seawall into the city, both times In 1946, originating from an earthquake in the Aleutians, and in 1960, from a Chilean temblor Against that coast, that magnificent open coast All the way to Waipi'o Valley A luau is prepared for two days and nights by dozens of men at a house off the road near the Waipi'o lookout terrace They group around an imu, the earth oven in which the slow, baking, kalua, is done The big men are immense shadows in the flickering light through a rain shower soon after sundown at night One's mother-in-law has died in her eighties and they go about preparing the feast Not a haole in sight Even with their baseball caps and pickup trucks, a mysterious inaccessable, ancient, thoroughly Pacific island rite From the lookout terrace a huge colonial roost of cattle egrets in the trees just off the mouth of the Waipi'o Stream on the flats behind the strand along Waipi'o Bay Returning in the hundreds flock by flock through the dusk that from the lookout, at the top of the road almost two thousand feet above, is as quiet as eternity Magnificence hangs there in the tropical evening Below in the valley where in the centuries, before Cook landed on the island's leeward coast, the valley's profound fertility supported a population of tens of thousands Where sheer valley after valley, stream after stream, cliffs that seem to never end stretch away below a vast sky The green thousands of feet below It goes through sundown, dims and then is nearly black Under the massive cliffs the metallic Pacific begins Going darker from silver to pewter to last light dimmed-down electropolished gray Thousands and thousands of miles each way +++++++++++++++ Sampling credits from Elizabeth Bishop's "Loves Lies Sleeping," W. S. Merwin's The Folding Cliffs repeatedly, and Garrett Hongo's Volcano.

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