Showing posts with label Maui. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Maui. Show all posts

Thursday, January 15, 2015

"Bookstore on Maui"


If you'd prefer to paw
through and gaze at used books
when you're on Maui, drive
or cycle past the smoke-stacks
of the sugar-plant between
cane-fields. On a wire

above a frail, dignified
wooden church, a night heron
in daylight may be studying
the water in the irrigation ditch.

Further on down the road,
in an old house belonging to
the Maui Friends of the Library,
you'll meet a modest, musty
buffet of books, 25 cents
a piece. Yes, there was a
church, without a steeple,
and here are the books.
Where are the people?

They're working, of course.
That sugar-factory, e.g.
Others are on beaches
and in bars, in shops and
cars. They're in the swelling,
lengthening anacondominiums,
eaters of capital, another
invasive species. And

people are also home in studio
apartments and tired bungalows,
recovering from double-shifts
in which, in some capacity,
they served touristic whims.

The books are on vacation,
away from the people. The shelves
are a residential hotel for words.
You stop by to say hello.


Hans Ostrom 2015




"Recent Storms"

The man in Maui said the recent storms
had ripped away sand and shortened beaches.
We were looking at one of the beaches.
It was narrow all right.

In what's called the distance, a humpback
whale lifted itself up, curved, went
back under, flipping its tail
in so doing: a thick, black Y.

Not incidentally at all,
a minah bird hopped onto grass
carrying a dead dragon fly.
The bird swallowed it,

taking the bulbous head first.
It stretched tall to get it all
down the pipe and expressed
liquid defecation in a quick

Latinate stream onto green.
We live inside a multitude
of dynamic systems, the man
said. He was homeless, and two

security-guards eyed him, us. That
we do, sir, I said. And
I gave him a fiver for his
journey, and everything changes form.


Hans Ostrom 2015