This is Laie, on the North Shore of Oahu, where
my grandfather had a store.
And these are the waters that he knew well.
You're looking from Laie to Kahuku.
That's Kahuku point over there.
You could see the Marconi, they call it,
the wireless telegraph.
That was one of the first places hit on December 7, 1941.
The Kahuku Marconi, they call it.
This is a beach in Laie.
This is actually near Pupukea, where he would go netting.
Net fishing is when you have the throw net that
has a circle of stones.
And it's thought to be always a Hawaiian, yeah,
a native Hawaiian technique.
No, sir, That's a Buddha head technique.
That's Japanese.
"Kubota on Kahuku Point to Maximus in Gloucester."
Wind ruffling my shirt and pants,
a gleam across the water.
Surf sounds in my ears, I roll the cuffs up my trousers.
Wade out in rubber stocking feet over the crags of black rock,
sea-slick with foam and garlands of kelp,
and pick my way across pockets of coarse sand.
The crushed white corals in bits of brilliant grit
between my steps, and realize I have had to learn the simplest
things last--
never to get angry, content each day with four
bowls of rice, some vegetables, and my house and store
under the shade of pines.
Ten years since the war's end and they sent me back.
Ten years of counting myself last in everything.
I was slow at first to put my hand out,
to try and do the world's business.
I stood aloof from that which was most familiar,
hurt by the drought of sympathy, cold in summer,
defeated by rains in winter, the wind ever my better.
But I turned back and ran with the shifting breezes one
day, no longer estranged, embraced
by the lapping waves of the sea content
not that the land was behind me only,
but that I gave no longer my first thought
to myself, but to my village, to the mother who was weary--
to whom I must carry a sack of rice--
to nature's dialogues with heaven,
and to the lush fall of rains that darkened like blush
on a woman's face, the waiting surface of the sea.
My trade, finally, was not in commerce with goods,
but an exchange with fear and burden.
My job to relieve them, going forth
through sickness and argument, bringing a pear to one who
is thirsty, a joke and the trick of silence
to the angriest man on the most sunless street in town.
But in no way am I wise.
I have squandered my care on useless things--
the spoon I crave to sharpen to a chisel, the lamp
I prayed for to reach through the black milk of night,
the repair I sought for the worn tatter of my soul.
All these came with time and a change of wind.
Wars end, my innocence, again, my own first possession.
So today, I look out as a wind and water man,
unfurling the loose folds of my black net
from its perfect geometry of stones,
so it spreads like the shade from a monkey pod tree
over the furtive edges of the lagoon,
dropping down on the green darts of fish
and grasping them all up in a ball.
When I cinch from the wrist, the tether,
and pull the whole writhing thing up.
I know now the quarters of weather when it comes,
where I must go with it.
Innocence is as ephemeral as that, a cloud massing,
unforeseeable around the blade edge of Kaena Point one
winter's night, a swarm of misfortune.
Then the slow peace again, fish running
with the tide, a soft wind in your shirt pocket.
It is undone business that makes us most calm, a pine grove
shade on a dune by the edge of the sea, coconuts and glass
floats to gather, bobbing from the surf.
It is to you, Maximus, I addressed myself this morning,
across the continent, with the sea stretching out
from my feet.