It's called, the first section is called, Climbing.
And each section has a name, which
is the first word of the first line, which
is the way, of course, as you know,
Hawaiian chants are set up.
The last line, the last word is very often
the first line, first word of the next stanza,
and it's the way the stanza is announced.
So the title of the first section is Climbing.
It's her name.
Her name means Pi'ilani.
Pi'ilani means climbing heaven.
And it begins with her, and it ends with her.
Climbing in the dark,
she felt the small stones
turn along the spine of the path,
whose color kept rising
in her mind.
Burned in color, moment of rust,
dried blood color, other color,
gone color by day.
And she knew what color was there
when she could not see it.
And when one of the stars
was the darkness before any breath of daylight,
and the way was in her feet again,
the star of Kao'ea rushed between clouds
when the dawn wind came toward her
down across the ridges of the mountain,
carrying the scent of water
from the peak of Wai'ale'ale.
At a high twist of the trail,
far down to the left,
behind her over the naked roots of the slope
and the widening hollow of Wai'aka,
where the folds of the mountain
were still touched by the moon,
she saw the sea outside
the curve of coast,
glinting past Waimea,
beyond the dark land and the hidden houses.
In one of them her father was invisible in sleep.
And past there, the sea outside Kekaha,
where she had been born,
on the shore of O'omanu,
all of it barely a shadow
from which she had set out
and nobody had heard her go.
Even the dogs in the moonlight
never barked when she went past,
looked up and watched,
and never barked, knowing who she was.
And with the next step,
that whole horizon was gone
behind the mountain.
The blackness beginning to the right of her
was the chasm of Waimea.
The air running from the edge of it
rustled the finer leaves of the koas.
Above her the voices of the plovers
stitched the night.
She knew the way now as something of hers,
a sound of her name.
It had been hers from the beginning,
waiting for her, when she woke into the world
on the coast at Kekaha,
her night name from before anyone had seen her
and from before that, always hers
but more of her had answered to it
after she had tasted
what she would not taste again,
infancy, when the belly turns up,
and the echo of the waves rocks it.
And then childhood, the naked rapids.
then the petal pleasure of everyone's eyes on her,
telling her how beautiful she had become,
how beautiful she was.
And then her watching him differently,
whom she had known for as long
as she could remember,
since they had been children there,
running on that same sand.
And then the feeling of him watching her
and the time he first came to her,
and all their early age together,
the house they lived in after the wedding
when she had heard his full name,
as though she had never known it,
although everyone knew it.
And when she heard it that time,
a cold finger touched her
at the top of her forehead
and ran down the front of her
over her face and her breast,
to her navel and below.
And she had shivered
and heard nothing for a moment.
Until the voice of Reverend Rowell,
who had taught them both to read and write
turned to her and said her name,
Pi'ilani, and asked her the lifelong question.
When she had gone up that trail
for the first time, they had been together,
all of them on horses.
Ko'olau her husband
ahead of her in the dark,
and Kua his friend and elder
riding ahead of him.
Kua Papiohuli,
who had taught Ko'olau from the beginning,
always an eye on him,
throwing the fishnet,
holding the spear, the paddle,
taught him the currents on the surface
and the ones below, who they were,
where they came from, what things they had done,
what it was best to expect from them, in what order,
as the hours turned in the sky.
And Kua taught him the touch with horses,
so that even as a boy, Ko'olau was famous
for his way with horses.
And Kua taught him the braiding of leather,
the life of a sinew, the spring of a lariat,
and taught him to use the lariat
so that it seemed to rise out of his hand by itself
and fly wherever he willed it to go
and drop there like a tern fishing.
Kua taught him the tracks on the ridges
and the gun, the handling of the gun.
And Ko'olau, they would say, never misses.
He never misses.