This last poem is an ode to all my Pacific poets
who've been reading tonight.
It's called Pearl.
And it's a meditation on inheritance,
and also the violence of the Pacific occupation.
Pearl.
The raw pearl your mother gave to you that you gave away.
You carry it sometimes in your dreams.
It's memory swelling like a blister forged
from the blood of the Pacific.
Little grain, little ache on the tongue.
If held in the mouth, it would be smooth.
Semen colored, embryonic.
If swallowed, it would slide down to the belly
and take root there.
The way you did once.
Niggling child listing in amnion,
lumped silica smoothed to a sheen.
If you were to hold the mollusk in your hand,
place a knife at the base of the hinge.
In this way, the shell- misshapen pearl
can be pried open, separated from the meat there.
There's a taste of salty mucus, of rusted nails.
Can you detect the fecal bloom of the oyster beds.
The pearl of shit building in the lower tracks.
Blushing microbiome of the tides.
Can you taste the life draining from the animal.
The waters that flowed through what was sifted
and what remained.
What chipped at the shell to release its tumorous
iridescence.
Can you siphon the past into gems.
All the residues draining from sewers.
Dead leviathans clustered with hag fish.
Bodies of fishermen and sailors, their mothers' grief
engulfed by the sea.
Your own mother returned decades too late to hand you this pearl.
Uneven thing with its own kind of potential.
Her island crusted layer by layer from the sea magma
made igneous, string of pearls draped along the Mariana Trench.
Could she look east as a child, and see a fire
in the nacreous skies over Bikini Atoll?
Does she think of a pearl?
On whose sons did the fallout rain?
Whose daughters, pearls growing deep in their bodies?
You think of the daughters never born to you.
Who will never receive this small and significant
inheritance.
A rough pearl in a plastic envelope from a highway gift
shop in Hawaii.
If you were to break it open and magnify the shards,
they would appear structured, highly brittle, mineral
platelets stacked like long boxes in a darkened warehouse.
Warehouse of forgotten lives of dead ancestors,
lost mothers and children.
Little speck, little star, disappearing
into the folds of your hand.
What does the light do as it arcs along the silken surface?
What if all families are grains scattered in the sea?
Si Yu'os ma'åse'.
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
That was great.