Hurricane Warnings
I rush trembling into the jungle when he calls. I run through pineapple plantations, plumeria passion fruit and mangoes crowding roadside stands burdened by the pressure of El Greco skies. The world is simple, vulnerable and innocent. She dreams of salvation and marriage like a virgin, a Catholic, a girl who believes in wishes and charms. Thin clouds are a pastel stitchery. This is the architecture of seashells and delusion. These sinuous etchings and tunnels in air. Pathways could open. He will not permit this. I am sixteen again, refined by constant heat and steam and motion— The subliminal pulse of the agitated ocean and the ambivalence of Kona storms above acres of arrested sugar cane parched, empty of serenity dull beyond bored. Fields yawn as I run. He could be anyone here where complications mean nothing in this seamless redundancy of oblivious green. The man is incidental to this process. He insists upon this. It is the torn wind I love the sudden wreckage the startled gash of wood ripped in half. A sunken galleon, a legion of condemned men an invented contagion beneath. It is hurtling into confused elements that arouses me and the sea speaking through her girl-lips. Her slow waking anger is familiar, soothing like a mirror or balm. I am intimate with wounded rock and the sculpture of disaster. Immeasurable drownings define me. I know the intricate asanas of rage and the decay that births hurricanes, the subtle abuses and discarded vows. I swallow volcanoes. My skin is chameleon. I too could erase an island if I chose.
