Seventeen feelings

postcards from the island at night without pictures

I would send you a picture except that nothing here fits the flat dead rectangle of a photograph and I am just barely tethered to the internet here. And anyway everything on this island is in a state of arrival. Everything is alive. So instead of pictures I’m sending you these words like postcards of feelings. So.

- - - 

The almost chemical clang of the tangerine juice. 

- - - 

The song-sing language that stops sometimes in the middle of a word a glottal stop the intake of breath crucial to its meaning. 

- - -  

Midnight. The barrage of rain.

- - - 

And up into the tawny hills slopes of touch grass wild goat overlap to meet the blue ocean ruffled with waves, whales surfacing.

- - - 

Later. A fine night rain rice on the kitchen’s tin roof. 

- - - 

The way the smaller chocolatey donkey’s fur goes curly in the morning because he slept in the grass overnight again. 

- - - 

The papaya boat filled with yogurt and thin slices of apple  banana and the granola glittering with macadamia nut and Hawaiian honey. 

- - - 

Black coffee in a blue cup in the corner of the treetop lanai where the seedlings grow in their patch of sun. 

- - - 

The nutmeg tree. 

- - - 

The stars.

- - - 

I followed the woman I just barely recognized over the edge of the high brick wall beside the theatre. My brother came after me. We made star shapes in the long fall and way below touched down so soft I knew we had to be inside of a dream with its dream powers. It got stranger from there. I woke up and walked to the edge of the clearing where the lime leaves were wet with moonlight. 

- - - 

I am alone in the big truck along the highway that cuts through the lava fields 4 rolls of gauze bandages beside me in the passenger seat listening to Island Radio loud.

- - - 

The almost transparent fish with purple polka dots in the calm forest of coral below the surface. Above the ocean is choppy. Waves like merengue.

- - - 

Twisting the tangerine gently on its stem high in the tree in the finest rain sweeping over me. Everything is scented. 

- - - 

My pockets full of sandalwood root chips from the pile behind the shed above the clouds where they are making a new forest from seeds of the first trees. 

- - - 

The guava wood smoked salmon with macadamia-coconut- lilikoi butter crust with saffron turmeric rice with lime and umeboshi plums pickled burdock matchstick. I was hoping that the bread pudding would crisp up in the propane broiler but we were laughing too hard.

- - - 

The smell of fresh-fallen grapefruit its oil stayed on my fingers and in my hands the glint I found of grapefruit amber I pried off a handful of shards and they glowed caramel-gold from inside. And I wondered if I could dry this sap, grind it to powder and use it to bind the reddish pigment inside the nutmeg shells and the inner fibres of spicy sandalwood and the tiny purple black berries brought down from the mountain that stained the container of the inside of my hat. 

- - - 

All this is ink. Postcards.

with heart,

Jason 

—-