Coral Road
I keep wanting to go back, across an ocean, blue-gray and
uncaring,
White cowlicks of waves at the continental shore, then the
midsea combers
Like white centipedes far below the jetliner that takes me
there.
And across time too, to 1919 and my ancestors fleeing
Waialua Plantation,
Trekking across the northern coast of O`ahu, that whole
family
of
first Shigemitsu
Walking in geta and sandals along railroad
ties and old roads at night,
Sleeping in the bushes by day, ha`alelehana—runaways
From the labor contract with Baldwin or American Factors.
My grandmother, ten at the time, hauling an infant brother
on her back,
Said there was a white coral road in those days, pieces of
crushed reef
Poured like gravel over the brown dirt, and, at night, with
the moon up,
As it was those nights during their flight, silver shadows
on the sea,
It lit their path like a roadway made of dust from the Ocean
of Clouds.
Michiyuki is what they called it, the Moon Road
from Waialua to Kahuku.
There is little to tell and few enough to tell it to—
A small circle of relatives gathered for reunion
At some beach barbecue or Elks Club veranda in Waikiki
All of us having survived that plantation sullenness
And two generations of labor in the sugar fields,
Having shed most all memory of travail and the shame of
upbringing
In the clapboard shotguns of ancestral poverty.
Who
else would even listen?
Where is the Virgil who might lead me through the shallow
underworld of this history?
And what demiurge can I say called to them, loveless ones,
through
twelve-score stands of cane
Chittering like small birds, nocturnal harpies in the feral
constancies of wind?
All is diffuse, like knowledge at dusk, a veiled shimmer in
the sea
As schools of baitfish boil and revolve in their iridescent
globes,
Turning to the olive dark and the drop-off back to depth
below,
Where they shiver like silver penitents—a cloud of thin,
summer moths—
While rains chill the air and pockmark the surface of the
sands at Sans Souci,
And we scatter back inside to a humble Chinese buffet and
cool sushi
Spread on Melamine platters on a starched white ribbon of
shining cloth.
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