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April 25, 2005 Honolulu Tuesday

A blessing rain awakens me in the dark before dawn. I lift into the spirit
Of rain. It’s like the sweet urgency of sex with a beloved, this rain.
We are home I tell my spirit who has momentarily become the rain.
We are home my arms tell my beloved who rolls close sweetly to seal the absence.
Yesterday I traveled in the sky, over houses, businesses and churches,
Over cornfields. And over rolling hills of brush, trees and rivers
And through the principalities of birds, animals and various elemental kingdoms.
And above snowy mountains and wide palms of desert. I flew over my mother’s house,
my sisters’ and my brothers’ houses. And over my daughter’s house. I flew over babyhood, childhood and the wilderness of bad decisions. The last hours of the flight were through an eternity of blue to make it home to this island.
This morning I woke and I know where I am.
Yesterday I stumbled up in a grand old hotel room in Des Moines at four a.m.. A few days before I arose to greet the dawn in Evansville, Indiana in a hotel out
on an American strip of junk food.
Before that it was a b and b in Albuquerque where I lay for two days crashing from exhaustion. Sunrise came to me then in a poem and I was renewed when I went out
into the crisp dawn.
Before Albuquerque was Mesilla, New Mexico and I woke in the room thinking I was at my cousin’s duplex in West Hollywood and then I dove back under and found myself in that desert motel under refrains of doves and other birds and clouds of family.
Before Mesilla it was a rundown hotel in the middle of Berkeley during a cold snap. The ridged back heaters threw off a little heat around their middles. I froze. I was in and out of that place in a snap.
And before that it was my cousin’s in West Hollywood. That house knows it will be torn down in the next few years, knows that everything is changing and its spirit heaves
with the knowledge. I landed there from L’Enfant Plaza Hotel in D.C. from smack in the middle of a testing field. The cherry blossoms were perfectly aroused.
I was given refuge before that at my cousin’s in my home in West Hollywood. It was perfectly spring. Spirits congregate in that house.
And before that in a motel in Newark, Ohio where I saw a groundhog chewing breakfast at the side of the road as I was driven from the hotel to my first class at Denison University.
And before that I left this island for this journey. I knew it would be a long one and walked the yard and the house, gathering what I needed along the way.
I return rich with stories, with new friends, with renewal of friendships, with disappointments, with accomplishments, with a resolve to keep moving beautifully no matter where I am. On this trip more than any other I realize how much assistance I am given to make it through this world. I see the faces of everyone who has picked me up from the airport, returned me, carried my bags, cooked meals, greeted me, shared stories, poems, songs. We have laughed and cried together. Sat silently together. Walked the grounds of old Mississippian Mounds in late afternoon. Talked the stuff of poetry: which is more about heartbreak, survival, loss, and self-deprecation than it is about who’s who or the mechanics of poetry. Yesterday morning stood in the dark in Des Moines with two poets I had met along the way. Our small knot of beingness was a prayer for poetry. We traveled off to our different directions. I turn back to acknowledge all this. I look forward into the dawn.
Green, broad leaves of plants are sprinkled freshly from the light rain. Plumeria blossoms are bright with love. The sun is rising above Ko’o’laus. I am home.