Seven Poems
Island Weather
We can spot what’s coming to us here
from a long way off.
We can watch it glide down
the many faces of the cliffs,
shading them different
darknesses of green,
moving toward us like a sorrow—
a gently sad, blue-gray
whisper of rain,
a soft, shimmery nimbus
that lifts and pushes us
toward what we’ve learned to expect.
It all comes in such
a cool rush of wonder
we can only consent.
Our weather’s far gathering
and sleepy roll down morning air
give us nothing more than
a moment’s prescience—
as much as we’ve ever wanted.
Spring Training in ʻAiea
On this raised ground, this April playing field
high on the heights above the ships and subs
of Pearl Harbor, my nine-year-old and I
play pitch and catch, hurrying against the coming dusk.
We would have the field to ourselves
if not for the gathering plovers, preening the wide wings
that will carry them through three-thousand miles of flight
unbroken across the unforgiving blue expanse
of Pacific sea—a trip they will take any day now.
Today, perhaps, we will see them leave.
We are ready for our season and they for theirs.
But our suburban world and this vast plover place do not touch.
Even when we switch to batting practice and my son’s hits
send the birds scattering this way and that.
We are no more to them than wind or grass.
It is so lovely, high, and breezy here;
the clouds steep against the Koʻolaus;
the Waiʻanaes in the distance heave stark silhouettes
against the sun that plunges down to the Leeward sea.
The ball floats so cleanly and true
through the high blue and orange of day-ending sky
that all this could almost be song.
The stitchings of the high pitch go round and round,
flickering red against smudged white
as the aria tumbles its aerial trajectory.
The plovers, too, sing a note now and then
as they fly from one spot to the next.
Every bird or ball must come down somewhere,
and always ground or sea is waiting,
but the sky is capable of holding so much—
turning it all carelessly in its hands.
Mejiro
Mejiro—a deft green stroke,
flying
or hopping from branch to branch,
tail upstruck—
is the moment’s punctuation,
a comma
flickering so quick
the rest of the bright green syntax
can only wheel after,
a lost clause trying to catch up.
Finches in Bamboo at the Art Building
This building holds, almost inside,
a minimalist streetscape
that weaves through gardens of bamboo,
crosshatched by stick and leaf and light.
Old, dark rocks on the ground scatter
in the gathered tan of fallen leaves
a small autumnal grief,
noted in passages between
galleries and vending machines.
The building’s walls are thick,
but sun and shadow stream in
at either side, so that this underneath
seems a cave, a cool lair for waiting.
At night, flocks of little finches
roost in dark bamboo. Approach
the rustling branches at sunset
and hear hundreds of tiny beaks
screech and chitter and cry.
Mynahs
Brash, pugnacious, and the loudest
of complainers—they are principal
citizens of our neighborhoods
and know it. They arrogantly stride—
on elegant, tall, yellow claws—
into the midst of other birds,
as if expecting pride of place.
More human than we are,
they reluctantly tolerate us
as evils necessary
for the food we leave in our wake.
Feathered situation comedies,
their lives seem endless quarrels
with each other and anything else
that moves or doesn’t.
The fights for nesting sites
we can understand,
but their puzzling,
spectacular ring fights—
cackling, off-key parodies
of West Side Story—
two combatants encircled
by raucous, bird-brained shriekers—
have no point that we can see.
Their jokes, too, are absurdities—
one-bird routines, the comedian
picking up something silly
and dancing around clumsily
like a drunken uncle at a wedding—
while the other mynahs laugh.
They are too much like us in every way,
and we despise them for it,
but, when light lowers in the largest trees,
they gather to themselves a dusky music
and make of their crabbed, separate voices
a higher harmony
that floats entirely above us.
Bulbuls at the Museum
Vivid bulbuls
flit and settle
and flit again.
They do not know
that they are nesting
in a museum
or that their homing
to the hybrid red
bougainvillea—
whose gnarled trunk
has climbed the courtyard wall
so long it has become a tree—
mimics
a hanging scroll
by Hoitsu.
Heron at Dusk
The heron at dusk is motionless—
a dark rock perched on a dark rock—
above the tide pool
where it will feed soon.
After a mild twist of torso
its gun-dark beak cleaves sky and sea,
becoming a sudden machine,
a nightmare piston.
Mostly I see them waiting singly,
singing sometimes a solitary distain,
a terrible patience,
a hollow sound at dusk, a bell.
The most recent of Joseph Stanton’s books of poems is Lifelines: Poems for Winslow Homer and Edward Hopper. His ninth book of poems, Kaaterskill Cove, is forthcoming in 2025. His poems have appeared in Poetry, New Letters, Ekphrasis, Antioch Review, Harvard Review, New York Quarterly, Bamboo Ridge, and many other magazines. He frequently collaborates with other poets, visual artists, playwrights, and composers. He occasionally teaches poetry workshops, such as the “Starting with Art” workshops he has taught at Poets House (in New York City) and at the Honolulu Museum of Art. He is a Professor Emeritus at UH-Manoa, where he taught in the American Studies and Art History programs.