Photographing the Eclipse (not)

Well, my camera decided that when it's auto-focusing, it needs to wander all over the sky like a roving eye. A camera equivalent of Damn You AutoCorect moment.  No way to stop its inexorable grinding. Like teeth. Mine. The moon swinging on a gravity-defying pendulum, the camera lens refocusing and grunting its way through fresh sets of  batteries. I gave up. So did all my batteries.

FIRE DANCE

      Total eclipse of the sun at Puʻuhonua o Hōnaunau,
      the City of Refuge, Hawaii, 1991.

I was snorkeling with the manini,

the striped reef fish, who gathered
around me like a gown of yellow leaves

as the sun disappeared behind the moon.

The birds no sooner sang the sun up, 

when they prepared for sleep again.

The wild wind stilled, the stars shone.
The sun was a black Van Gogh sunflower. 

Bailey's beads rippled, a spritzer of light,
then, a diamond ring nearly blinded us.
Ghost visions danced as a Hawaiian couple
dressed in tapa cloth and feather cloaks,
exchanged vows at the Hale O Keawe heiau.

Though we broke kapu, we avoided certain death,
we were not ha ole, without breath, without honi.

Their kahuna sang the sun back into the sky.

The ali'i answered. Solar winds rose. The sea

was garlanded in leis of pikake & maile leaves.

The manini drifted off, fire danced on the water.

The collective aha! as we breathed in the mana 

and sang alo ha! to the returning sun.

11/1/2103

A Fowl Run-in with Mercury Retrograde

My Mercury Retrograde began a little early. Because of the BART strike, the roads were jammed—I was in Silicon Valley for a tech conference. Because traffic on Highway 280 to 92 was snarly as a hungry lion, I stopped off at the least exit in Foster City and bought a lovely Costco roast chicken, and waited out the worst of the traffic jam. 

Crossing the San Mateo Bridge under full moonlight was worth the wait—pure magic—platinum trail of moonlight on the indigo velvet of the bay. I thought I could see the after effects of the lunar eclipse, the moon looked a little lopsided on top. But I was imagining things. 

All was serene, it was as if I was inside a Maxfield Parrish painting. Hunter's Moon and eclipse. In the rearview mirror, the sunset was a dragon's blood glow, and Venus to the west, a beautymark. I was basking in all this glorious gloaming. Until an idiot in a SUV cut in front of me.

I stopped short, the chicken decided to fly the coop as if to get to the other side of the road. At least it didn't hit the window. The roasting pan lid popped off on the descent, and the damned chicken landed upside down inside my backpack and drooled on my brand-new skinny cuff jeans. 

They were the last pair in my size, and on sale for only $10. Costco pants rarely fit—I usually buy three pairs, keep one, return the others. In fact, that's why I was in Costco, to begin with—to return a pair of jeans. I really couldn't think of how I could possibly return these jeans smelling like a chicken roast-off. They'd better fit is all I can say.

Luckily I had a premonition beforehand and moved my gorgeous new purple and magenta silky down vest to the back seat. Apparently the premonition wasn't strong enough for me to consider putting the chicken on the floor of the car, shackled with snow chains, instead of in a shopping bag on the passenger's seat. Wish I had thought to move my cameras from the bottom of the bag as well. Nothing like chicken schmutz to lube the LCD screen. Of course, it completely missed the baby bagels.

So while driving with a greased gearshift, I grabbed the slippery sucker by a leg and shoved it back into the roasting pan and set it on the dashboard. Mopping up what mess I could reach with toilet paper, I felt like the lubricated inside of a BBQ basting pan.  

When I got home, I went to transfer that errant chicken back into bag. It leapt out of the roasting pan to take a roll all over my faux suede car seats, splashing chicken juice and fat into my eye and hair. And judging the look on Neil's face when I walked in the door—apparently I was modeling a Something About Mary coiffure. And how was your conference, dear?

Can I please have a pass? I already did my Mercury Retrograde time. Or was it full moon time? Oh, the car smells foul, the jeans do fit but they keep clucking and cats follow me wherever I go.

Transit of Venus

It's certainly been a month chock-full of fantastic celestial events: A supermoon on May 5th, an annular eclipse on May 20th, another supermoon and lunar eclipse on June 3rd, and the Transit of Venus on June 4th. 

All this celestial grandeur—and solar maximums—stunning aurorae, meandering meteorites, lunar and solar eclipses galore, the Transit of Venus—the likes of which few will have ever witnessed in their lifetime—sans apocalyptic mayhem. 

Like the Rapture, remember that? The Mayan calendar didn't predict the end of the Fifth World—either someone calculated the astronomical alignments all wrong, or something was lost in translation. The date's been moved up to December 12, 2012. We'll see about that. The last Transit of Venus was in 2004, the next one is in 2117. The Venus transits come in pairs. I don't think any of us will be around for the next Transit.

My attempt to view Monday's super lunar eclipse was eclipsed by clouds. The supermoon looked good at 2 AM, all the coyotes in Nicasio thought so too. (Note to self: the coyotes on the ridge above Halleck Creek either need tuning, or take singing lessons. Two-note yips is not a song. Their Sonoma cousins have a full vocal range that spans octaves. I wonder if the piano doctor can fix them?) 

My cousin Sinead and I had plans to go out to Nicasio Reservoir and take photos of the lunar eclipse over Elephant Mountain. But the sky was socked in by 4 AM and spitting pure drizz by 5 AM, but then it got nice and cozy-dark. The pitter-patter of unseasonal June rain on the roof punctuated the end of my eclipse chasing intentions. Not that there was anything to see. Snyxxx! I was out like a light. The birds shut up their dawn yapping too.

That tiny beauty mark is not a fly on the paper, it's Venus!

I did manage to witness yesterday's Transit of Venus. Or maybe it was the transvestite of Venus. It's really a reverse image projected on a TJ's envelope. Upside-down and backwards. Think Camera Obscura. Like the one at the Cliff House at Ocean Beach, in San Francisco. 

I once watched an upside-down sunset unfold over the Pacific from the Camera Obscura—which merely means a darkened vaulted chamber, or room. Waves rolling in upside-down where the sky should be, was unnerving.

I've seen the camera obscura phenomenon in the wild (so to speak). I was once stuck in the nasty dark bellows of an overcrowded accordian-hinged double bus in Leningrad and watched upside-down color images of Nevsky Prospekt whizz by on a baffle bend in the wall like an old-timy movie. I nearly shrieked when I realized what I was seeing. OMG! Pinhole camera. But who was I to tell? The Russians weren't interested.

They say that the Bedouins were the first to notice this phenomenon, the endless Sahara replete with camels on the back walls of their tents. What did they make of it? But Leonardo da Vinci was the one who was credited with the invention of the camera obscura. 

This photo is based on a similar principle. I used a silver-lined beach umbrella for my vaulted darkroom. Trying to track the sun upside down and backwards through binoculars (also upside down—or at least, backwards) without looking through the lens was challenging. I had to move opposite to what was intuitive to find the image.

Then I had to get the angle and distance of the paper right to bring it all into focus. But every time I got everything lined up and in focus in order to take a photo, the bloody sun kept racing across the paper—it was more like chasing the mass-transit of Venus. So things aren't exactly in focus, I had too many factors to juggle, including the wind niggling the paper. Using a digital camera to record the camera obscura image was a new twist on the process.

OK, so it didn't help that the binocuars were broken—one lens fell off at a benefit concert for Mimi Fariña ages ago, so duct tape was my bestest friend—I slapped it back onto the body but the imprecision of alignment made it hard to focus. I finally resorted to ductaping the entire binoculars to a tripod as it was so hard to keep everything all lined up. Far too many variables to keep track of. I could only focus one lens at a time.

Sor Juana Inéz de la Crúz by J. Sánchez. 17th c.. Wiki 

I felt like a modern-day Sor Juana de la Crúz (1651-95), the scientist-poet of New Spain (Mexico's first poet) during the Age of Enlightenment, tracking celestial phenomenon with very faulty equipment. I bet she would've killed to have access to binoculars and duct tape. A digital camera would've seemed like pure magic.

Sor Juana tried to disguise herself as a man so that she could attend university—denied an education (girls were forbidden to read), by age 15, she had read all 5,000 books in her uncle's library, and taught herself Latin, Greek, Nahual, math and science. She became a nun, rather than being forced to marry, and she crusaded for a woman's right to an education—for which she was punished and silenced. The Age of Enlightenment had no place for women.

Neil insisted that the small black dot on my envelope really wasn't Venus, that it was merely a bit of dirt on the lens. So I kept cleaning the lens of cruft, until I realized I wasn't looking at white light on the page, I was actually looking at the silhouette of Venus. That white light was the sun itself with sunspots erupting and sinking and occasional solar flares in living color! Wow. Double wow (it was a bi-nocular event.)

Besides, even if there was cruft on the lens, it wouldn't project with a sharp line. I've scratched camera lenses that work just fine—sometimes there's a bit of shadow, but otherwise the lens obliterates the mar. Yep, it was Venus all right.

I love the way the binocular lens is also a prism, splitting the rainbow—red on one side, cyan on the other side. This is how Sor Juana's contemporary, Sir Isaac Newton (1642-1727), threw off the shackles and plough of farming, and tracked and divided light which gave us Opticks (1704), the scientific treatise on refracted light and the visible spectrum. All this thought strayed from the frayed edges of eyeglasses throwing little diffracted rainbows in a darkened room.

Newton proved that white light was made of all the colors of the rainbow. All that talk of color set the poets off, (Pope, Keats, Blake, Shelley, Wordsworth, Breton), and poetry itself changed—for the first time poetry was filled with images of color for color's sake. Call it Newtonian poetry.

OK, so Sir Isaac, the inventor of calculus and other beefy things, became rather loony toward the end of his life, mysticism having occluded his lens. They say he has Asperger's Syndrome, but that doesn't fit the profile. Besides, the mere thought of calculus makes me rather loony.

For me the proof in the pudding was watching pale golden sunspots erupting and sinking over and over like little eyes, and Venus, a mouth, or maybe more appropriately, a celestial beautymark on the face of the sun. Transit of Venus.

Puts us all into another perspective.

Partial Eclipse, 7/21/2009

At 6:45 PM, I had an impromptu eclipse date with the sun and moon. I'd forgotten all about it until a friend posted something about the eclipse on Facebook. I dropped everything and made a mad dash for the door. But we were not in the path of totality. My Mylar eclipse glasses from the Hawaiian total eclipse on July 11, 1991, were up in Forestville, I was completely unprepared to view this partial eclipse, what would work? I could think of nothing, other than some old Mylar hard drive bags. Bingo! I dragged a box of computer parts from the morgue, left a constellation of old hard drives and memory cards scattered all over the bed, trying to find a good Mylar bag. I was running out of time. 

I ran out in the street and viewed the sun through the old Mylar hard drive bags, looking like some street loonie. Passersby stared, but I didn't care. However, the fog bank kept thrusting its tongue out. I was determined; something about seeing eclipses changes how you think. So I drove up the hill to the next clear spot in the road unhampered by high rises.

The Mylar bags worked, but were less successful, they were too thin, I couldn't see through multiple layers and the one really dense Mylar bag was too warped or full of minute holes for true viewing pleasure. But I had all kinds of eclipse viewing tricks up my sleeve leftover from childhood. I ripped the cover off a paperback book and punched a hole in it with a ballpoint pen. The pinhole camera idea wasn't working out, nor were the tree leaves cooperating. The sun was too low on the horizon to cast myriad eclipses on the ground through tree leaves. 

* * *

It's a little known fact that trees cast myriad images of the sun on the ground. All those funny little circles of light are really projections of suns. Trees make natural pinhole cameras. During an eclipse, the ground beneath the trees is covered with hundreds of eclipse shadows. You just have to know where to look. A piece of white cardboard helps put it into focus. Oak trees work best. How very druidic. Must be something about the negative spaces created by oval leaf shape of oaks as pine needles are too thin. 

I discovered the pinhole camera effect by accident Feb. 26, 1979, when I was pinning something up on the kitchen wall, I was living in Cotati with Sweet Old Bob, but that's another eclipsed story. 

I was admiring some shadows cast on the wall by a rockrose succulent I had hanging out the kitchen window, they looked very Japanese sumi-e, but there were funny little moving crescents on the wall. WTF? Ants? Small spiders? I went to get my camera to document the strange moving shadows, and then I realized the light outside was strange...it was far too dark for noon, no clouds in the clear blue sky. Hmmm. 

Then it dawned on me: it  was a total eclipse of the sun, I had no idea...my rockrose informed me. Too afraid to look directly at the sun, as we were not quite in the path of totality (Washington to Greenland), I don't remember seeing Bailey's beads, nor the diamond ring, just a slivers of light, like the half moons on my fingernails.

Wherever the rockrose needles intersected each other, they made a natural pinhole camera with myriad "lenses." I madly took photos of eclipse shadows. I made pinhole cameras, used my hands to cast eclipse shadows, I was clean mad with the joy of discovery. Even the eucalyptus tree was celebrating the eclipse....there were eclipse crescents everywhere on the ground. 

Surely this phenomenon had been discovered before, but by whom? Lost in the mists of time. I was a modern day  Sor Juana de la Crúz experimenting with light and shadow. I  was totally in the zone—jazzed by the adrenaline rush of discovery and excitement....but I was home alone, no one to share it with. 

* * *

Chasing the setting sun, I parked the car at the top of MacArthur and Adams Point, darkened the car with my car shades and got innovative, asking "what if..." I set some reading glasses in a beam of light on the dashboard and got little twin eclipses projected onto the car door, but then, too soon, they disappeared. 

I tried using double sunglasses to view the sun as it hid behind a cloud bank, and marveled over the rainbow colors I could see through the polarized lenses, and then it came to me in a flash: I thought, what if I have the wrong day, what if there's no eclipse and I'm looking straight into the sun's corona like a mad dog? Will I go blind due to some cosmic joke? 

I drove home disgruntled, thinking my experiment had failed, only to find I'd caught the ratass end, not the beginning of the eclipse. Then I found out that it began at 6:15, not 7:15. Where did I get that info from? Probably from somebody living on Mountain Time.

But I was pretty chuffed over resorting to reading glasses trick—you know how you can sometimes see rainbow hued suns on the ripples of a lake or on the beveled edge of a rearview mirror? That's what gave me the idea. That, and the crystal heart dangling from the rear view mirror. Association by degree. To use the reading glasses as a projector telescope. Focus was easy, about 2 feel from the door, once I lined the glasses up to the sun. 

I experimented with tilting the lenses, etc., and I was able to make surreal 3-D parallax suns, reminding me that the eclipse image I was seeing was really projecting upside down. Just like when you take a magnifying glass and hold it away from you and everything turns upside down. Add another magnifying glass in front of it, and you can set the world right again. Sometimes I do that trick with kids to blow their minds. That, and using old CDs to throw rainbows across a crowded room.

* * *

It's a little known fact that we actually see the world upside down. Which explains a lot. Our brain processes what we see and sets it right side up. Light bounces off the retina, and crosses paths entering the optic nerve for the brain to decode it. Pretty cool stuff.

So, I was feeling a bit like the unschooled Dutch scientist Antony van Leeuwenkoek (1632-1723), who felt that the best teacher was an open mind uncluttered by scientific dogma. Well, I had that. He valued curiosity, and said to observe, observe, observe, and then experiment—and so I did. 

Son of a brewer and a basketmaker, Van Leeuwenhoek was a highly unlikely candidate for scientist.  Friend of Vermeer, he was attracted to light, he also as a lens grinder and maker of spectacles (lately so relevant in my life), which led to his invention of the microscope: a lens and a pinhole of light. A focal plane. Much like the inner workings of the Nikon camera lens aperture I held in my hand. That, and Gallileo's telescope. 

Unfortunately the photos I took were post eclipse phenomena, I was too distracted by technical difficulties, only able to eke out 2 photos due to dead batteries, but it does illustrate my point, albeit a Khruschev's shoe photo—after the fact.

I marveled at the rainbow fringe cast around the edges of the sun images and was reminded of another lensmaker, an English contemporary of van Leeuwenhoek's who noticed rainbows cast on the edges of a ground lens he was working on in a darkened room. 

This observation led to Sir Isaac Newton's (1643-1727) famous 1704 magnum opus, Opticks: a Treatise on the Reflexions and the Refractions and Inflexions and Colours of Light, and the discovery of the color spectrum revolutionized the work of poets and artists. Suddenly paintings were full of prismatic color and poets harnessed the metaphor of rainbow.

* * *

Reflection, absorption, transmission, wavelength. I tried an experiment with two pairs of reading glasses and discovered that two lenses cancelled each other out and dimmed the image of the sun. But then I had four eclipses projected on the wall!

Sitting in my darkened car, I felt like I was inside the Camera Obscura at the Cliff House in San Francisco watching twinned projected suns on the doors of my car. It worked really well, you could even see the layers of cloud bank in front of the sun. 

* * *

Forgive me Antony van Leeuwenhoek for standing on your gravestone. I meant no disrespect. Coming in from the bright sun into the dimly lit church at Delft, I was purblind. I looked for you in vain, until my friend Vins said, "you're standing right on top of him!" With your lenses you gave us entrance to a cognate miniature worlds of animalcules—inner constellations of foramifera and spirogyra held in a single drop of lake water. And camera lenses. Our world has never been the same, wee beasties, and all.

I'm still seeing sun spots before my eyes.

PS I found the time error, from a forwarded email from Antonia Lamb, who gave lots of astrological implications as a gateway to great power, but listed the eclipse at 7:30 PM. Always double check the facts, ma'am.

Basking in the sea

Vito says you can’t bask in the sea. Shiva says But you can bask in the sun, but I am thinking of floating in a warm sea, basking, floating, with no destination in mind. Surely the creatures of the sea can bask? What about the basking shark? I have seen turtles basking on the surface of the sea, with no destination. They were more than just floating, they were basking. Once, during the total eclipse, I sea turtle startled me and I nearly drowned with excitement as he swim beneath me. He was huge, like a sled or a boogie board and all morning I followed him around that bay as the sun in the moon wrestled in the sky between light and dark. It was a free time where all bets were off even in the natural world. We were out of time as tide and wind were in stasis. I followed that turtle ballet until I was so far out to sea, all alone. But when the sun returned as Maui the sun god pulled the moon's face from the sun's…. But not before I saw the diamond ring and the penumbra. Meanwhile a couple exchanged wedding vows and let their leis loose in the sea. Puuonuaohonaunau, the place of refuge. That turtle pulled me far out to see like a siren. That day I had no fear of drowning though drowning was at hand.

2/24//2006 Writers' Group

Total eclipse of the moon, freewrite

We watched a total eclipse of the moon from Treasure Island. The moon was like a Oreo cookie. The moon dangled over the Bay bridge, and the shadows nibbled with a dark hunger, until only the Sea of Tranquility was visible. I don’t know if it really is the sea, a swirling land formation at the top of the moon was more visible than normal. Hunters moon, being eaten by its prey and Samhain on its heels.

Time to remember the dead and offer their names up for the end of the year. That tradition got thoroughly bungled and swallowed in the Christian struggle against paganism, it got mired down and mixed up a couple of months. And everybody thinking January is the new year but it’s really November 1, All Saints’ Day. Then the second holiday was needed for all the souls who didn’t quite make it to heaven because they needed more time to work off their sins—as if they were on the moon, swallowed by the light by the shadow. Obscure and unseen. 

The Chinese said the red moon was a Dragon’s blood moon. A baleful red eye in the sky, watching all the people lined up in city canyons to peer through telescopes, as the moon verged on red, as if balancing atop the Transamerica building. Some said the red moon was bad luck, but red is the color of good fortune, the color of brides and the color of wealth.  

The bride of a moon peeking out from behind the earths’s shadow is shedding a wealth of light on us, no red moon of war. Everyone out on the streets is a little bit crazy and pointing at the moon, checking up on it, as if it wasn’t to be believed, or trusted and wondering where the man in the moon went. Full moon over Geary Street and a baleful dragon’s eye, bloodshot and drunk on all the smog.

10/29/04 Writers’ Group

PASS AROUND POEM

PASS AROUND POEM

I missed both eclipses of the sun and moon
but unwittingly wore my eclipse tee shirt anyway
the night the moon hung like a light bulb over the Golden Gate.
On the way home, we looked for the moon, found none.
I blamed the pattern of trees and ridges.
The Nigerians were unused to the vagaries of this coast.
Ghosts of ships, the interior of stone sleeping beneath the waves.
I cannot find the way to the end of my heart.
Who finds the way back home for the heart
knows the secrets of life.
He knows the wind will be jealous
and the willows will not forgive him.
He prefers the sound of rain
to the beating heart.
I am watching the stars crawl across the horizon.
To find the way, to lose it, and to find it again.
There are no simple answers
other than the constancy of the moon, the stars, this song.
The soft notes escape the melody
lingers in the black keys.
Feeding the piano he came to understand
the arms of the saguaro embrace the air.
Why did he call me to explain
why he beat her that night in Baja?
The sky considers the blueness of itself,
decides upon the word azul,
becomes water to thirst
because the clouds know how to dance in the sky
like a thought in hot water.
The water needed no directions from the mountains.
It knew the patterns of the sea, the paths to the sea,
dreaming it was a violet in search of the past.

5/31/94
I extracted my lines from several poems we passed around and each wrote two lines to, then folded the paper so we couldn't see the first line—4 authors. Makes you stretch.

Hawaii Journal, 7/11/91, total eclipse of the sun

7/11/91, total eclipse of the sun. I actually saw the solar flare of the sun’s corona with the naked eye, red verging on magenta. And I could see the surface of the moon. Totality lasted four minutes but it felt both timeless, and only one second long before the diamond ring burst forth. On the beach a couple was getting married.

We sat within the sea wall arms of the place of refuge and offered our very consciousness to the sun and moon. But we didn’t see the moon’s shadow descend, due to the light cloud cover. We were lucky, as the coast was socked in with fog earlier in the morning. It actually parted just as the eclipse began. It was as if we had made a bargain with the gods of weather.

Everything was bathed under a strange glowing light similar to candlelight. No sooner had the birds chattered and sung their songs to make the sun rise, they had to prepare again for the descent of darkness. As soon as they did that, they had to sing their morning song once again to make the sun rise. It seems they were confused as to which song to sing, and when. It was a very busy morning for the birds.  

I swam in the pool with my massive night-blooming cereus blossom, the size of my face, wearing a plumeria lei, visor and shades, I must have been a sight. I swam with the sleeping fish, mostly yellow tang, and manini, as the eclipse descended. 

The city of refuge was a perfect place to view the eclipse, there was a scattering of people. As totality descended you could hear everyone gasp, let go their breath, and a spontaneous cheer erupted as the diamond ring broke free. You could actually see the edge of the moon, the silhouette of the mountains and the craters. No metaphor about it. Nothing could prepare us for the actual experience, nothing.

Photographs don’t even come close to capturing it. It’s utterly magical, a strange glow, an umbra, followed by the penumbra. The air had gotten noticeably colder, and the wind stopped blowing, and the sea grew calm. Then the wind reversed directions, and the sea rose. Never have I seen such obvious cause and effect, such sheer power, the forces of gravity at work. You could actually see the direction of the solar wind radiating out from the corona. 

I think we had clearer weather here than at the main viewing place, which was packed as a penguin rookery. The couple getting married embraced, a group hug followed. It seemed that the sun took forever to come out from behind the moon. 

We stood on the pahoehoe, or female, or ropey lava with our backs to the sea, it was mirror-calm, a glassine pond, without a ripple. I didn’t need a snorkel to see the fish. There was a timelessness to the event, we felt bound to each other and wedded to time itself—suspended animation. No problem in understanding why primitive folks freaked out when there was an eclipse. It was a sublime event, a real harmonic convergence.

We went home, had toast with Cabernet Sauvignon jelly, and mimosas made from Eddie’s own tangelos and Napa Mumm champagne. We watched the televised event again. Eddie had pre-recorded it, but the cameras did not capture even half of what we witnessed or experience. However, it was wonderful to be able to replay the clips on the TV. They showed shots from the Maunakea Observatory. 

And to think we had clearer skies than the designated eclipse viewing spots on the northern Kona Coast. It’s a somehow fitting that we watched in the very place, Honaunau Bay, where Captain Cook met his untimely end in the Sandwich Islands (hold the Mayo). If only he had made it to this side of the bay, to the city of refuge, the Aili’i would have had to given him refuge, and he would’ve lived to tell the tale, instead of becoming the main course. Instead, he wound up in someone’s stew pot. 

I gave my night-blooming cereus blossoms, dream-white with lemon yellow stamens, so like ostrich feathers quivering at the site slightest breeze—as a gift to the sea.

Later on in the afternoon, I came back to snorkel in this same pool, there are two perfectly round lava pools here, the one I’m sitting in front of now, is a reflecting pool, higher than the sea. We sat between the two pools, a spot Ed had picked out. Those 6 AM scouting parties paid off, we had the best seats in the house. 

I also snorkeled in Honaunau Bay, entering it from the lava flow in front of the heiau. It was as magnificent as I had remembered, the most outrageous coral gardens on earth. I saw myriad unicorn fish, and a lot of fish I have never seen before. I braved swimming outside of the reef and was startled to see a strange creature in the canyon in front of me. I swam with the sea turtles for nearly a half an hour. They led me out to sea.

A couple I had met earlier, played tag with this creature, he said he tried to hitch a ride but the turtle’s shell was slippery. We swam out around the point where the bay drops off 30 feet and we found an even larger spotted turtle.

Unicorn fish, orange and black and blue and white scribbled file fish, an orange trumpet fish, surgeonfish, Moorish idols, threadfin and long-nosed butterflyfish, ornate wrasses, several types of parrotfish, Achilles’ tang, sargent majors, blue jacks, anglerfish, purple surgeons, Picassofish, or humuhumu triggerfish, angelfish, damselfish... I spotted at least 50 species and some that I can’t even find in my fish books and I’m not including the gobies, the lizard fish, the tetras, the neons, and all the other aquatic fish we’re familiar with. mudskippers, a turkey fish, I forgot about the grunts, the coris, and the blennies and sculpins.

The Hawaiian kids that I swim with earlier, thrashed about in the lava pool, once a sacred fishing pond of the royalty. A boy takes off his snorkel and turns it into a conch horn. The sound reverberates up the mountains. My day is now complete. I leave my lei at the heiau altar. Yesterday’s ti leaf and coral intact. There are many more leis, offerings to the older gods as well as to the gods of science. 

It’s beginning to rain as it does each afternoon. And I am thankful to be alive on such a day as this.

My butterfly-fish drawings are 24x36”

• ON ACHIEVING TOTALITY

Hawaii Journal, 7/7/91 Big Island, Hawaii, eclipse madness

7/7/91 I’ve been in Hawaii a week and I have no real writing to speak up. On the Big Island, at my cousin Ed’s place, I feel at home at last. I fall asleep for a few-hour nap after lunch. Island salmon grilled in the yard. Divine. Maybe it was the rum punch at noon.

Later, we went down the hill to Kona and sat in a bar overlooking the bay, the open air is redolent with moisture, an incoming storm. Rain, and eclipse countdown. I try not to get too excited, it might be overcast. I admire ripe mangoes against green miniature suns, and listen to the Japanese doves cooing, their quiet call has become a signature backdrop sound of the islands.

At Ed’s place in Napoopoo, we are miles above the sea. It’s been five years since I’ve been to Ed’s place, and everything seems so familiar, as if I had never left. The geckos chirping, trying to lay their eggs on the ceiling again. We can’t explain the properties of gravity to them. Little eggshells on the coffee table. I read that Jack London wrote 1000 words a day. How did he ever do it here? I’m positively narcoleptic.

Evidence of eclipse frenzy everywhere. From Tshirts to designer cookies. The camera crews arrive on our same flight, looking as disoriented as us. Do you to a late airport shuttle pick up, we barely caught our flights at all. All Aloha air flights were booked solid and they added 60% more flights said my cousin Ed, landing and taking off every 10 minutes. It’s a zoo here. The buzz in the air is palpable. Eclipse madness.

LUNAR ECLIPSE, MULEGE, BAJA

LUNAR ECLIPSE, MULEGE, BAJA 

Sunlight surreptitiously
slips out from under rocks
to reveal the age of trees.

Dust beneath us,
dust above.
Pale green bloom on leaves
like spores.
Winged half-moons
in symmetrical repetition.

why so sweet
why so yellow
sun and moon

The beast rises from the swamp.
Tattered cannibals
devour this darkness.

Civilizations rise and fall
by the edge of this fruit.

When will we pass this way again
calling out the names of cattle
on the last handhold of sliding earth?

4/21/ 1986

Recipe for an eclipse, on the occasion of Suzanne and Ron’s wedding

Recipe for an eclipse, on the occasion of Suzanne and Ron’s wedding

1. Make a simple pinhole camera. You need two pieces of stuff white paper. Make a small hole small in the sheet that will be the upper piece, and the eclipse will project itself onto the lower piece of page. In this manner you can safely view the eclipse and you won’t go blind from trying to look directly at the sun.

2. Bring out your two bottles of Dos Equus chilled for the occasion of celebrating a partial eclipse. You will need one for you and one for your friend. Sit down under the shade of a tree and wait for the eclipse to occur. While waiting under the trees, look at the sunlight filtering through the leaves. See all the circles of light on the ground? Throw away the pinhole camera. You don’t need it. Look on the ground, there are myriad eclipse is everywhere. Hundreds of them. However, today there are no eclipse is scheduled to occur in this part of the hemisphere. Only a wedding, an eclipse of sorts.

8/10 1980

PATTERNS IN THE STEAM (AKA The Clinging Odor of the Sea)

PATTERNS IN THE STEAM
           —for J.H. Montrose and Yukio Mishima

As I prepare the evening meal

the odor of just-picked green beans

rises up from the steam

and drifts like the taste of sea in the fog

I am reminded of the clinging odor of the sea

in my hair swaying like kelp in the waves

Hair curls to the pattern of sliced watermelon

watermelon mimics a tsunami wave

Red tsunami wave red sky the black seeds

Japanese fishing boats on the water    in the sky

The steam rises and repeats the sound of waves

Shiosai Shiosai

Steam rises from a cup of coffee

milk fat swirls on its surface

my lips curl to the motion in the cup

The cup is the ocean

deep basin to harbor water

our blood runs thru rivers of veins to the ocean

Our blood is the ocean

the watermelon's capillaries pump water

to the heart to the seeds

Take a bite

the moon took a bite out of the sun

it was black like the seeds

the earth took a bite out of the moon

Red moon watermelon moon

dragon's blood hanging in the sky

the crescent moon holds water

pick axe moon spills it white again

The stars       severed ends of capillaries

facing your eye head on

light leaks out day seeps in

old moon spills blood

dies and is carried out in her own arms

she is shrouded in the sky by swirling clouds

Steam rises

like the surface of skin on a lagoon

steam rises

the clouds are oceans floating

steam rises

and carries the clinging odor of the sea

into my mouth

5/79?

rev. 7/27/1979

rev. Spring 1980
Forestville
Shiosai means the sound of the waves
(AKA The Clinging Odor of the Sea)