Within Reach

Not breeze but strong wind. The scent of coffee in this house not my home but my brother's with expanse of high ceiling and lawn of palms around the perimeter. More sun than one can stare into in this change of time, waking in my bed in a corner of the grandmother Ohana with a rectangle of perfect sky cut just above and to my left. 

I am visiting an island where my brother owns a backhoe parked under a tarp. I walk past it to pick lemons. Past nameless leafy and magenta. The coconuts on the trees are deceptively green. I presume the brown rough and sweet milk are tucked inside these coy treasure chests. Maui matryoshka. 

Flying in at night, I couldn't see anything much but dark and the highway that I guessed was running around the edge of the island, or alongside sugar cane fields, its lit lines under splintered moon. All the large and small warm houses below with their daughters of inevitable aching hearts and boys with tiny drum sets and fistfuls of legos. 

I talk on the phone in the morning to my daughter describing how the driveway is one long black tongue surrounded by green grass. How I dreamt I was walking the streets photographing plaster gnomes in tall grass. Little did I know yet there is a phallic mountain needle in a rainforest as shrine to the god of the underworld, that we will drive through a blinding rainstorm in search of warm drinks though the rain isn't cold outside, and a valley where ancient remains are buried in secret places. Or that in a town named Paia we will dine on fruit crepes on a street where the storefronts are painted sea blue and draped with modern technology cable like dark Christmas garland. 

There are two white dogs in a cage outside my secluded bedroom. I don't know their names either. What could be a bobolink calls out, yet it could be any species other than what I imagine when I close and then re-open my eyes.