Morning Meets the Lodge

Maui is across the finger of sea.  Four birds



Abandon their trees and bob.



I woke them up.  As I go to get my book



I see a spiderweb marking each



Room, and more besides.



Mine wags and like a soap bubble is pastel.



An empty hexagon marks where a fly was,



At the top.  The spider is exactly in the middle.



 



Three other spiders are in sight.  One wants



To make his web where one’s web already is.



Why don’t I see this more, one spider



In another’s web?  Why is it this way, that the webless



Seek the most precarious?



Twenty-seven lines hold the marked web up.



                        *** 



This island rose up to receive the bird but it



Received the palm.  It was naked and



Shallow and fish-shaped to mark its origin,



Out of the sea.



We swam in its mouth.  The coconut,



Readied by a reflex in seawater, settles,



Converting its own flesh into a tree.



 



A bobbing coconut, readied by its passion, refuses



To open.  No.  It lands and it opens



Canopies.  It bursts and is still and frondlike is



No spider.  The trunk achieves the sky.  Each frond



Blackly breaks the light.