A Meditation at Opae’ula

I no longer remember what I had come expecting to see,
but when I arrived at the trickling waterfall, where the fern
feathered and a single lehua ohia relaxed in plush bloom,

there was a pool that filmed the sky with its one cloud moving,
as on the mind’s blank screen, suggesting neither shape nor wisp
of dream, but seen cleanly—white bloom of vapor,
formless anatomy—

when the air unzipped and a denizen of the sun hovered above
the pool, its clear wings dusted with specks of light. Its eyes
were hived prisms, its body, a wand that cast a mesmeric spell

that enlivened fern and flower and the green-black sheen,
and I saw how it was all vibration, each drop in the pool
a bell’s note, and that the secret was to hum along with the
frequency.