My dream life started in L.A.’s concrete world,a cityscape of cheap apartments and palm trees,crowned asphalt streets, blacktop playgrounds aswirlwith immigrant, Black, and Asian kids, a wheezeof asthma in my chest, missing Hawai‘iand my playmate cousins, the sighing seashorethat had, in foaming curls of white stories,given a pastoral and all its loreto paint my daydreams, vanish distress,and bring back the lost words of pitching waves,itinerant sellers of kūlolo and fish,evenings of porch music and windward rains.I had these the way Muir had his Sierras,a splendor alive in all my waking,a green mural of folded cliffs, plumeriablooms on patchy lawns, litter for the taking.
Throughout childhood, I had my secret place,a splendor of mind amid urban squalor,palimpsests of imaginings to trace,while a car wreck screeched from the corner.I conjured yellow hau…