Oahu's Suicide Swimmer Like A Jasmine Bird Into The Sea Poem by Bernard Henrie

A woman rises like a sleeper's moon
from the calm venue of late dusk.
We welcome the day's last swimmer.

Coconut brown shoulders.
She walks by, errorless proclivity
for green sea. The rogue sea
lifted in ceaseless blows
the length of the darkened beach.

Pausing at the sand's rough rim,
swaying, as though lying on the wind,
blowing like a fisherman's line.

The meticulous swim, the strong arms
come to reposses the ocean machine,
the face buried in the emerald waves.
Then nothing.

A spiral light turned off as a porch light
is extinguished, or a whisper
in a child's room. Silent Andromeda
rotates away for the night.


All that many years ago,
so many vacations ago,

now on a balcony
with my daughter mesmerized
at a tide pool,
Hawaiian brochures on my lap
and my wife in glimmering sun,
I walk out from the seawall
to the ocean's high pitched slap,
the empty cascade of beach clouds
turned back like a clouded iris.

The sudden longing that arises
for figures that limp or sag, glower
in our thoughts, block our path,
rush through the night
arrive breathless and unable to speak,
sit with us all night, bereaved, thinking,
weeping for reasons we cannot explain.

A bell that lies on the water's surface,
ceremonial tint for those lost from us.

What color is jasmine?
I can't remember.