.
Today we island-hopped. A strange sensation,
Having airplane flights in mid-vacation.
Áll the rush and stress of journey ended,
Farewells to the places we'd befriended:
Hotel restaurant breakfast, then we sat
Beside a koi pond at the laundromat;
Our just-dry clothes we bustled into bags,
We rustled up our tickets and our tags
And for the last time rode our rental car
Across the lava fields, not very far,
To Kona airport, where we first came in --
But yet our trip was newly to begin.
A skateboard camber upward, West and North,
And hardly had our aircraft sallied forth
Than down it swung to drop us on Kauai
(By pause in Honolulu). As the sky
Went silver, pink, and settled into dark,
As if by pardon, we could disembark
Into a new adventure, all-new place,
Redoubled romance and true Traveller's grace.
The headlights of our second rental car
Show road, and little else of where we are
As through the shadowed foliage we proceed,
Guided by tourist map too small to read.
And though I swear and clench the steering wheel,
Insult the useless road signs, O I feel,
In every breath of clean Pacific air
That through the open windows stirs my hair,
In every hint of hills that upward loom
Like chunks of deeper night in darker bloom
Against the stars, a welcome and a thrill,
Excitement near too strong for sitting still,
A call, a song, my spirit in reply --
Yes, even now I know I love Kauai!
My smiling Sara understands my mood,
Discharged in verbal energetic flood
Of hot impatience at the balky roads
(And nothing is the matter with the roads);
We find our condo village easily,
With tiki torches down the lane to see
Illuminated hints of a lagoon
In a soft jungle. Registered, and soon
Directed to our cabin for the night,
At once, with Sara, I must needs take flight
And lead her down the pathway toward the shore:
In darkness, drawn on by the breathing roar
And open black ahead, we slip between
The bark and glow of indoor TV screen
In condo hamlets, and at last we reach
The open arc of empty moonless beach.
And O, the constellations crowd the sky
As barefoot down the seamless sand we fly;
And O, the surf engulfs our travel pants
As, laughing, in and out we daring dance;
My Sara, O, I write this, and we seem
Forever in our first Kauaian dream!
--Matt
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