Poems by Eric Shaffer

River Eye

by Eric Shaffer

From Canary Summer 2021

Eric lives on the windward side of the mokupuni (island) of O‘ahu in the Ko‘olaupoko moku (district) of the Kailua ahupua‘a (watershed) near the Kawainui Marsh and within Ko‘olau Crater, the remains of a caldera whose seaward wall collapsed nearly two million years ago, providing easy access to more than two thousand miles of ocean.

When I stood on the deck above the rivers I loved, felt the wheel turn
in my hands, and stared down at the shifting, murky, muddy curtain
where the Sacramento and the American became one, I was happy

to be where I was. I spent days alone on the deck of the Damnation
or drove the California Kid against the current into sunset, watching
red-shouldered hawks in cottonwoods overhead. If I did anything

right in those days, it was finding the right things to love and loving
them till they were gone. The world is no better or worse for me
passing through, or for passing through me, bent like the rays sunk

in deep water and glimmers of golden motes in the clouds of silt, soil,
and mud stirred by the flow moving the earth. Everything escapes me
now, so I drop a line into the river, catch what I can, drag snapping,

quicksilver muscle to the deck, and stare for a moment into the cold
and tilting, silver-rimmed darkness of an alien eye from the river bottom
before I release at last what I never meant to catch and cannot keep.

© Eric Shaffer

The Mole: A Tribute

by Eric Shaffer

From Canary Spring 2019

after Ursula K. Le Guin

The mole is in love with the earth. No, she loves dirt,
the honest clods and pebbles crumbling in the soft,
pink spades of her lightless hands. She is blind to all

that blazes above the grasses waving in a far wind
she’s known less than she would love. Below sod and soil,
her world is warm beneath winter, cool under summer.

The mole bores through sediment and ore, leaves tunnels
studded with gems that may never see light. She presses
everlasting night aside with her nose, the scents of dirt

and darkness always before her. She nuzzles roots
dangling from the roof, and she skirts stone and spring,
shaping an underworld where she is sovereign. The mole

is totem to none but hermits, astronauts, and the daughters
of anthropologists. She is cousin to the bear, thrice removed,
yet not: the bear sleeps in the earth through cold and snow;

the mole abides within, a stout heart beating a dusky path
few know, few go, and fewer follow. Buried, alive,
she burrows beneath a world others see as solid, looking

only up. The mole mines the sphere below the horizon,
traveling through the dark, her back bent to the work.
The earth bows, and the sky bends above her passage.

© Eric Shaffer

The Open Secret of the Sea

by Eric Shaffer

From Canary Spring 2019

He uli na ka he‘e puloa.

The octopus is the open secret of the sea. Day is the darkness
in which he hides, and when I read the reef, floating above
with sun at my back, he watches with an eye I cannot see.

The octopus stands atop the coral outcrop, silent, still,
an innocuous knot invisible in the web of hues shifting
below the surface. With rainbows hidden in his skin, the octopus

takes the tint of the current, blends with coral and sand spangled
in sunlight among the black and gold, scarlet and turquoise
of flickering fish. Shaped by the sea, his is the soft body

and tough skin of the impermanent that tides and current prove
on the shore. Eight-armed and articulate, he is a compass flower
sauntering the surface below the surface,

yet with measureless ocean to explore and one sole year,
the octopus seeks a cave with a door the size of a shark's eye
and slides his rubbery bulk through crevices smaller than he,

rounding corners no others turn. As clever as a child of Maui,
the octopus reveals the wisdom of concealment. He fades
into the ultramarine, and only a lure contrived of cowry shell

and hidden hook draws him from his den, yet curious and clever,
he avoids the fate of becoming board or bait, understanding the hunter
is always, as well, the hunted. Even caught, landed, and stowed,

the octopus escapes, as one limber limb slips
from within his prison to twist a latch or lift a lid for a sudden slide
through the scuppers to the sea. Solitary seeker

beneath the waves, the octopus assumes the character of light,
seen yet not seen, and teaches the craft and cunning of night,
for in long, utterly lightless nights under the ocean, he distills

that darkness into the ink which is his fame and his flight.
Sought and spied hiding in the light, the octopus
disappears in the drifting cloud of his own shadow.

He uli na ka he‘e puloa means “ink from the long-headed octopus.” In ‘Olelo No‘eau, her collection of traditional Hawaiian proverbs, Mary Kawena Pukui notes that these words are spoken “of a person clever at getting away with mischief. The ink of the octopus is its camouflage.”