Hawaii

At a hostel on stilts, I pass off
stories of my hometown breaks:
Llangennith with an offshore wind,
dolphins knitting my mini-mal
as I huff toward Worm’s Head.

A photo on the dormitory wall,
taken the summer before, shows
our beach hut framed by water,
a foam horizon tops the timber roof.
El Nino’s monopoly on imagination
had them name it: Big Wednesday.
Cars picked up and parked again.
No more beach furniture. Static.
A midweek mountain range.
Birds snatched from the sky.

The other photo is Kelly Slater
towed in with a jet ski, his feet
strapped to the gun, unzipping
all forty-five foot, carving his name
in one long prick-tease.

It’s all male display, of course,
I think, having arrived the season
after the season no-one will forget:
Waimea, Pipeline, Waikiki, Backdoor,
all flat, empty stadiums. Some debris
still underwater: the snapped nib
of a bodyboard. I snorkel, humming
Indiana Jones, checking the reefs for flesh.

Back at the hostel, I tell more lies about
the darkness that comes in a barrel,
the pressure of a train in a tunnel,
it’s spit and pitch: they lean in,
like seaweed, as I talk a ton of water
then their eyes begin to drift.