in parentheses

Anne Whitehouse’s most recent poetry collection is OUTSIDE FROM THE INSIDE (Dos Madres Press, 2020), and her most recent chapbook is ESCAPING LEE MILLER (Ethel Zine and Micro Press, 2021). She is also the author of a novel, FALL LOVE.

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BURNT STATUES

I. The Moai

It’s a miracle they are here at all,
on a solitary island surrounded by ocean,
thousands of miles from anywhere,
with a volcanic crater at its center.

Monumental sculptures of long faces
carved from volcanic tuff,
standing eight to forty feet high,
the moai reach deep into the ground,
hiding and revealing secrets
of the people who made them.

Rapa Nui—a seafaring people
who came from Polynesia
a thousand years ago.
How did they find this speck
of an island in the vast sea?
Were they blown off course?
Was their journey intentional?
Their coming is a mystery.

By the nineteenth century,
the population was decimated,
killed by European diseases
or forced into slavery.

Today, the descendants live
in a vortex of climate change—
storms and surges, coastal erosion.
Trash from four continents
washes up on their shores.

On a ranch last year,
a fire broke out. Some know
who set it, but they aren’t telling.
Wind spread the flames
to the sacred crater.
A hundred moai were scorched.

The moai are not eternal.
They can be rebuilt. A century ago,
their significance was forgotten.
Reclaiming their collective memory,
an oppressed people became free.
They recognized the moai
as representations of their ancestors
who walked the same land
they walk now, breathed the air,
and watched the ocean.

II. Rapanui pianist, Mahani Teave

As a child, I never felt isolated.
I thought my island
was the whole planet.
My introduction to piano
came from a visiting teacher.
People would arrive for a year
and teach music, theater, dance.
Then they’d leave.
To advance my artistic dream,
I, too, left the island.

In Santiago, Cleveland, and Berlin,
I learned from great artists.
I might have had a concert career,
but I didn’t wish to perform
every other day in a different place.
Guided by my teachers,
my goal was always to find
the maximum beauty in music.

Ten years ago, I returned to Rapa Nui
to create a music school on the island.
I felt no one else would be able
to create this school.
I was the one who had studied
with the world’s best musicians.
This was something I had to do.

Everyone here loves being here,
and those who leave long to return.
Nothing is truer to being human
than art and music.
Here on the island,
there is artistic blood in everyone.

IN TANDEM

When we moved into our apartment,
we painted over the ugly wallpaper
in the master bathroom, first with primer,
then with white, oil-based paint
in an eggshell finish.

Using artists’ oil pigments
we mixed a Caribbean aquamarine
and thinned it with oil glaze.
With a ribbed cotton cloth,
we ragged the luminous glaze
in gentle swirls over the white walls,
suggesting the depths of the ocean.

My husband created a stencil in mylar
of Hokusai’s famous tidal wave
rearing its head like a stallion,
tossing white flecks of spray
like the locks of a horse’s mane.

Master of Exakto knives
and mathematic intervals,
my husband sized the stencil
so its repeating pattern
fit the wall’s dimensions,
and he cut it flawlessly.

He invented, and I implemented,
balancing on the bathroom counter
to apply the stencil to the walls.
The waves, in dazzling white
and black and dark cobalt,
contrasted with the aquamarine.

To add to the illusion,
we made miniature models
of Caribbean fish in paper maché—
black drum and red snapper,
triggerfish and porgy,
grunt and angelfish,
seahorse with a curved tail—
which we painted realistically
and strung using dental floss
from hooks in the ceiling,
suspended below Hokusai’s waves
in the bathroom’s watery element.

We didn’t know then
about Hokusai and his daughter,
how he recognized her talents
in childhood and fostered them.
She worked alongside him in the studio.
It is said that some of the works
attributed to him were made by her.

In a time and place where women
were confined to the domestic sphere,
did Katsushita Oi’s obscurity
trouble her? Her modesty and her sex
were impediments to her renown,
so perhaps she was content to add to his.

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