the Pacific Plate trudges ten centimeters per year, pulling

     the Hawaiian archipelago with it

          wind grinding, rain chiseling

          mountains in the waves

          losing themselves in bits

          islands in a line, youngest to oldest,

          marching northwestward

 

once mighty shield volcanoes

     tall and softly sloping

are now sheered into jagged spires

     like weathered statuary in a garden

          Venus and Apollo missing their limbs, their faces washed away

 

standing in the sea, apart

     catching glimpses of each other on clear days as

     silhouettes on the horizon against

          the yellow sunrise

          the pink-orange sunset

 

the brittle-boned elders in the lead

          disintegrating into atolls and reefs

          and beyond them, invisible now, below the surface

          sunken shards of pottery

          the ancient ones

          surrendering to their final diminishment

 

a person is no clod or promontory, not a part of the main

     we are islands—

     in time and space and feeling—

     but still, I own with you the meaning of the tolling of

     every bell; we are pulled on the same path, conveyed

     and in this we are one

 

onward

     together in this procession

     heading northwestward

     into the rain and the wind and

          the setting of the Sun.