Middle-Aged Midwesterner at Waikiki Again

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The surfers beautiful as men
  can be
ride the warm
 blue green
  swells
and the white sand is alive with girls.
Outriggers (double boats) ride the waves back in 
as the native warriors did. 
I tried to swim and tried to look, 
but ended up just going back: 
a huge, perfect black
man at the beach
somehow drove me away a block 
to St. Augustine’s Church. 
The bodies were giv-
 ing me a fit
and I have come to seek the momentary calm
we find sometimes in the musk of Christ
(when he was awake
  and sweat-
ing blood
 as others slept,
or like a furious bouncer
hustling out the money changers). 
The bodies of Mary and Christ
both still live, we’re told. They’re alive 
and thus
must have dealt with the stress 
of that long time
 of turning on 
to being young.
I speak of teens.
 Fifteen and ten

years ago when I first confessed,
it was in this same church built then 
as a gigantic shed
where the strange Hawaiian birds 
(I forgot their names—no matter) 
flew in and out of the high wood-
en rafters
like the whimsical winds of grace, 
and grace gives back to sight 
what beauty is—
 as
that loveliness at the beach.
Now the church
  has been rebuilt 
in pointed stone across the street 
from a much
 higher new hotel
where at lunch
  I almost spilled
and found I could not eat
the purple orchid in my drink.

© John Logan