A Polynesia Moment While Coming Out of the Hilltop Mall (Clarksburg, WV)

Abstract

A Polynesia Moment While Coming Out of the Hilltop Mall (Clarksburg, WV) Don Ho oiled A-lo-ha on the Musak and though I lusted for Hawaiian shorts I bought instead a long sleeve oxford shirt. In the mall, palms grow. Oiled maidens vie for Miss West Virginia Luau. Beauty, their cells call, is the product of eons, will be revealed in due time, but the crowd eats them up like poi, like roast suckling pig. Once these hills, lost islands in the westward flow of promise, were not scalped for malls. The dead were planted here, lifted to greet the sun. Looking up, I remember that old sea that surged one hundred feet above my head. And what were you saying, oh sweet, short blonde, contestant number three, whose nipples winked from your flowering halter? That your genes, exquisite as they are, speak only the tongue of trilobites buried deep in the clay of these worn hills? That your genes are as old as those that sang in the shoulders of brown-backed paddlers, reaching and pulling, plunging in tempo that lost war canoe running the creamy surf off paradise? Now I pause, anchored by my plastic sack, complete with hula girl. Hills sweep round me, an earthen reef. Green surges on glass, sighs against brick, pulses on car tires. I pause, listen for that voice of ancient seas. The emerald hills say only leaf, leaf, leaf. —Mark DeFoe 17 ...