Untitled and Rough -- poem about hiking to Manoa Falls

Okay, I think this might have some good stuff in it, but I feel like it is all over the place. I think it probably needs to be cut way down, but I'm having a hard time cutting anything (actually, I keep adding!!). It has so many different themes, and images and ideas. Is it too much? Anyway, here it is:


Your tiny trail-muddied shoe rubs
against my leg
smearing dirt across my shorts
as I carry you down from Manoa Falls.

On the way up, you hiked uncomplaining
jumping and climbing and scrambling
your own way over the bolder
whose mossy back divided the easy trail.
You beckoned me on
when I paused,
eager to reach the falls.
Mothering me by
telling me to watch out for the puddles.

Now you are wet against my side;
where you sit on my hip
the fall-water soaks me to the skin.
Tired and skinned-kneed, you insist
on being carried, and though tired too,
I oblige.

Ahead, I see the boys have waited
in the bamboo forest
where the sticks click, talking to us
in the breeze,
as we pause with them for pictures.
When the wind gusts I look up
and I'm dizzied by the violent
swaying of these tall, thin giants.
I feel like a child, swallowed up in this ocean.
A stick of bamboo blown down
thuds hard on the ground
and I move us quickly along,
fearful of where the next piece will strike.
My boys and brothers disappear
ahead of us again.

Behind us lags
my mother with her parents.
Four generations of haoles
trailing through the giant ferns.

And again on my hip
you fill the relative silence
with a little nonsense tune.
Competing now and then
with the chattering of birds,
and always accompanied
by the low gurgle of the stream,
you hum in my ear.

A breeze brings a flower scent
filled with a hundred blurred memories
of my childhood in Hawaii.
And in this moment of filtered sunlight
touching earth and trees and stream,
with your sweet body
against mine
all is suddenly sublime.