Merwin on Hawaii's Beginnings

A number of people commented on the Merwin poem with which I began this blog, and I thought, since I'm reading it more consistently now that I'm here (it's over 300 pages), the time had come to include another passage, if I could find a good reason to. I'm also perusing here and there a few books on the natural world of Hawaii, and happened to read, on the same day, two very different accounts of Hawaii's beginnings. Here's Merwin:

The mountain rises by itself out of the turning night
out of the floor of the sea and is the whole of an island
alone in the one horizon alone in the entire day
as a word is alone in the moment it is spoken
meaning what it means only then and meaning it only
once with the same syllables that have arisen
and have formed and been uttered before again and again
somewhere in the past to mean something of the same nature
but different something continuing and transmitted
but with refractions something recognized in its changes
something remembered from what is no longer there
and behind it something forgotten as the beginning
is forgotten and as the dream vanishes the present
mountain is moving at its own pace at the end
of its radius it is sailing in its own time
with the earth turning away under it as the day
turns under a word and it came late as a word comes late
with a whole language behind it by the time it is spoken
its fire came late among the fires in the dark of space
its burning plume rose late through the plated shell of the globe
it formed late at the end of the old plume unfurling into
the black depth of the sea and it burst up at last into
the air higher and higher collapsing sliding away
and pressing anew from beneath splitting open lifting
and finally moving away from the fire-plume and cooling
almost twice as high in its youth as the scored peak
in the story and setting out in that giant time
following its elders the earlier usages
already invisible beyond the late day

Merwin, The Folding Cliffs