by Albert Wendt
Push up through the stream
of rainbow people
Now we’re on the Wave
at its perfect cresting but
it won’t break and hurl us
back into the trough
of drowning
Climb the steepness to
the highest watchtower Stand
(Feel the presence of the guardians?)
Suck in the ravenous scent of
invading warriors Listen
to their unintelligible shouting
See the Khan in the middle?
His eyes are beacons of terror
Nightflight A fixed defence
constructed to the dimensions
of Emperor Qin’s self-love was no strategy
against the untamed atua who poured
arrows through the gaps and followed
to fit the Emperor’s heart
which infected them
with his civilised madness
Nightflight
In Foucault’s language the Wall is
all other walls (including
those we erect around
the heart) and their discourses
Eco would invest the Wall
with metaphysical puzzles
Nightflight From the
watchtower
gaze down at the plains that suck back
the Pass and hills
into the white soul of the north
and the labyrinths of atua
whose 9999 names are seeded
across oceans of applauding grass
Nightflight
The Wall is
greater than my grandmother’s stories
and all Its possibilities
It is a Wall
that sings to the souls
of the Dead who built it
with their suffering
It protects nothing the Wall
your eyes will carry
until the atua desert them
(22) Morning
Nightflight I’ll await
the morning and in this flying tunnel’s
roar fish for the long sad silence
Tagaloaalagi breathed into
the sinews of our planet
Nightflight Night
QF93 holds the edge of the abyss
but I know we’ll arrive safely
because how else could this pen
this hand have recorded
this flight across the page
of a continent?
This hand this pen
this flight
17
A Sequence
A hesitant midnight knocking on my front door
Warily I opened it and for an unbelieving heartskip
I refused to recognise Vela who wrapped in the biting
winter cold looked barely alive after being away
for almost ten years and I’d given up on him returning
I’m so sorry I was too afraid to return! he cried
He collapsed into my arms with his usual flyingfox
smell and weighing almost nothing as I scooped him up
and settled him into his favourite armchair by the fire
Rushed into the bedroom got blankets and cocooned him
in their warmth It’s so terrible out there he murmured
I’m so glad to be home son and he was soon asleep
Throughout the night I kept the fire alive and watched
the healing flames ease blood back into his face
Whenever he’d needed consolation he’d turned to me
but for the most killing decade of my life he’d not been
there and I wasn’t going to forgive him for that
no never he’d not honored his alofa for me
The addictive smell of dhal my favourite food
dropped like a fishing line through my nostrils
hooked me awake and pulled me into the morning kitchen
and Vela dressed in an assortment of Michael’s clothes
that were far too big for him And how are my grandchildren?
he asked scooping the steaming dhal into my bowl
I thought you knew everything! I started my attack
knowing the dhal was his softener He filled his bowl sat down
bowed his bald head and prayed: Tagaloaalagi e, it is good
to be home again with my beloved family …
No you’re not going to con me again! I shouted
Your beloved family have left And you weren’t here to help me!
Through the blur of tears I saw him lean forward and grip
my trembling hands I’m sorry the coward that I am
won and I couldn’t return he whispered
That’s your excuse for everything You don’t love me
I’m only the gullible chronicler you need to record your self-love
What bloody use are your useless stories anyway!
Deliberately he dipped his spoon into his soup paused
and gazing into my anger raised it to his mouth and sipped
It’s good he said Eat it before it gets cold
My back-swinging hand slapped the spoon from his grip
Damn you! I cried and scrambled out and into my study
and the inescapable accusing wreckage of my marriage
For three days without saying anything he kept
bringing food and leaving it outside my door
I listened to him shuffling through the rooms of the house
that was our family and wondered what he was doing
with the presences and memories he found there
Sometimes I thought I heard him weeping
On the third night I sneaked out and finding him snoring
in Michael’s room under the poster of Jordan outleaping
gravity crept from room to room marvelling at how
he’d cleaned rearranged and restoried each one
My room with Jenny now had a single bed
and only my photos momentoes and books
The drawers and cupboards contained only my clothes
He’d changed even the room scent to my favourite —
lemon and coconut with a tinge of frangipani
The children’s rooms he’d restored to what they’d been
ten years before when he’d last seen them
and on the centre wall of each one he’d hung a photo of me
Throughout the house he’d removed all evidence of Jenny
I loved him for all that but how do you erase over twenty years
of a life together? How do you remove it from your eyes
nose heart and memory? I returned to my study and until
dawn removed all visible evidence of Jenny from it
When Vela woke I invited him to his favourite breakfast
and while we feasted on crisply fried bacon eggs
tomatoes white toast lemon marmalade and coffee
laughed about how he’d tried to exorcise history and the aitu
from our house and when I was ready I confessed
Like you’ve always done with your suffering I wrote myself
into the pain and came to terms with it
Yes he murmured our only gift is to fashion stories out of our
misery and in the storying bring some meaning to it
I still miss her I whispered into the tears in his eyes
And no storying of what happened will heal that he consoled
Do you want to hear the story anyway? I asked
If you want me to he whispered if you want me to
(1) Maungawhau
On the slopes of Maungawhau
the southerly again petals your house
with hieroglyphs of her departure
What is the colour of the future?
Is it the red of the speared bonito?
The steely blue of kereru feathers?
Mele your shaman in her dreams
always chose the overgrown track
through the bush
The tamarillo branches tapping the windows
are wings of tava’esina —
messengers of death across a night
teeming with silence
In the afternoons when you walk round Maungawhau
you see her in the shadows that stalk the slopes
for the sad memories of the Ngati Whatua
The house is full of her echoes
She hangs in the cupboards
and from all the racks
What is the cartography of pain?
This room is a jigsaw of memory and light:
the Hotere Wall of Moruroa sunrises and sunsets
of Black Rainbows and the Fourteen Stations
of Death wearing the feathers of a peacock
of 60,000 years of Aboriginal birth at Mungo
POST-BLACK Ralph has redrawn the calligraphy
of black and Pouliuli lives again
in all its magic plumage
The air is seeded with her fingerprints and scent
In your father’s compound
whenever the Vaipe flooded
your future smelled of amniotic promise
The red firetruck she bought for Tehaa
for his first birthday
lies on its side
No alarms no fires
It watches you for omens of that final fire
and the urned ashes your children will one day scatter
with the forgiving To’elau
across the lava fields of Savai’i
How old is the future?
How far is it away from Isabella’s
second birthday yesterday?
(On her fourth blowing we had to help her
snuff out the two candles
The chocolate birthday cake was too sweet)
Scattered round Tehaa’s firetruck
is his broken kingdom of:
Big Bird and Sesame Street
Leggolimbed creatures jousting for midnight’s honours
the plastic didgeridoo he twirls round and round his head
to give voice to a world without mana
Your grandson doesn’t yet know winter
or the swing into spring
and the other seasons of the blood
which dictate what we don’t mean our lives to be
and as the song says:
The fatman and his bald charm
took her to the Hanson St Motel
on the river of no return
Not long after she left
you dreamt she was standing alone
in a paddock of burnt grass that stretched forever
She was gazing down into the wordless abyss
of her shadow as it stretched out to you
Tonight you again net Frame’s small
but dangerous words: and if but however …
the conjunctions which determine choice
and the excuses for what our lives are
She decided there was no return
despite your ifs buts and pleading
She told your daughters
she and the fatman were compatible:
he isn’t sexist
loves cooking and classical music
shares domestic chores
brings her cups of tea in bed
and she hoped your suffering
would make you a better person
In the Vaipe your arthritic father wakes
each dawn to the Mulivai Cathedral bell
and can barely wade through the rooms of his life
towards God and work
He is shrinking
He shuffles forward defiantly
but one day soon over the phone
the small words will choose you return
to the Vaipe and help bury
a man who weighs what he was at birth
One morning she too will wake
to the dawn of the small words
and the choices that could have been
and the fatman will look fat and bald
in the paddock of burnt grass
which can’t contain her shadow
In the apt connectedness of things
the objects around you exude
the shimmering illumination you saw
in the eyes of the red carp
in the lake of the Golden Pavilion —
an uncanny intelligence delighting
in its wisdom
The carp wore the face of a gnome
Since she left
your dreaming has taught you the nature
of drowning repeatedly
You didn’t ask for that or deserve
the bristling aitu which brim up out
of the floor and engulfing you
in their arms drag you down
into the airless pool of your bed
When you were a boy
Mele warned you of that recurring death
storytellers must live out to ensure
their tales’ truths
(Baxter Tuwhare and others
have spoken of it too)
You’d not known such pain before
All you wanted was to sleep
and never wake again
Sometimes when your parents quarrelled
your mother packed you off
to Vaiala and Patu Togi
your favourite grandfather
He said little as you helped him
prepare his artful fishtraps
and watched him paddling out to the reef
believing he’d topple over the edge
but he always returned
with a feast of ula pusi and fe’e
His was a serene gladness
moulded by his love of fishing and the sea
(Asi Tunupopo his father
had been a notorious war leader)
Once Patu told you he’d one day
sail the rainbow’s path
into a horizon as white as bone
picked clean by the waves
And he did
A stillness crouches
where the light ends
and the night begins
It won’t take a shape
you can tame
It counts the ticking
of your veins …
(2) Whatuwhiwhi
The air is a conspiracy of whispers
that defines you as castaway
You crusoe the beach
wearing the full text of your grief
as the summer dawn nets stories
in the black waters of Whatuwhiwhi Bay
Every bay is a generous heart opening
out to the world
Every beach a page to be written on
by the exploring sea
A genealogy of bays and beaches:
Vaiala where you introduced your children
to the sea’s unforgiving gifts and taught them
how to ride the waves’s crest above the drowning …
Shells snap and crunch and crunch again
like wellsucked bones under your feet
You wanted to escape her and the fatman
so Reina Daughter of the Thunder drove you
here from the city where yesterday
you watched Maui in unwashed jeans
tight round arse and hips
roll up Queen St Reeboked feet
aspiring to Jordan’s anti-
gravitational leap
Lefaga Bay is the circling arm protecting
your grandfather Tuaopepe Tauilo
and the ancient line of ancestors
who are buried at Olofa: mounds of
eyeblack stones on white sand
under tangled pua and a sky
that gazes back at you
You and your sisters and brothers tidied
their graves in the holidays
played kilikiti on the beach
and swam in the coral-forested water
that
flowed into your future
while they applauded …
A light breeze walks upright out
of the astonishment of water
and weaves through the mollyhawks
semiquavered on the wet pages of sand
Reina holds your arm
Your shadows merge and pull you
towards Te Ra snared in Maui’s trap
The waka sailed out of the horizon’s heart
and planted their sacred cargo
of atua and hope in this bay
From the harakeke wove the bay’s name
and a rich kete of children
Now no Māori footprints to steer you
to the defiant marae at the sunset tip
of the bay through almost two centuries
of Pākehā erasure that began
when Captain Cook renamed
the bay Doubtless
Your Taranaki schoolmates took you
to Ngamotu for your first New Zealand swim
As you inched into the beerbright water
the cold killed your toes feet legs
When it started on your balls
you fled and never swam there again
Spent later visits with your friends
exploring the dunes for passionate
lovers to spy on …
You inherit only your footprints
that follow each other between
Te Ra breaking free from Maui’s trap
and your rescue from her and the fatman
who walk on the water hang from the sky
and lie across the horizon taunting you
You want to kill them with obsidian knives
that cut raggedly and slow
and feed their blood to the morning tide
They’ll pay for it one day —
the atua will see to that your Tohunga prophesies
(Crusoe was rescued finally
and took Friday to fight his colonial wars
Later Friday’s children turned
their guns on Crusoe’s Empire)
As the sun performed another loud Hollywood
setting behind Diamond Head
you strolled Waikiki Beach behind
