Wendt - Photographs: Poems by Albert Wendt

(for Sina & Johnny) I sit in our backyard shade drinking ice-cold beer and the sun suspended in it Every time I put down my glass the emperor sun is reborn in the liquid an embryo cauled in fire a Van Gogh sunflower the succulent yellow of kina Along the backfence a peach tree a gum tree creepers and ponga six cicadas: two in the peach three in the gum tree one in the creepers I count them by their different songs All week my son and I have weeded the flower beds trimmed the hedges mowed the lawns raked and swept watered the young pohutukawa we planted after Christmas in the far corner of the yard Last night in my sleep the fullmoon wore a necklace of tabua above Maungawhau and our city of black glass Maungakiekies face was a moko of green fire (The volcanoes died long ago) Our home and yard are as neat as the cicadas celebrating chorus ready for Sinas wedding tomorrow I keep drinking the sun to that Sina ia manuia le lua aiga! (for Tehaaora & Isabella) Language is blind water poured over the heart to find its apt shape of sight So lets see what it finds tonight 1 In the long eyes of the trees the sky is full of the winter moon and escaping stories of rain Maungawhau surfs nights precarious crest The zebra light tiptoes along Edenvale Crescent oneway into your grandsons nursery-rhyme dreams Tehaaora the Breath-of-Life but everyone calls him Tehaa the Czar Chagalls white cow jumps clean over the moon into this poem but Reinas fat cat at Orakei is too lazy to elope with the spoon (How did the artful spoon slip slide into this rhyme?) The neighbours designer dog doesnt laugh to see such fun because he got neutered yesterday on the level playing field of life (By the way what happened to the fiddle? And what about the diddle?) 2 Every time you ring your granddaughter Isabella she insists on your duoing Twinkle twinkle little star over the phone: Twinkle twinkle philosophical star do you ever wonder who we are? Up above the world so high like a pizza in the sky did Copernicus ever figure you right? What about Stephen Hawkings marvellous insights? And why dont you twinkle on nuclear nights? Twinkle twinkle brave little star please protect Queen Isabella and the Czar from falling skies (for Reina) You are dressed in your enigma You shift like mist across words that describe water You plant signs You invent yourself in syllables of nightlight and winter turning to spring on Maungawhaus shoulders Every thing is Every thing is earth the atua feed on Every thing is earth moulded in Ruaumokos belly and thrown up to know Tanes kiss of living air Your ancestors left their shadows for you to grow into They fished islands and visions out of tides that washed back into the Void They dealt in imagery of bone and feather They knew the alphabet of omens and could cipher the silences that once knew the speech of pain They planted white pebbles in the mouths of their dead and sailed them into the eyes of the future You are dressed in your enigma that finds language in the gift that is water that is earth that is every thing 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 tavaesina 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 all 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 fathers compound whenever the Vaipe flooded your future smelled of amniotic promise The red firetruck she bought 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 Toelau across the lava fields of Savaii How old is the future? How far is it away from Isabellas 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 Tehaas firetruck is his broken kingdom of: Big Bird and Sesame St. Legolimbed creatures jousting for midnights honours the plastic didgeridoo he twirls round and round his head to give voice to a world without mana Your grandson doesnt yet know winter or the swing into spring and the other seasons of the blood which dictate what we dont mean our lives to be and as the song says: The fatman and his bald charmtook her to the Hanson St Motelon 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 Frames 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 isnt 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 couldve been and the fatman will look fat and bald in the paddock of burnt grass which cant 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 didnt 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) Youd 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 hed topple over the edge but he always returned with a feast of ula pusi and fee 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 hed one day sail the rainbows 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 wont take a shape you can tame It counts the ticking of your veins Whatuwhiwhi