Is Vela of my dreaming? Or am I the object of his?
Now he’s got me perceiving through his riddles and metaphysics
Truth is we can’t survive without each other in a planet teethed
with silver dollars and ruled by aitu of various fang shapes
and skin colour or as Vela has sung:
All streets lead to the Fale of Terror
Above its front door is this question
WHAT’S ALOFA GOT TO DO WITH MONEY?
Merchants with bible-black eyes and smiles
as bright as new coins hook themselves
to the ice-blue walls inside
Assess in orderly litanies the various cuts
decide on weights and prices
the profit and sources of supply
and at their meetings echo this refrain
What’s alofa got to do with money?
What’s alofa got to do with a person’s price?
Literally one morning I woke to him sleeping beside me
in a public ward Moto’otua Hospital
Admittedly he was in the next bed and tubed to hanging bottles
feeding his anaesthetized slumber
Like me his lifelong duodenal ulcer had perforated
corroding poisons into his centre the surgeons slit
open and mopped out that midnight
(I’d come two weeks before and my stitched
belly was healing nicely)
So figuratively our mutual dependence was born
of the same planet-wide malady: the Sacred Moa bursting
to let us wear our Century’s medal — upright belly scar morse-coded
both sides with stitchdots a wicked centipede
permanently crawling upwards: Camus’ Sisyphus
repeating the Mountain Odysseus tied to Rock and Eagle
Yeats’ glad-eyed seers climbing Lapis Lazuli Mountain
Maui in Hine’s unforgiving tunnel Kuki Kaa fixed
into my vocabulary and Baxter detailed in our coffee bar conversations
and carried to a Wanganui Jerusalem which filled his questing
mouth with the communion bread of aroha (Vela later admired
my translations of Baxter’s sonnets)
Enough free-flowing symbolism back to a perforated Vela sieving
sleep as Mahatma Gandhi’s physical reincarnation
ebony hide tightly gathering in frugal bone and muscle
scars not folds fat honed away by perilous journeys endured for generations
a mythical creature polished to lava hardness but now caught
in the solid grasp of that hospital siever of the sick and dying
For days he was curtained with doctors and nurses
who broke in and out of his coma and replenished his feeding bottles
though they pronounced him dying: he’d been found bleeding
from every orifice on the Town Clock steps
What heartless children would abandon
their father! Nurse Fa’afetai whimpered (Very un-Samoan I suggested)
The other perforated ulcers in our ward agreed we were losing
alofa in our hunt for the mighty Tala
Aunt Ita Old Testament prophet of my upbringing had visited
and injected fear of eternal damnation and for my promised
return to God’s correct premises she’d prayed success into my operation
Grateful for her divine intervention I was sticking religiously to diet
and exercise regulations reducing stress by avoiding other victims’ problems
However Gandhi’s abandoned reincarnation — the resemblance was uncanny —
kept corroding that resolution as if he’d chosen me
his last disciple witness accomplice
Each day I fled his curtained silence to the veranda
and in gay view of Mt Vaea where RLS is tombed for tourists
feasted on my son’s science fiction collection
(My wife brought love in my favourite soups
My daughters continued my conversion to Cartland
and the Mills and Boon stable)
He slipped into my night sleep as flyingfox — cheeky batwinged rat
squealing estatically as it devoured upsidedown my dreams’ marrow
(Later he’d reveal that was his atua and insist I tell him
all the stories about Dracula Batman and Batwoman who from then on he referred to as his ‘revered cousins’)
Zipp! Pause Zippp! Pause Zippp!
And I was awake to the final Zipppp! of my dying neighbour uncurtaining
the morning and then crosslegged he started unplugging his lifelines
Nurse Nurse! I shouted unwilling to be accomplice
to his suicide pinning his arms sidewards (God he stank like flyingfox)
Nurse Fa’afetai and another wrestled him prone to mattress
and chastised him for ingratitude
No verbal protest but his bulbous eyes were fired at my betrayal
Verandawards I retreated while Nurse Fa’afetai doped him
back to sleeping obedience
She couldn’t understand why he wasn’t dying
as Dr Falani had predicted (Vela hated fulfilling others’ prophecies)
Judas! The snake hiss stung me to his mischevious chortling
as he picked his toenails and raised black pick to nose to savour
Did you speak? I asked but he ignored me and inhaled the fragrance
of his toedirt (Connoisseur of Toejam my children later labelled him)
By evening without permission he’d discarded his lifelines
and was roosterfit for dinner which he unpicked of meat
eating only the overcooked veggies toothless mouth pumping like an
accordion
Day after day after day so Coleridge might’ve written
Vela maintained his haughty silence refusing all medicine and our existence
Poor beggar’s nuts! Some patients whispered
Manic depressive! Dr Falani Freud’s disciple interpreted
Nothing true alofa can’t cure! Nurse Fa’afetai offered
Why can’t others’ problems leave me alone! I protested to my wife
But he’s only pintsize she insisted
He’s the weight of our total history the mountain of ash
smothering my night breathing I told her
That night secretly I packed to escape homewards
Don’t go his whisper blew the mountain skywards
Sit listen to the tales of my journey
And I was trapped in the sieve of his breathing
So he began night after night and out of the hospital
to my home wife children year after year after year plaiting
the delicate rope across the abyss of our forgetting
Sometimes he’d disappear I never asked where
but guessed to recharge breath at the source of all stories
or to win more heirs to his chronicles
Vela the Cooked
Vela my adopted father who taught
me the biology of language
Tagaloaalagi whispered into Vanimonimo
Vela who appointed me his chronicler
in the written script of the Albinos