Talking with Sio about Saipele

[It is Visesio Siasau's birthday today. Here's a poem I wrote for him. It describes the talk-filled walks Sio and I used to take along Nuku'alofa's warm, gloriously shabby waterfront at dusk. 

I learned about Saipele, the magician and carpenter of Niutao, from German anthropologist Gerd Koch's amazing book Songs of Tuvalu. Sio once spent weeks in Tuvalu, after the Tongan naval vessel he had ridden there ran out of petrol. He used that time to investigate the archipelago's culture.]

July the fourteenth, Nuku'alofa, six o'clock.
Rain falls like closing credits
over Vuna Road. A Chinese shop fades, one flour bag
at a time. Norfolk pines and ironwoods melt
down into the darkness. We are still walking
on Salote's wharf, walking back and forth
through puddles of fishemen's piss, walking fast
and talking about Saipele, 'last believer
in the old gods', adept
of turtles, initiator of Gerd Koch.

Saipele taught Koch where to aim
his notebook, the stub of his pencil, the snout
of an 8mm camera. He warned the German
against eating octopus, squid, turtle.
Together they stopped the tide off Niutao,
shoaled and emptied the lagoons, extracted lightning
from a silent cloud. Tuvalu cannot afford the wood
for sculpture, but before Koch left Saipele slew
a pandanus tree, and carved his first
his last masterpiece. Saipele, you are saying, saw the turtle
inside the tree: the swell of its back, its fin-feet, its tiny eyes.

The creature was waiting for his blade.
Dirty water laps the wharf edge
pedantically. Pangaimotu floats on the harbour
like a dead octopus.