Noio awoke early to sound and the sight of huts, maybe her...
A disordered dream of an Albatross settling on a nest lingered,
and as he turned seaward he saw, more terrible than legends
told late and last around the night fires, Arenui!
Like a barrier reef breaching, it soared above his canoe.
He was born Navigator, educated by father, grandfather,
and elders in that revered circle of those that read the world
with eyes squinted like horizon atolls.
They translated the first words spoken
by stars that swept like the hand of a girl around her gaze.
He learned the language of broken waves
that drummed on boats of islands and silhouettes.
Noio rhymed lines of fish schools and trade winds
and gave them to wanderers to sing.
Tides were a woman’s nuanced intimations
but the bluster of seabirds was naked
as the tattoos that logged the story of a man.
No kanaka was better read or travelled than Noio
and Oceania’s flotsam punctuated the epics that always ended
with a prow nuzzling a dot on his blue infinity.
He stood like a palm
and his thoughts went back to last night
when he thought all stories had been told
for it was stillness within a homing breeze.
His migrating heart had ached to remain now with Nani.
He had been touching the moon cloth he was returning to her, when he had seen and not understood
the cryptic characters of tremulous luminescence
in the column of the double hulls.
The wave curled over, a blank page.
J.S. MacLean lives in Calgary Alberta, Canada. His work has appeared in such places as ditch, Why Vandalism?, Battered Suitcase, Soundzine, The Toronto Quarterly, and various others. In 2007 he won first place in poetry in THIS Magazine’s Great Canadian Literary Hunt. In his spare time he wears various hats on the staff of an online literary journal, The Triggerfish Critical Review.
