Stephen Oliver Night of Warehouses New and Selected Poems 1978 - 2000 Night of Warehouses Stephen Oliver grew up in Brooklyn-west, and was educated at Marist Brothers, Newtown and St Patrick’s College, Cambridge Terrace, Wellington. He subsequently completed a one year diploma course in magazine journalism at Wellington Polytechnic. He has lived in Paris, Vienna, London, San Francisco, Greece and Israel, where he signed on with ‘The Voice of Peace’ radio ship broadcasting in the Mediterranean out of Jaffa. He has worked throughout New Zealand and Australia as a freelance production voice, newsreader, broadcaster, journalist, copy and features writer. Night of Warehouses: New and Selected Poems 1978 - 2000 is his sixth volume of poetry and spans two decades. Stephen Oliver is a transtasman poet based in Sydney. B Y S T E P H E N O L I V E R Henwise [poem cycle] & Interviews Autumn Songs [poem cycle] Letter To James K. Baxter [poem] Earthbound Mirrors Guardians, Not Angels Islands of Wilderness - A Romance Unmanned Election Year Blues [poem] Night of Warehouses: New and Selected Poems 1978 - 2000 S T E P H E N O L I V E R Night of Warehouses New and Selected Poems 1978 - 2000 HeadworX W ELLINGTON © Stephen Oliver, 2001 First published 2001 ISBN 0-473-07388-9 Published by HeadworX Publishers 26 Grant Rd, Thorndon Wellington Aotearoa / New Zealand http://headworx.eyesis.co.nz Printed by Publishing Press HeadworX® is a registered trademark of HeadworX Publishers The text of this book is set in Garamond 11 pt This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of review, private research and study, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced without written permission from the author. A C K N O W L E D G E M E N T S I wish to thank the publishers of my previous books; Horizontal Press, Hazard Press, Penguin Books, Australia, and HeadworX Publishers, Wellington. Many of the poems originally appeared in a slightly different form. Acknowledgements are made to the editors of the following magazines where a number of the New Poems originally appeared; The Weekend Australian Review, JAAM (NZ), Landfall (NZ), The Perfect Diary (Australia), Southerly (Australia), Staple / New Writing (UK), Thylazine (Australia). Several of the poems in this volume were read by the author as guest poet in Brisbane at: Subverse: Queensland Poetry Festival, 2000, and in Launceston at the Tasmanian Poetry Festival, 2001. The poems, Cultural Misappropriation, Generation of ‘68, Bruno Lawrence first read and recorded by the author on Bookmarks, National Radio, and Plains FM 96.9, Christchurch, New Zealand. Poems without main titles as in the collection, Islands of Wilderness - A Romance are tabled by the first line and numbered as originally published. The selections from Autumn Songs were first published in 1978 as an accompanying booklet to & Interviews. The poems taken from this publication are properly included here as part of that collection. A 35 mm film short, based on the poem “Something In The Air” from Earthbound Mirrors, narrated by the author to an original music score by Bob Jackson, jazz musician, and directed by Allan MacGillivray. The film screened at the Auckland International Film Festival, 1986. Screened, Roma Theatre, Sydney; dist. CEL, 1987. A selection from Earthbound Mirrors recorded by the author at Mandrill Studios, and released through the Ode Records label, Auckland in 1984. This was the first undertaking by a recording company in New Zealand to put out a poet on cassette. /incident 34 (from) & Interviews appeared in the anthology, A Cage of Words, ed., Harvey McQueen, Longman Paul, 1980. The Woolshed and Emblem for Dead Youth appear in the anthologies, Jewels in the Water, and Doors, respectively; ed., Terry Locke, Leaders Press, 2000, School of Education, University of Waikato, Hamilton, New Zealand. 5/ The Departure (from) Autumn Songs, and, /answers 21 (from) & Interviews appear in REAL FIRE a counter anthology of New Zealand poets from the ‘60s / ‘70s, ed., by Bernard Gadd, Square One Press, Dunedin, 2001. My gratitude to Laurence Aberhart, the New Zealand photographer, for generously supplying the front cover photograph: Dunedin [warehouse facade] 1975. The display lettering O F C A stands for ‘Otago Farmers Co-operative Association.’ My special thanks to Peter Ireland, friend of some thirty years standing, who from the very outset gave generously of his time and knowledge in honest support and encouragement of my early literary endeavours. For those interested in learning more about my early days as a writer in Wellington, New Zealand, an autobiographical essay ‘Chalk, Talk and Asphalt Days’ appears in JAAM magazine, Issue No. 15 (May 2001). The Article puts in context my early development and literary '‘influences’ as an emerging poet. John Pule and Denys Trussell have written on my poetics in JAAM, Issue No. `3 (March 2000). See also a listing in the recent Oxford Companion to New Zealand Literature in English (OUP, 1998). I thank Pina Ricciu for her tireless support, Warren Dibble, playwright and poet, for his strong belief in my work over the years, and Professor Emeritius James Tulip, of the University of Sydney, for his early generosity. My particular thanks go to Mark Pirie for his strong commitment in seeing through to publication Unmanned, as well as this representative selection of work spanning two decades. C O N T E N T S Introduction from & I N T E R V I E W S 1978 10 The wait. 15 /still life 16 The window falls down to earth that is certain 17 17 You can’t hear the clouds 18 19 Macrocarpa 19 /answers 21 there are of course, numerous combinations 20 30 Spring out of October into the next month 21 /incident 34 Birds knew (the wait then the second shock) 23 /incident 36 10 O’clock 24 /sketches 45 Before the winds - 25 48 & anyhow, I would write you a sonnet 26 50 I 27 epilogue 28 from Autumn Songs 32 3/ The Flight 5/ The Departure 7/ The Encounter 12/ The Orchardist from E A R T H B O U N D M I R R O R S 1984 Something in the Air 40 7.5 on the Richter Scale 45 Flotilla 46 A Meeting 50 Mosaic 51 Whistle Them Up 52 Ascension 53 Perspective 54 The Find 55 from Earthbound Mirrors 56 i. ii. iii. iv. v. vi. vii. viii. xi. xii. Black Concentrations 64 Song of Gravity 65 Sang the Sailsurfer 66 from G U A R D I A N S, N O T A N G E L S 1993 Waltzing The Gods 69 Ace 71 A Far Noise from Near Things 72 Halley’s Comet 76 Manned Mission to the Green Planet 78 As The Painter Moves Toward His Canvas 80 Hallo Moon, Hallo Moon 81 Queen Street Riot 82 Guardians, Not Angels 83 Nicholas Charles Bochsa 1791-1856 84 Irina Ratushinskaya, Freed 85 And all the Goodtime Charlies 86 John Keats Came On Too Strong 87 The Decadeers 88 from I S L A N D S O F W I L D E R N E S S - A R o m a n c e 1996 15. Love is a way back 91 22. As you wait to come 92 29. Then the rats up and 93 32. DEAR LADY, regard my heart 94 35. All the tough kids got 95 44. In the ancient city of Jaffa 96 45. Yeah, there were props of 97 51. ‘Spirit and flesh 98 55. The tubular wind 99 58. On her sad 100 61. The Orient (lighted beads 101 67. Night of Warehouses. 102 76. Sparrows pack in a family 103 78. On the dark side of a 104 86. Rain solid as riot gear 105 87. ‘Look pal, men do it 106 91. Tank tracks down the 107 92. True ham of the 108 93. You promised you’d 109 94. Disappointment hung 110 98. Sails whiter than an 111 100. Pitiless is a word 112 101. The millennial turtle 113 103. What history, that of 114 from U N M A N N E D 1999 Cultural Misappropriation 117 from Word Maps 118 1. Down By The River 3. False Idols 8. Continental Shelf Co. 12. Hills Of Home Generation of ‘68 120 Pat Boon & Tonto 121 To Talk of Flags 122 Words to Lure a Ghost 123 Sheet Music 124 Myth & Mariolatry 125 Unmanned 126 Braidwood 130 Brilliant Losers 131 Wardrobe Drinkers 133 Aunty Eve 134 Conrad & Wells & Co 136 ‘Bob Orr’ 137 You Don’t Remember Dying 138 Graham Clifford 139 Bruno Lawrence 140 Stork 141 from The Still Watches III / VI / VIII / 1X / X / X11 N E W P O E M S [1998 – 2000] Of Roofs 153 Taffy the Turtle 155 Treasure Island 157 Littoral 158 “Oldest Pine” 159 This Way 161 Ergo Poem 163 Summer Cup 165 Emblem for Dead Youth 167 Tundra Flight 168 Salle d’attente 169 Copestone for A Nation 170 The Mangawakas 172 The Good Old Days 173 Transmission 174 Observatory Hill 176 Director’s Cut 177 The Woolshed 178 Flagon Days 179 Portraits 180 1. Old Groover 2. The Lonely Men 3. Lawman 4. Tour Guide Brady’s Grave 184 ‘Wolfhound Century’ 185 Index of Titles or First Lines 189 Night of Warehouses from & I N T E R V I E W S 1 9 7 8 & I N T E R V I E W S 10 The wait. Then the second shock & at low level the land rattles my voice a dry riverbed deep in your land our pact you/me stand apart unshaken separate structures we enjoy the echo of the child who tracks the ground between each / his voice building a ripple from your wall to mine. (((( No matter that you persist look upon me as landmark with old block to new stone. I have taken my measure I size you to a scale beyond the ornamental moment. You no longer turn upon me you turn as ‘figurine’ it is a matter sensitive to style. Sustain the ideal / the lie and heap the words at your pedestal on your bier maybe? I hoist you upon the miles (like shoulders). Grass Street, Oriental Parade, Wellington, 1975 /the still life 16 The window falls down to earth that is certain imperturbable the window flows in gravity a fly fixed there would take a hundred years to shift its length on the glass tide outside I view the world as a hall of mirrors day by day the land distorts the wind is buckled / the putty sound of skin stretched / the turning of the head tomorrow the clouds I hang neatly as curtains. 17 You can’t hear the clouds. Motionless as a glacier over Mt Cargill how they tumble to the bay: no movement / certain as a slow growth this time of year the clouds could be happening while the days spin you/me different ways. The little changes that occur are: (like the weather) ‘heartless’ wouldn’t you say? 19 Macrocarpa holding green against sundown where the last of these searchlights dim to that westward compound of cloud & the monotony of dusk : is the drama of Sawyers Bay. Such luminant clichés ending each day hold me. This I understand is transferable (like habit) moving against the casement windows the sun is over the house & with one slow bounce outside the macrocarpa. /answers 21 There are of course, numerous combinations .... my cells regard but don’t decide against your sex I argue with my hormones as the old tyranny exerts, again, you upon me. Who gathers about you now? I cannot hear your breath. Even before your cells met in conference to spill warmth one into the other the brute impact fell you knocked whole zones of flesh into silence you do not know it, now that absolute rejection flows smoothly through you. 30 Spring out of October into the next month the winds chasing bits of broken growth even against the deadened tree / that bird / & peeling bark spring! Oyster/catchers dabs of tar on the factory roof throats noisy & in on the act right now the whole crazy arithmetic of the species. Sawyers Bay. Port Chalmers. Careys Bay. Deborah Bay. (((( The severe brush strokes of the sea at Aramoana. (((( Pulling at the tubers ferns pulling at the chopped soil, at the neatly cropped rows pooling the pockets of the market/gardeners (God’s yards) in on the act. Spring. Wisteria scrambles along the weatherboard to our casement windows, framing this. Against cloudwork the bruise spread yellow with some dismantling to the west. These structures of / distance / balance / perspective tarnish their plaques owning (not us) : words that doodle in cloudstrokes to remake the boundaries & the commonplace of seasons. (( (( Mt Cargill continues under detonation to loosen giant cubes a mouth widening over the years & elevated terraces look east to the harbour where the dredge lets the shipping run back to the sea bluish. /incident 34 Birds knew (the wait then the second shock) I know it that in the space of one morning / a space / & the macrocarpa toppled to the next door paddock because we heard it the land rattled as at low level the trunk was cut we saw the whole operation through our casement windows that frame now more open air. Durham Street, Wellington, 1975 /incident 36 10 O’clock still hangs thin under the Otago night. Down the otherside of the hour I take the hill road to Reynolds town a walk back up through the broken glass of the skyline where the pieces scatter (on) the horizon: at this hour/ the moon shapes to a cocktail glass its tube filling the harbour heads. Here we boarded. There were three homes we had each in its own time one celebration. /sketches 45 Before the winds - those trumpets! The absolute length of the wall dropped that is, the sea fell: flat / lettering, graffito (not words) figures, hieroglyph the unexplained billboard lay down with much noise onto the land & is still falling. I do not ask you to match your parenthesis of understanding against that of the sea still falling before those trumpets - it is inconclusive. 48 & anyhow, I would write you a sonnet as all the others dear to theirs but can’t square off this account (i.e. mine with yours) can’t wrap up this ongoing conference I hold dear with you/me can’t square the deal as they say - can’t square it off at the edges neat as a quarter acre section. Clichés we had were never that clear & anyhow I would write you a sonnet that is final: Our son continues yes he continues; our son is an unbroken sentence that’s final. 50 I call them the floating triangles from Whangarei Heads, the land moves 1000 mls. back to Sawyers Bay & where I rest now on the arrowhead of this island there is a folding of the land behind. It comes to this no matter what moves me I am squared to The Prevailings as (once) a fugitive in your flesh I slipped through the mesh who has never fled such hunger? :is: the third breath that quakes you/me quakes all Whangarei / Onerahi, 1976 epilogue The grey overcoat of the sky flung open! A hundred buttons threaded with rain wrapped about itself & as suddenly - stopped. The air disintegrated, or perhaps that’s too neat? It becomes harder & harder to people these lines to lay them flat as on a slab of ice. With a gun/shot I could evoke a crowd but don’t wish that either. I am a white/coated official hemmed within & completely attendant on the Brueghel noises of the mob; wrapped about itself. These lines then, are hurdles they are poles to bruise the shins of the rabble. The tongue that troubles the top of the mouth / is a birdflight that takes me back to initial ancestors who coupled together in rhyme who created the memory of me that takes me back that turns me back. I would like to say I am vintage of all which consumes me; that I would like to have said a lot of things though have not scanned these yet. Meanwhile, across the light my shadow behind me behind me walks out. The moment drops as though dead/wood & there is light slipping from it & there is a breath of wind, this wind that parts wooden mobiles. The bleep of lie detectors on the branches on the sonic trees pressed out under an over/pass which takes a left/hand turn into dusk, from these birds piled high along the plane/trees. For them & me the same repetition the simple image of the hour to take refuge in. If you wish, I am making bricks out of air for them & me. All it takes is for one bird to escape one wing to drop like a half/moon & then the thing is undone as a girl who walks the middle of the street at night. Who veers neither left nor right. The air has gone clear. Your whisper is a heated flat/iron pressed to my ear clear as the visibility of day. Clear as that. Sounds are flying night/blind as though a playground or the vocals of it had assembled on the air. I hear that your voice takes too much of my vision & crowds me in. I elaborate / why I make bricks out of air. from A U T U M N S O N G S 3/ The Flight Grape/shot of blackbird get there before the stars do, Black Concentrations! & so the fabric loosens & the mesh of the centre is diffuse (allows mist through). Then, as they are about to settle I see them scuffing the inches off next season’s spring. Over the rise & fall of the tree/line such Black Concentrations! 5/ The Departure Flies have short memories / immediately toward the instinct of smell they collect themselves, there! The comma softens the breath and I wait the possibilities of coldness rejected as meat the blackness of my anger setting to a stench. Who is it falls from whom? 7/ The Encounter You would think sparrows moved through pebbles. That sound that falls behind them that sound that flows behind them somewhere, a dog is boasting his bass notes & moves on. At fear the body temperature drops & the hair on the neck rises through the pricked/blanket of skin. 12/ The Orchardist The smell of largeness, of breath, white destinations of rain lift over the glass these fragmented molecules: the dizziness of a too upright man. & how the motes before his eyes catch at the skeins of pride lungs big as a cloud - who will take anything in his stride; an obstacle course played in a set of rhymes. Purple leaves at his soles. Wood Street, Ponsonby, Auckland, 1977 from E A R T H B O U N D M I R R O R S 1 9 8 4 S O M E T H I N G I N T H E A I R Auckland you big arsehole, ah, soul is what the man meant, what you lack on this pock/baked earth scraped from the barren uteri of The Seven Dead Ones. But that don’t matter a scrap as you ease your carcass into the breech of summer into the season of reprieve and airy flocculence. It is summer. Summertime, and the intersecting motorways sparkle with loads of tinsel that dissolve and bubble through long distances of heat. There is something in the air, and it is not that coruscant light which burns down through the fluffy elements that drift and break against the cold sides of the sky. An unique breed here in Wood Street, in Wood Street, which leads onto a home (in Elizabeth Street) for them other citizens, there without fortune have had (it) their souls slammed in the door of Auckland. You would think it broke them, yes, their backs that they carry so much weight to and fro Wood Street they go they carry the imaginary golden key to this city on back bowed it breaks them them’s the breaks buddy. To and fro Wood Street they go bearing that weight, and I wonder whether them broken backs feel it too, they could be sniffing the air? ** ‘O the Gulf opens out a chest bare as Sir Dove Meyer Robinson heaving in the morning light shapes up for another day of commercial wham bam (thank you mam) O thank you for turning out and already one of them days where cloud has discounted some of the brightness off the hours (the weatherman tells us) and nose-sense tells me that here we’ve got a ring / ding / ding / of a Queen city.’ And only then is the air tight with warning. ** This is a poem and place of asides. This is a town of asides; public ground has been set aside for: public walks have been set aside for: street corners have been set aside for: recreational purposes and pick/ups. Victoria Park is a green depth swimming under an overpass and the heavy pollen of petrol settles here ever so gentle. O gently now still float the fumes over the public trees and the public seats therefore it is an open stillness right down here under the girdered grip of the sky where cold edges of buildings and motors flail by on the other (wild) side of that band of leafy trees still feeding off them metallic bees that are getting nowhere fast. Auto/fellatio flippancies of ‘the good guys’ running rings round Auckland you vast arse / soul you’ve got your very own marketable twist here at the top O’ the Isle, never a truer phrase passed than the HAURAKI Gulf: you know, someone oughta builda Radio Station Heir (ha ha). ** They’ve slapped a contraceptive writ on Aotea Clinic while a darkening flood of women drag ripe bellies off the international tarmac and down the long slide to the Sydney skyscrapers incisive in the surgical light for there is something in the air over the Tasman Sea a free/load of immigrants an airborne web/like gauze of foetal parachutists raining down, still fallen on another soil. ** When the city has become one fluorescent tube the Black Concentrations blockade the Gulf. Islands and islands coast out of the bluestone waters which slide like an abacus the tides, the tides that short/change with spillage of distance the numerous beaches here. Rangitoto has a secret stash of water which no living soul has seen or smelt, perhaps fed by the dark stream that ran the course of Queen Street when Auckland was nothing but scrub and ti-tree, when Auckland was nothing. Now, in a thousand basements buildings pump back the unseen sea unseen, back to the thrumming tides before folk here get salt in wounds and nostrils. Auckland is returning to the sea undercover of dark, undercover of the eternal trig/stations which mark out the cold boundaries of the sky and this town won’t end with a bang, but smooth as any jingle open-ended. 7. 5 O N T H E R I C H T E R S C A L E A metal/rod the colour of cloud vibrates on the trees. ‘Raw ore’ is the grain of birdsong fed back to the leaves. And how the whole construction breaks. And how the entire circuitry runs out upon the sounding board of air. Live/wires everywhere and a tonnage of breathing space. From the harbour, ships sound out horns and depart against the mist and along the metal/rod of cloud. Through the Black Concentrations of Auckland the metal/rod the colour of cloud vibrates like a tuning fork. Tuneless, the sounds gather into flatness and the whole construction breaks. F L O T I L L A Suicide is the result of infinite faith in matter - P.D. Ouspensky Would you salute them butterflies or aggressors / switchblades in the Rangitoto channel? On this furnace day it is summertime and too much light for anger to stand tall as it is, here, compressed along the volcanic distances without tint of shadow to the band (lava) rotunda emerging from the Hauraki Gulf where the switchblades betwixt and between them show sail and colour. ** Point of relaxation / to idiocy. And across the bent back of this city a cool breeze withers into the bland mud/flats. Jumbo/booted beyond the bridge, buildings relax into the distances (would you salute them?) Lifting switchblades against the back/wash sun the idiocy of those eternal trig/stations over the bent/back of the sky, flick into sight. Today, they closed the outer lanes of the bridge, the ‘Nippon-clip-on’ ran empty as an erased tape, over and over, traffic running so fast it is oblique. A continuous fall from balance toward the grace of the bridge from the city over and over that bent back: an oblique return to the sea, a lemming mentality. How he flicks into sight! Sailsurfer takes his body to the ‘point of balance we have not got’ a human switchblade / a dangerous stamen / fixed to the full blossom of canvas a diminished bead along the edge of the horizon. Butterflies or aggressors, you will see them twist obliquely back to the city slide like an abacus the tides and those other citizens, to and fro over the bridge they go over the bent back of Auckland the metal rod the colour of cloud that something in the air. ** And if you should decide to drop, an anguished plumb-bob of flesh, from the bridge and the point of balance (which you have just left) arms and legs in salute of the air, yeah, you will be honoured as a fully fledged citizen in having met the full expectations of this city and the bluestone waters where you have left your mark, prophetically. ** Should you decide to drop, the tilted head takes the end of brightness in - of sky and of the sea. Either way, it is the horizontal rod of balance that is broken as you sink into the green depths of Victoria Park where it could be under you that the surface recedes back from the tree tops to the Black Concentrations of stars. Flicked through the currents of air, your body in its fall, arched as an astronaut, inverted as suicide : as the brightened beads of traffic flip by the band of leafy trees : as the girdered grip of the bridge falls away from you know that there is enough of the sky and its innocence (especially at the corners) to wipe a city clean, any dawn. A M E E T I N G ‘I got myself short. Should be two dollars. Have to get my cigarettes Wednesday.’ The other voice remains inaudible. ‘You see? Count it.’ The voice is inaudible though accepts one hand to the shoulder. ‘Three dollars. That’s all right. Where you going?’ The upright, inaudible voice slides away, smiling. The hour rolls like a pinball across the hammock of Wood Street this meeting of two hands to and fro. This is the monorail on which one preoccupation chimes with another. This is the attempted synchronisation of two blades at an imaginary switch/point. The surface of each face breaks recognition with the other. Salute them. Wood Street, Ponsonby, Auckland, 1978 M O S A I C The colour plate of Auckland pressed against that cupola. On the air and in that vibration how the line distorts - the inverted images of the city dropped into the round. And how the enamel cubes express their light within the dark fan of the sky, and how! There ain’t nothing antique about this city when it has become one fluorescent tube even in reflection is sliding back to the sea into pre-biotic ruin. O to slip quietly from the face of the sky and break the surface and break the waters and break the capillary tubes of the nostrils of the people here. O to break recognition with one another (like a memory restored.) W H I S T L E T H E M U P The silent war blows me away, not the Golden Hand Shake of foreign metals where one history breaks recognition with the other, it is the ‘inaudible’ slip of the key where eyes meet in strict consultation. O to break recognition with one another, that frightens. Those long bass notes coast out on the horns of the ocean liners and tankers whose vibrations flick the whitened hulls. Through different orbits deliver them from the volcanic distances and the jaws of the roaring lion beneath the moon which sheds its golden fleece is a nursery rhyme to shake us, alarmingly. O kill them softly O sweetly with that song. A S C E N S I O N Rangitoto does not possess light. Rangitoto (sparkles as a tube of crystal water) inside. Rangitoto absorbs itself. ** The baked charcoal island weighted on the bluestone harbour brittle as the fluorescent tube as the gulls lift over to it that something in the air. Rangitoto of The Dead Ones / the seventh seal of the barren uteri you would expect to explode colour like a Japanese graphic. ‘A great mountain, all in flame.’ P E R S P E C T I V E The physicist will tell you: God is matter of fact equals / no one need be surprised at guilt anymore, quoth the lay poet. The explanation holds the centre together. Surprise: fear: suicide: surprise. And that’s an equation like the man arms and legs in salute of the air over and over the same problem and so I remind myself that I must remind myself • the astronaut yawns life onto the universe • the poet draws breath back out of the earth • the sailsurfer plays the division between earth and sky. T H E F I N D for Hone Tuwhare They dug her up in Queen Street. A fossilised colonial woman clutching a parasol, stiff and rigid in her flannel frock. Pince-nez clay encrusted on the bridge of her nose, she was pointed toward Alexandra Park, English settler fashion when the pneumatic bursts shattered the ear-bone. A couple of spades and they wedged her out of the mould (intact) and leaned her against the side of a Kenworth and then broke for ‘smoko’ - propped there as though to advertise it. She was carbon dated 1863, and by the salt stains on her handkerchief (tucked under the sleeve) she had either been crying or spending too much time with the boys down at the Whaling Station. Records failed to prove this. One thing remained a mystery to authorities: the stake, or rather, surveyor’s peg driven through the breast bone, attested to an acquisitive quarrel over which were her rights, and which weren’t? from E A R T H B O U N D M I R R O R S [i] In these days, we don’t exult the sun. Instead, we pay cheap coinage to its reflection and I’m reminded that there ain’t nothing new on a metaphor. Who would dare praise the sun that something close to our hearts? Exult him then! That great runner who sees the track before him and that makes me feel real proudful. In these days, we don’t exult the sun. A man shot in the snow will distort like a hall of mirrors I mean; there’s just too much other beauty about. [ii] A woman polished as an earthenware jug filled with northern light: and you know there isn’t a chance of that. Is that what beauty’s all about what you’d like to give into most to make a gift of it, to get what’s going? Right through your eyes allow me to see these transparencies which crush me like ice. Now, that’s beauty. And so I practise at departure as this light moving the trees - airily. What saves me (if you can call it that) are the words here which stick, something like a rubber/boot on damp ash. [iii] O the renown of the writer who put it: ‘the arse end of nowhere’ this place which has light through it as the wet across the back of a fish and the whole damn island rising. The arse end of nowhere has got this geological radiance, the likes of which make an unwritable thesis. The sun is resin all over the day it bubbles and all over these pencil/scrapings which have the sound of laughter. O the renown of the chorus who sang it. [iv] A whistle draws the thread of response from those small motors of the heart the drum solo that prompt the limbs to beat. A cough starts nothing but an audience - the jubilant cord of breath (that’s different). In the beginning was the whistle and then believe it or not the word like a lead pellet stored in the lungs. I would reckon it (personally) that the cough is the beginning of speech though the word has grown thick with hair and as dry as hurt. On our hands the question is raised which came first the whistle or the word? [v] I turn my back on the world my tendons between the shoulder/blades set me against the pokings of this planet like any other. I am a small corner into which the noises of the continents gather and eddy. I turn my back on the world and feel the sharp blows on the back of the neck, in this way, I add to the noises of the earth. I drive my centre to the eye of your hurricane. (I say) that our love is a little like a summit meeting, we swap histories, we bargain for terms. Our own separate bag of noises we throw at each other as so many sticks and stones to break our bones and with sudden percussion fall upon one another. [vi] Even from their dust they shall adore (and done!) how the bits of peoples stagger, dazed and numinous out into the sunlight. Unbeliever calls it / divinity pollution this light the colour of chopped straw. O hearts of dust puff up ambitions at the day. Dust as a hand clap in the Roman Senate. Dust as the ancient sound of the conquered tribe. With a large effort I pull myself together, so what (I ask) so what else is there then as I concentrate myself onto the here and now and feel the sun as blotched copper on my skin? [vii] Our bodies move through one single arc of sorrow. (Forgive) them who haven’t noticed a whit. / Brother! now that’s about as meek and mild as you can get: like people setting up road blocks like fright stretched to a piano wire like people holding out against themselves and I won’t let go of you till you let go of me yes I will no I won’t yes I will you to the devil. Our bodies move through one single arc of regret, c’mon be fair that’s only afterwards. Sister, I tell you that for the moment them bells toll to kick the shit out of us (gently). [viii] Q: Why don’t us people just hold together than set about with the purpose of dying? and this is done expressly (the hidden wish) nothing’s more tangible than the self-destruct button we play our signature tune on. O to synthesise our (very) selves to bits and sometimes, that music squeezed is O so very beautiful as smooth as cordial even as water is the conductor to smell - well, we can simply hear our own ending coming as an untainted and complete intoxication, don’t we? O to synthesise our (very) selves to shreds the blood the beautiful flow of water as music. Sometimes, that music sanguine is O so very beautiful as smooth as cordial and even. [xi] Here I am then, a spotted handkerchief and stick on my shoulder the southern/hemisphere like a cairn behind me. I whistle a merry tune into the corners of the world sniff the prospects my heart the colour of camouflage. Under indifferent stars I don a different hat buried as a worm in the northern half of this apple I digest another set of sins. Here I am then, a spotted handkerchief and stick on my shoulder O every so slightly worse for wear. [xii] I have as many jests as checks on my coat and a smile as dry as a brush of chalk. The black/band of the crowd holds me in - but I show them my colours. Overhead, the big tent of the Shooting Star Circus and I know it is me who is phosphorescent. I drift from north to south, from east to west and they know it is me who is fun loving. I have many jests as checks on my coat and a smile as dry as a brush of chalk. How I love them, those women with crisp, sibilant voices, whose eyes fall like rotten fruit about me. B L A C K C O N C E N T R A T I O N S Morning, noon, evening who drinks the milk of darkness? I consider the magic or aggression gone out of it - entirely. Lives, that is. A distinct peace. The immediate slowed to peace / sans / colour. Stillness plump as a cushion not sat upon. Understanding if you wish and that is what you wish. So much habitation and no one to hear me observe and no one to inform me they do not hear me say what sort of peace is this? I am a small area of agitation. I am here and everyone finding nourishment in other places. Evening, noon, and morning who drinks the milk of darkness? Vienna, 1979 S O N G O F G R A V I T Y Icarus, torn from his focus on the sun, reached the supreme consummation (like any woman) and took unto himself a worldly weight - the complete possession of centre and gravity. Does the woman forever plummet the whole like (in the masculine) how one helicopter taken at a certain angle entering the skyline, possesses an entire city? The want to get more than gravity can provide is simply an exercise in non/love. Icarus should have taken a tilt of the head to look down and see the sun the water. Who can work that proposition with eyes open, even buckle oneself to a question mark and contemplate the centre of the earth? (thoughts: shoving my muscle through black hair). San Francisco, 1979 S A N G T H E S A I L S U R F E R Wherein that zone of coming toward (not quite rainbow) where all is possible possession takes place the colours running and the boundaries non-existent and at once the reach of prophecies is present before final settled things begin before corybantic moon and the sun remunerative resume their different and separate reserves. And only then is the air tight with warning. No hour can be appointed to this time which decides against the rhythms of day as the mind reels out in perfect balance and with itself (is sought out in turn) and at once the reach of prophecies is present a woman will foretell who plays with light this is the song of the Black Concentrations in the scooped hollow at the back of the head. And only then is the air tight with warning. from G U A R D I A N S, N O T A N G E L S 1 9 9 3 W A L T Z I N G T H E G O D S As if they could not lift themselves high enough children who unfold into fantasies kites over Philopappou Hill from string, pull cloud out of thin air the way a comma tugs when the line runs out. The clouds I spoke of, augmented, became italic and passed through the stilled serif of the Acropolis as did the kites that worked the air – bluish like the freshly exposed socket of a bone. As if they could not lift themselves high enough where sideways a 747 snipped to view and halved the sky and cut the string that played the fingers that lifted the hands that tossed the kites the children built. Behind certain white walls you can hear the untroubled plumbing of the flute and you would propose that here, the player transposed fingertips to a flock of doves. Or at certain quay-sides, brake drums within the throats of mules, screech. On the sounding-board of these cobbled ways (that is) from the whitewashed alley-ways noisy with the approach of mules, events of sound. Then the heavy swallowing of the bell-tower makes solid the hour and you would conclude that it was here events had collected as though people, objects exchanged substances. As marble broke down against the skyline – broken and suggestive of an absent architecture the half dome of the observatory rose – frozen, locked up the moon for the night on an empty sky. And the Acropolis, silent as a construction site, held down the curled blueprint of the stars a tiny model made to house a universe while over Philopappou Hill closed the dark shutters of bats: closed the theory of darkness we call night opened the small recognitions we call the stars parted the vast separations we call the winds revolved the minute gravities we call stillness. Ano Petralona, Athens 1979 A C E Sky ploughs and grades to partial storm, quick moments of darkness, casual rain. An aircraft drags badly taped sound through another hour. The engine rocks its mounts confident. The prop turns, autodidactic. Quartz landing lights calculate a downward path. An early idiom of stars surface upward. He gives his scarf one comic flick, college style. He taxis in. By planets and galaxies of gas light he dreams ambition high as a stealth bomber, swerves o’er massy thunderhead. With eyes blitzed as Beirut his Gatling laughter strafes. Or, tearing a dotted line down the Dead Sea - noise chasing after - he sways that horizon cradle fashion, sweeps the Left Bank, banks to the Apollo glare of the Sinai high noon. He dreams his family safely bunkered and quartered suburbwise, happy as a neatly clipped hedge, kids hopping Frisbee quick on the broad lawn. His spouse, blond as bread, awaits the whisperings of his black-box heart, mooning for dog fight love at home coming. A F A R N O I S E F R O M N E A R T H I N G S That which has gained a little further, high enough to curve out the earth, the diminished rainforests of Brazil, the hole in the ozone above Antarctica, the lessened bushtribes of Africa, the years pushed out by light, the greenhouse globe over-photographed is how we picture ourselves back, falling. Or rice paper moon in the July afternoon. Bulkheads of tankers whitelit on the horizon. Night, underground with a silence of escalators. Sky and cloud, a dream of snakes. A fallen leaf against the skylight. A leaf against the skylight fallen, so. And we then who engage the light take ourselves to the work of aerial attention the Ancients were part of - remembrance of time, atomistic. The seasons knew us as we learned. Our lessons learned well, too. Around the roulette wheel of the world, throught he yellow pages of the sun flicking over decades what migrations made, from the micro-chip to Star Wars, digital sex to right wing abstinence, eclipse of personal vision, limitation of immediate memory, the object of our desires objective love, love at several removes in our falling. Sangsara. The great lesson came in a sudden hurt of killing, our first knowledge reflected through caves ochre-images of the slain. We began worship, measured time, and built against the shock, the pain. These sentiments amongst the tumbled blocks of older verse are gone from the heart, the darkest galaxy, and memory alone promotes sorrow. It is today always, green as a computer screen and elsewhere, unrecorded, the high surgery of the supernova which never exploded now, but once. Child dream. An abandoned railway siding overgrown with nettle, hide- out for a wizard. Backdrop of gentle slopes, elms at distance. Adolescent visions of Irish barrows, hollowed darkness, whisperings, a wish to locate the signal in self back in time. This resides still. Downwards and over the garden (a dark, humped square) my neighbour shadows through dropblinds before a startled TV. Dirtied cloud frames a full moon that is sideways in this movingly. Gravity takes hold and accentuates. Gestures weigh in their orbits. Bright as cufflinks, radio telescopes revolve on red tablelands to uncover one more sacred site between the stars. A brain-based society ornately tracks the lusty technologies and the years recognise our whereabouts. In the beginning wooden paddles echoed from atoll to island. Air whitened, thunder reverberated. A riot of leaves under malarial rain. Then came the creak of rigging, came the off-shore companies, came synthetic drugs and salvation, and finally, came migration back to Vanuatu, Samoa, Tonga, Niue to light up the rim of the Pacific. The hour turns, an electric train flicks blue flashes over suburb and hoarding, brick arch and emptied streets. The day’s news ceases amongst the satellites. High enough to curve out earth, painted prows of long boats are falling on Southern skies, dragging their keels across some coral harbour where - fitfully, gracious guns of goodwill ride at anchor. Chelmsford Street, Newtown, Sydney, 1987 H A L L E Y ’ S C O M E T “ Bushy as a great broom held across the sky ” - Wang (c. AD 120) trans. Arthur Waley At first there was brilliant sunlight anticipating earlier years. A breath of lit wind that did not possess any location dissolved back into the evenness of day, became a gift-wrapped surprise from an unknown friend unthought of until then. Earthquakes which rumoured those things done and forgotten were sufficiently compacted in some other and inhuman memory, for every creature must have its fair say at the end as did these. The anti-climax had been expected and surprised one. Without a scream the disasters continued unhurried, as if it were an appointment that had to be kept; for this had always been arriving beyond any personal memory of the wisest man that might have served as an invitation, warning. When the comet finally described the finitude of the heavens, coming back a millennium later, we remembered his words about the serpent consuming its tail. M A N N E D M I S S I O N T O T H E G R E E N P L A N E T Behind some night bush Rousseau green, some dwelling in one place, some in another, it had been agreed between us by courier and hesitation to meet in the village centre at midnight. The first figure to emerge was to be greeted this: America comes to interpret its humour: the hurried reply; community halls abound. Back, beyond our allotted frequency, The General who had not been posted gathered over another Power Lunch. After the brief and the oiling of rifles we set forth across the causeway through the marble green of foothills, into the grey of higher ground. The thought, like a saffron scarf caught on a thorn bush seemed even now on the closed terrain a crusade of sorts, - kept us ahead. Amply, unnumbered rivers plashed into the battery green of immeasurable hollows. So it was that we became inseparable, spirit creatures to the forest life, the journey boundless, the orders which concerned the depot, unread. A S T H E P A I N T E R M O V E S T O W A R D H I S C A N VA S 1. Momentarily; we knew we could own nothing. An orchestra crackled in parenthesis on the emergency band as if from another age. Through mountain passes the white dirigible tilted at electrical storms. Yet, what felt like fear looked like a pink, tropical orchid in close up, deadly in every detail. The colour plate said it, though got mixed with others after the catalogue got lost. An afternoon hot and steamy. After the rain had finished the thought came through like a gilded sun that we could luxuriate our every wish, music too, if we wanted. Civic Leaders pushed their pitch: the tallest building in the southern hemisphere (Sydney) was soon to rise beyond the computer graphic, apparitional as a water spout! O the half sunk water wheel rests its spokes on the ancient river basin, only to re-emerge as the harbour bridge into early morning, traffic fog. And passing by the Western Quarter, open frontages, cotton shirts, rack upon rack, hot smell of metal on felt, often backing onto smaller factories and interwoven lanes, sometimes a glimpse of whitewash hanging out picket-fence lettering: EVERY SPECIES IS AN ENDANGERED SPECIES and claims to long-lost sacred sites. Charcoal flaked fences under yellow gorse, the valley falling away to memory of bush fires which swept long before his boyhood took this place as playground, an image now taut as comprehension. 11. Pull in from celluloid an early afternoon from 1954 (Rpt) pulsing cloud up mountain valleys seen on location in Peru as you recalled then someone toppling two miles through thin air - Chuck, our hero, black leather jacket hard-pressed against the mountain. Yet, it was the light which figured, flickering there in your young matinee years some found memory, reservoir to intelligence, long ago. Not the mop-topped birds, nor the sun heading toward warmer seasons built out of piano notes from the echoing school facing the little park. But turning through those chords, something you had to say lies behind where it always was. That empty space calls you now, asks your energy and faith more than the body can give, to finally give out. The day shoulders through our personal gravities. With a slight shift on the wind current as if to eventually make up its mind, the white dirigible turns cloud faint over the long horizon - its guy-ropes whisker thin, the day languid. H A L L O M O O N, H A L L O M O O N Janis Joplin had duende, made her feel good but can you take it? The Stone Age people worshipped the heart, hardline love of elements. The vision meets the image perfectly. MOON BOUNCING radio operators call it - Kepler dreamed this too. Signals bounce back visually. If you’ve the right equipment you become the man without qualities, a prism in your hand. You don’t know the weight of heartwood. And, who do you love anyway? You went past your original, became mud only to become human once more. Something remembered you. With a kind of irradiance, your soft focus fell back upon me through an arch of greenery. Q U E E N S T R E E T R I O T The breaking of the shield. Clouds beat out their gongs, call the pohutukawa bloom to the Auckland summer. Above glass office blocks, black as tornadoes, the gong beat out again, boomed the length of Queen Street. At Aotea Square the crowd smiles, hangs in the balance under an overturned moon. A hundred heads turn as one to meet recognition. And the dream? That becomes the body working inside its costume. The breaking of the shield. Night falls with a thickness of batons. Riot police, armed, visored, moving upon the hobbled hearts of the people (violent against property and themselves) moving from side-streets under shields, riot police moving in one black net to catch Auckland. And the deed? That becomes a moment in time. The moon thumps the blue wrists of Queen Street up from a darkening sea. The Lady Mayor walks by flashing cameras, walks by the doll-house city broken on the black and white screen of Aotea Square. And this hour turns the colour of pale, lemon light. The breaking of the shield. G U A R D I A N S, N O T A N G E L S Lake Wairarapa? I think it the eye of the fish Maui hauled. A still place at sea level, brackish. A grey pupil over which weather comes makeshift to Martinborough from the coast. For each of us there exists a mystic-scape drawn from fact; the image recurs stealthily. Lake Wairarapa waits for the keeper of its colours through dream vigilance. Lake George? Gold tussock suggests it. A deepening breath defines to a temporary surface, vapours through heat, sinks, rises again. As though it wished to retrieve itself back through time and is remembered elsewhere. No one knows how, yet a certain guesswork stays, like the way Turner blurred the sky and smeared the shock of living, made a moist gauze of light. Could it be done? To reshape the globe into a cube not flung elliptical, but rolled upon its points. Continuously, the unseen figure stumbles out of the park made perfect by a perfect hand, and under a scapula moon chases thought toward contentment. N I C H O L A S C H A R L E S B O C H S A 1 7 9 1 - 1 8 5 6 Camperdown cemetery, Sydney I liked your story and the stone placed by your lover, Ann Bishop, in St Stephen’s cemetery. How Ann left her composer husband Henry to his knighthood and in Paris found you, Nicholas Bochsa. You became lovers, travelled the continent giving concerts, she with her magical voice and you with your lyre. Then you sailed on to Sydney and your final curtain call at the Royal. Did the ‘Agents of Napoleon’ truly track you down under, pay you off for crimes of embezzlement? You knew return to France meant immediate arrest and jail. Knowing you were dying you wrote your own requiem, a loud laugh at Catholicism. After, Ann gave you an Anglican burial and the whole town turned out. She never looked back, continued on to China. So you took thousands from the emperor, shows you knew a good rort, were pretty good with your hands. I R I N A R A T U S H I N S K A Y A, F R E E D Something has lit up your Motherland. Whose eyes? What flock of birds? Camplights? Late summer eve and the freeway insists its traffic through wind. Rubbed off sound. Handfuls of enjoyment coming and going. Not the noise of barbed wire dragged through snow, and not the dull weight of concrete at Zone 4 Mordovia. Irina Ratushinskaya, would this have reached your last address before your Russian God brought you safe to England, and safely to her hospitals, to the freeworld and a million little decisions? Handfuls of shouting reach out from solitary confinement, your breath amplifies and your words bite warmth. Something has lit up your Motherland. A N D A L L T H E G O O D T I M E C H A R L I E S for my mother, Cecily Joan McCormack, 1920 - 1990 Striding girls spill from office blocks, cool light through May leaves. The moon, a hayrick unsettled before palings of cloud. A bat caught on wire makes one buckled lampshade. Your generation ends with you now. Swell, so long! I see chrome hubs spinning backward along green embankments under a tribute of elm. Something carries through laughter like a klaxon, and shuffles black swans over the Taieri river. The town clock ceased sometime back in 1920, when brassy sounding trams halted by the Band Rotunda. J O H N K E A T S C A M E O N T O O S T R O N G To Fanny his girl he did. To think, if telephones existed in those days, what a mess he would’ve made of it. Verily, the best Romantic is an isolated one. Post-by-carriage. Reflection through a long sea-cliff stroll. A quiet cough in Rome, or blood the colour of port? So he’d write Fanny and say: ‘On the 21st of this month, Sunday at 10.30 a.m. precise, check out Shakespeare’s sonnet No. 38, ditto, I’ll do the same. Thinking of you.’ She didn’t give a rat’s arse for John as genius and he never got to bonk the woman. He just couldn’t cope. O My Belovéd, so it is that in the mind’s eye I scale you down to little dimensions, and you but a gentle cough away. T H E D E C A D E E R S Yi-yippee-yo! The picket line of verse slingers stretches back to the ‘50s. The decadeers ride on in anthological gallop to blaze the way with found poetry into one more famous sunset. Kerouac is laid back on the trail, strung out beneath the bo-tree. Bukowski has lit out for the badlands of L.A. Stead’s skull hangs over the ripped off limbs of embryo poets at El Academia. Jacques Derrida signs up, notches a trope on the butt of language: - they ride on off the page onto the stage. All that day smoke rose untroubled from the desk-top mesas into a blank sky. In the borderless regions the racist ape yawled through the stadiums of Europe. Then night came fast as a fax, and as they leaned into saddles on that wordless waste, each writer pondered: what had been altered by the observation of it? The furor poeticus sang like a great wind down the Information Highway. from I S L A N D S O F W I L D E R N E S S A R o m a n c e 1 9 9 6 15. Love is a way back to the first sense before association, beyond the large, lit city of mind, to departure before it became loss, to memory before it became sorrow, and so on back to original models before we bought the bright, imitative ones. On hearing the above, her brow arched into a bow, dismissively. His discoveries sank, this in turn gave rise to pity, and so on. Grafton, Auckland, 1981 22. As you wait to come back, lives mass to concussion. Past sunsets froth up like fizz from a bottle. You are left with hat in hand before the task had begun. What is discovered is the backward gesture. The gun returns to the holster and the victim judders upright. We do not worry forward but stalk the old securities. The rest is ambush. 29. Then the rats up and left. Much later, the pied-piper and the townsfolk, following upon the greedy heels of illusion, walked into the mountain. Tough. So she plays the song she wants to hear inside another’s head. Or did. Until the echo came back like a boulder telling the same old story: in the beginning was ‘The Word’ for those with heart enough to hear. 32. DEAR LADY, regard my heart as a waiting room. The magazines lie fanwise on the empty seat. The poster reads: SAVE THE BEECH FORESTS. An undergrowth of light through bamboo blinds warms the body’s mind. My hands make an appointment with your breasts, and that mountainous plateau of exquisite flowers where you hail me from. 35. All the tough kids got married and made a homework full of kids who went to school and got tough and didn’t believe what mum and dad said. I let loose my dart at you. But the message inside was too heavy and I missed. I wanted to say I would walk you home because that’s where the heart is, and, if I am to find yours it’s the first place I would look. 44. In the ancient city of Jaffa yellow steps descend to the whale’s belly, to white weddings in cool, stone rooms. Shalom. Between the explosions and the weather life is matter-of-fact. But today space is tense and boasts occupations, like bunkers built on the moon. At the dead centre of this amphitheatre the echo laps back from my feet. Unavoidable. 45. Yeah, there were props of wind, gusty and folded, and the weather satellite did its job days ahead of schedule. Other signs, too. The picture jolted sideways a bit but no one felt it. Significance came later, after the laughter swung on a boom around the room. None dared to name it. About then, the dame in furs pulled the grate on the lift, leaving the wise-guys to hang out in the vestibule. 51. ‘Spirit and flesh don’t work,’ she said, ‘together.’ Upon this thought stole the man with stockinged head. Her words climbed as broomsticks over the willow trees. ‘To avoid the rape,’ she said, ‘allow the aggression.’ And so she had been beaten into division. Softly, the night with its protective arm drew across her eyes. 55. The tubular wind. The motorcycle beat of snow on Arctic wastes. That’s me moving into frame. A hunched figure fur-edged against the cold. O bring back the ghosts. Against the closed set of my heart, under the laddered sky, O my love, this is a preview to let you know I don’t mean it. This is an emerald iceberg I float / to you. 58.* On her sad pilgrimage she leaned into hills on her way home, forever bent against nostalgia, to where she has always been, that childhood round as a world. Impossible now. And this is why she is still going, caught there on the track under the green cliff, as though it were merely a day’s walk away. *Under the collection’s original title, Romances, No 58 was taken by the New Zealand painter, Tony Fomison (1939-1990) as title and dedication to a work which depicted this scene. 61. The Orient (lighted beads quickly flipped through the hands of darkness) Express. The gentleman with the black fedora didn’t move a muscle. The lady with diamond fingers, languished. And then, the thin-lipped man. A hiss of steam under the vaulted roof. The dream ended abruptly on a high note as the lady slumped forward onto the sign: R18. SUITABLE FOR ADULTS ONLY. Awatea Rd, Parnell, Auckland, 1983 67. Night of Warehouses. The wind of God blows through ventilation ducts rank as carbolic. Lucky Luciano makes a deal with Dutch Schultz. Rat-ta-tat-tat-tat. ‘Even if you ain’t seen it, you’ve heard it all before.’ ‘Sure, it reminds me of a dream I never had.’ And the two old priests drink and roll dice and each harbours a gangster in his heart. France Street, Newton, Auckland, 1984 76. Sparrows pack in a family above the sea-sound of traffic. Under busted cornices and behind neon billboards night rain saddens to yellow. Sparrows pack in a family on the green, underwaterstreets of May, in Vienna. I once looked with hard knowing, the seeing is circular now. Gulls turn through the gusty wet of this hour, and so I hear you. 78. On the dark side of a cold hill (they sang) bullets were the one light, and roses blossomed from out his chest (they sang) against a green, green sky. He dreamed then of being tossed into the Spanish night on the horns of the sun. Federico Garcia Lorca, the most humble of village fountains lifts its sword to clash against the icicles of the moon, your silence. 86. Rain solid as riot gear on beach palms, the day flexible under Cyclone Gaddafi. A landing barge pulls to the cove and the General proclaims a Banana Republic. Props: pink canvas chairs and lettuce green towels. Back on Lava Mountain natives fire up the Bicentennial Beacon. The South Pacific sure has a lot to answer for but -, that’s cool. Chelmsford St, Newtown, Sydney, 1988 87. ‘Look pal, men do it for prestige, and women for security, so write that across the sky. Both demand different things, relationships, that is.’ Roman de le Rose was rooted out centuries ago, killed off with a high powered mix of cynicism and freedom. In fact, the last couple seen heading into the labyrinth was Laurel and Hardy, looking terribly confused. 91. Tank tracks down the arm of Afghanistan. Supertankers plunge into the Persian Gulf. We forever enact a terrible knowledge, that all of us contain the negative of the ‘Big Bang,’ are those self-same atoms. Energy continuously surfaces as anger, creation turned inside-out. Sacred domes on the highest mountains revolve toward that farthest point of fleecy light. 92. True ham of the heart, you inflect attic-sad at the moon, farm affections out on the car phone. Vowels populate over mansard roofs, you’re in Paris; over ganoid slick of gutters, you’re in New York; over stained counterpanes, you’re in Kings Cross. ‘When I hear the word heroin I reach for my magnum,’ says the ansaphone. Well - how do you feel? 93. You promised you’d show me an Argentinian rainforest where the butterflies harvest moisture from massive waterfalls! I thought of Lord Greystoke who couldn’t hack the fashions of the ‘90s: char-a-bancs, steam engines, banners and brass, frock-coats, the formaldehyde; and with force majeure (leaving Sir Ralph skidding on a tea-tray off the landing) went back. 94. Disappointment hung slack like rope on a bollard. town planners downed pens when we missed out on the America’s Cup. Seminal designs for the Auckland harbour boulevard went up in smoke. And when Mlle Leprieur blew up the ‘Rainbow Warrior’ she got the perfect ‘gitaway’ holiday! a South Pacific Hideaway. Now she’s home and pregnant, a little live corpse afloat inside her. 98. Sails whiter than an Opera House tilt toward the continent flat as a postage stamp, lift to the Centre Point Tower. Discovery Day is, what it is. And give the blacks the old heave-ho in the wake of the first fleet. There’s the balloon hike and Expo 88, there’s the woodchip graft from a grateful parliament, futons and Snugglepot Awards. Discovery Day is, what it is. And give the blacks the old heave-ho in the wake of the first fleet. 100. Pitiless is a word disowned. It is honour minus object, subsumed, majestic as a Shade. Buried metres down and locked in ice, it is irretrievable as a mammoth. Pitiless is a word like extinction. It is rain sweeping vast tracts of basalt. It haunts the migratory paths of ungulates and birds. Pitiless is a word of immense resource, and wakes in delicate, ancient heat. 101. The millennial turtle parted ocean plates. Goldrush on the Pacific rim of Fire, Misima Is. Papua New Guinea. On quarried thermal reserves of Rotorua. On open-cut volcanoes of Polynesia. On atolls landscaped as heliports, and mines worked by repatriated ethnic groups. Ladies and Gentlemen, I unveil this devolutionary model, an infrastructure worthy of Disney or Darwin. 103. What history, that of Cultural Apologists, or the Individual Egoist? A.M. on the semiotic main, post-modern pirates plunder 3-D ghost ships for Found Booty. Kierkegaard makes a leap but hit the deck. Umberto Eco makes a movie. In the Captain’s quarters a Chubb safe and mementos of Miss O’Hara. The word processor broadsides: COME. AS. YOU. WERE. PM. from U N M A N N E D 1 9 9 9 C U L T U R A L M I S A P P R O P R I A T I O N Is that what I hear you cry, citizen? If a delph-glazed moon with its O so delicate pattern pans over Holland, flat as a tack, it also comes by way of the Antarctic circle right to your door-step in equal measure. If the sun clamps its golden torque on mosque or synagogue, pa, cathedral or sacred site does this endorse any one people over another? Is it your wish to head off the cultural bandits at the historical impasse, citizen, by placing a patent on your mana? Beware the polemicists who define and so divide, who aggregate authority unto self where before lay none. Symbol becomes the circumference of time and custom. It is not the thing itself, but the beautiful echo of a people’s harmonic which cannot be bounded nor weakened. Here lies the camouflage that protects the ancient matrix, the silent memory of our blood’s journey and sound leads you to it. from W O R D M A P S 1. Down By The River Of the brain, mushroom shaped as bomb blast, we project the image to fact; up river from the torrent, amongst the calmness of boulders, the angler shadow-casts looping the steady surface for the archetypal fish whose leapt arc anticipates - but the headwaters are held greyly back by a concrete-net on this dappled and uncaptured urban afternoon. He deftly flicks and spools back and forth from channel to channel. 3. False Idols It was always wood, wood along the way, and exits went from grove to sacred grove till deeper wood lay beyond the Roman shield and sword; that, though, belongs to another picture book. The lyre-bird mimics the chainsaw and Birds of Paradise spit chips. Along the Hume Hwy. east of Eden, a concrete Mountain Ash dubbed ‘Yggdrasil’ boasts a wide-screen computer enhanced vista: an arrow-straight mono-rail running from Uluru clean through the Olgas. 8. Continental Shelf Co. I officially declare the millennial Poets’ Symposium on the Age of Inner Space now open: Welcome to OCEANISM. Poets are required to be proficient in submarine mythology of an exploratory and Cousteau-esque manner, able to identify myriad life-forms luminescent yet undiscovered (except, perhaps, for the Vampire Squid) at depths unsounded, in sea-trenches unknown, free, hopefully of maritime wrecks and missiles from any epoch; whose task it is to float lines at once filigreed as plankton, filtered as sunlight. 12. “Hills Of Home” Greywacke mostly, and fat pale clay where I troubled the hills about Wellington (Brooklyn-west) that you dug through to reach China as a kid out-the-back of our place. The gorse gully and yellow flowers, black seed-pods bursting in the summer heat. Down you went past broken bottle glass to the untouched cool clay hoping any moment to pot-hole up into a paddy field through the earth’s centre. Every failed dig stayed a secret from adults, forever. G E N E R A T I O N O F ‘68 Frank O’Hara (here I’m skating slow on sacred ice) has got a lot to answer for, yet who hasn’t? Take the legacy of ‘60s poets, for example, who can’t help but write like him; syntactically careering around his blizzard of words, elbow-jolting crazily, clutching at each others’ ear-muffs, button-holing opportunity. Seems they did that as par for the course till it got too dizzy. Round and round the freedom rink they went and those who zigzagged quick or cut up rough fell back upon the railings youth-exhausted to exhale worn, cautious success, though tried not to show it. What happened to the stragglers in the maul is anyone’s guess; some unmarried, a good number courted hardship - whatever. Nobody cares overly much. The ‘60s poets they go on to write like Frank 0’Hara: fewer drop-by parties, meaner somehow. P A T B O O N E & T O N T O White-shirted (not blue) they approach in twos: “Excuse me Sir, a small moment of your time?” Soft-selling eternity and the clean-cut Hereafter. The boyish accent downloads the serious side of the American dream, eyes fixed computer bright. The other is slower, slope-shouldered and discipled, backgrounded by a blandished brain. As a child, when the God was always friendly, big as a house, long as a street and the day endless, the knock upon the door signalled: “Excuse me young man, is the lady of the house in?” Welcome the suitcased salesman; the Bon-Brush Man: big-bristled, wooden-backed scrubbing and bottle brushes, sandsoap and Brasso for hard domestic usage. Not now. These two modern peddlers head out to the brick bungalows of the inner-city suburbs selling the Light and the Way, galloping round the outer handicapped districts; brainwashed right-wing angels confident as professional sportsmen on a World Tour. T O T A L K O F F L A G S ‘The flags fall like large, hollow, monochrome leaves,’ said Ritsos, but this isn’t Greece. How can you talk of changing flags as blithely as you would a marriage? When we fly the flag it is as label to proclaim attitude, and rightly so, too: the Remembrance Day Parades, Expansionism, other people’s wars; the main street of every country town at the dying of day lights up the ‘Unknown Soldier’ - the long lists of the Dead written in lead. No, these things will always hold, rung up once yearly regular as a poker-machine. Change flags, to acknowledge what? Whose domestic honour, what custodial deaths? W O R D S T O L U R E A G H O S T an exile’s soliloquy Henley Pub? I am one year from your death, and a mad mile from your achievement twenty or so years down the track. I think you may have killed a few of us off, brother, who rejoiced in your thicket of sorrows. Jim Baxter, if a cabbage tree marks your spot by the river, I am glad of it. After you went, we were too eager for another Apollo, and the laurel was tossed from hand to poetic hand like a hot kumara. Most dropped it. A number were swept by the winter river with the eels into the underworld. The God Love and the God Vengeance sat down in a burnt out warehouse to share out the small morsels of pain. The poets are playing hide-and-seek with each other in and out of marriage. The sharing is done. A southerly whistles up over the gun emplacements on Brooklyn Hills, Jim, scattering the unposted autumn leaves. S H E E T M U S I C Like some murky storm that presages pain, or engine that mauls the curb, the stereo wallows its bass notes at the top of the head, lands soft as afterbirth. ‘If you place a white sheet over America 500 Indian Nations show like bloodspots,’ said Jim Harrison at Lake Superior, ‘the buffalo and the Big Tree’s gone too. Greed!’ Mostly, beauty is nostalgia. The random motes of a rainbow end up on the garbage heap again. These sticks which encase the Great Lakes, Jim, are the Happy Hunting ground for the likes of you and me. Men picking on the chance sounds of emptiness. The daily round of campfire, man and nature, etc. A moon patient as an escalator, maybe. It’s all been done before, anyhow. What was that about Indians leaving a flaw in the fabric for the soul to escape? Ours is the gift of factory seconds, well made, well meant through to a public we detest if you think about it. And the quickest way to solitude is via a four wheel drive, eh? There’s comfort in that mate, getting out. M Y T H & M A R I O L A T R Y At a small village not far from Manila, in the house of armaments & munitions, in a house of grenades and ammunition, the plaster statue of the Virgin Mary as humble as a trademark, stands splashed in carmine tears like some peasant shot on a quiet morning bearing water from the creek. The hovels strewn about the hills are so many broken boxes. The sun is spinning clockwise for hope. One cloud out of nowhere , then a drape of blue that might be the sky. The gathering of people is more impressive than a food drop. They come at the appointed hour when the boy who serves as runner to the Beautiful Lady arrives, breathless, with the Word. Occasionally, the statue weeps paint-fresh tears. They will leave once faith is gathered in abundance like so many wild flowers off the near mountain meadow. Here, under a glass blown moon, a cool wind shall leave this place sacred. U N M A N N E D Take this day, lonely as a man in an empty house, at his window, the wintry yard below. Sea calm. The moon scatters its coinage. A rubber dinghy bucks an orectic surf. Pebble beach. The conning-tower signals: ‘which came first, meaning or memory?’ One flashlight winks hungrily under sea-cliffs, and then the flare. This setting becomes an habitual space, chosen era for commando or smuggler. We make our choice, learn that grief comes regular as sunset. The bow-wave turned in chrome coils as the coastline dropped from view. Once in a metal-etched hour, people ran away to America, to buildings the colour of gun-metal, to a sidewalk venting steam about the ankles of sable-stockinged girls. How many of us cannot begin the adventure of the day upon its arrival? The ablutions of the night done with, the half-bad dreams wiped away, the tensions of the muscles adjusted in preparation for the perpendicular, the carpet rolled back, the masks hung up once more upon the wall at the ready. Each waking is a starting out from the old country. The responsibility of light beckons, unclothes the familiar objects and not so familiar ones. Lightning leaves the expression surprised and the lone tree in the paddock, startled with cinematic glare, unharmed and lovely. In a homely way, the headlights sweep the backyard hovering over the roped-swing in the pelting rain and neighbourhood of cat and dog. This tells you that the family is in deep trouble to be called into account in afteryears while the shutters slap wettish to little effect. Shaped as an emu neck, steam extends over the factory stack from the industrial sector in this small, southern city. A yellow band of horizon suggests sunset. The steam darkens out. Now runs at 4:15 the see-through veins of rain from window-to-sill. A splashed up forest of drops tap out what is left of this late, ruined day in July. Here there is no history, if by history you mean the soul fired in the kiln of time. Here there is only the compilation of event in a scrap-yard of days and kicked aside incident. You can still hear the settlers’ squeeze box and fiddle in suburban settlements and tavern, the landscape-flat accents, the Sky Channel applause and throat-clearing of smoke exhaust. We remember the po-faced poets who went away never to return from the Ambition Wars and Success Sorties. As always, cars chittering in long queues in the persimmon light of dusk, on freeways dreary with drizzle and distance, at the encoded city-bound intersections. He makes his heroine his addiction and vice versa, becomes the object of obsession into which safe-zone he precipitates himself, unmanned. Away now from that well worn cliché, the crazy party hat of Sydney’s Opera House / the bat-eared shells and clouds that muscle reflective buildings to the O so cloacal coil of green hills round the rectangular cattle, prominent as so many out-of-town acts in provincial centres. You pass smoothly in your car the valley below and there, an intimate scene: a family gathered shock still: the overhanging forest imaged on the coffin-lid, momentarily; then lowered into shadow. The town lies behind you. The world will change to that which forgets you, and your enthusiasms will be as a passing fashion. In this you come to understand the nature of illusion and the hoped for expectations of youth, a too-well travelled dream. Here where life recedes further into distance you will know yourself as unmanned. B R A I D W O O D for Judith Wright Granite and quartz country, once gold rush, now cattle tread amongst the white hawthorn and yellow broom; from Captain’s Flat to Major’s Creek the creek-beds cut the empty vein. Hail or heat, the hanged ghost of Thomas Braidwood rolls out his oaths big as boulders upon the town: ‘dust, poverty, despair, drunkenness’ before he choked his rage at the end of a rope, phlegm thick as gossip. Annandale, Sydney, November 4, 1996 B R I L L I A N T L O S E R S on reading Geoff Cochrane’s Tin Nimbus The gay psychologist quoting ‘The Divine Right of Kings’ and the lexicographer, his life’s dream of the Great New Zealand Dictionary, both entrenched alcoholics, both the originals Dostoyevsky might have claimed, although both stark losers by the world’s brute standards. Yes, I was there too, that late Saturday night after THE DUKE, riding the Kelburn cable-car up under the shadowy, Gothic pile of Victoria University, where furtive as hedgehogs, we found a handhold to jemmy open an illegal window, fossick the disused office for carton stacked upon carton, each one packed with indexed filing cards, meticulous references, NZ arcana, forgotten dialects, fables rare as moose from Southland, obscure derivations, etc., incalculable musings of an idealist (this he showed us) and dreamer. Here lay the singular industry of a reverential scholar, abandoned - yet thirty years on, The Oxford Dictionary of New Zealand English first appeared, penned by an academic of that selfsame city. We are the last of the witnesses Geoff, like the derelicts who took the sun sitting behind the Public Library, or sheltered in Pigeon Park, days long gone (along with THE DUKE and THE GRAND HOTEL) a city newly syllabled, yet the light remains, much the same milky white and pale as stone. W A R D R O B E D R I N K E R S is what they are in Austinmer. Yuppies from the North Shore $300,000 homes on the beach front sending the RSL broke and the greenies blocking development for a few birds up an estuary. Could be worse, given the Japs on the Gold Coast going off like mobile phones. The miners and cottages are long gone, so is full employment. In 1941 as a telegraph Delivery Boy I made 13 shillings 10 a week. Across the Harbour Bridge to the North Shore on a regulation red bike. Sunday was the day for casualty messages, the dead and wounded delivered all over Sydney except Vine street, Darlington, where Darcy the Crim lived and the most dangerous place in town. I came to Austinmer 30 years ago before the Wardrobe Drinkers in the days of the miners and cottages. Take those grain and coal carriers upwards of 250,000 tonnes with a 12 man crew, anchored stern to wind, off ‘Hill 60’ out of Port Kembla - navigated by satellite direct to Japan. You want the best view? Sublime Pt. Lookout, right down the coast, the Pacific ironed flat far as the eye can see, a sky expanded metal-red nightly. Austinmer, NSW, 1993 A U N T Y E V E who always kept the Aspidistra flying high up in her Georgian house on the windy Terrace from marble urns had lipstick bomber-pilot red and nails the colour of flame. It was often ‘elevenses’ in her lounge with Gordon’s served on a silver platter, THE CITY HOTEL, DUNEDIN 1932 engraved on the rim. ‘Another “stim” dear? ’ from the mahogany sideboard repository to dozens of weighty 78 jazz records in brown paper jackets stacked like so many ossified flap-jacks. Oh, she had the most beautiful hands (in her day) they said, used for ‘commercials’ in the Women’s Weekly & Booths the Chemists. Who could forget her gravel voice and make up mannequin thick not remember her gin-sweet breath warm upon the neck? And how some Yank billeted during WW2 (here) ‘ducky!’ thought she was a ‘real living doll.’ Oh, such beautiful hands she had and the crystal light streaming forth from those great bay windows onto the iron railings below. C O N R A D & W E L L S & CO Great to have met Joseph Conrad or for that matter, H.G. Wells, who said, ‘Let’s go upstairs and do nice things with our bodies,’ and who did just that to take a tilt at the waitress. I saw them once, Conrad and Wells, in a photograph, standing together. A courtyard setting beside a few bamboo chairs. The hour was mild in a black and white afternoon. Trees, too, green galleons shipping oars in autumn. Conrad had, perhaps, cast off the last line of a novel: the indigo lump upon the horizon is an island: behind it the sun spilling its treasure trove: the rent sail-cloth of a sea-squall. Anyway, he could still smell the coast wobble from the deck of the tartane, her weight to the wind. Wells, maybe, was thinking on socialism and science, and in some melancholic way of the waitress - and she, scented. By what conversations did they measure each other, these two voyagers who possessed that sense of the bigness of the world? For Wells, an electrical spark that arced across the white page, and for Conrad, each word creaking on the blocks, the woman pale before the moon, her eyes black as tornadoes at sea. Melbourne, 1994 ‘ B O B O R R ’ I called back down the unawakened dawn of the Tasman sea and along the East Coast from the pre-dawn light of my sleep, I called out ‘Bob Orr’ soft as the punch of a howitzer to the Hokianga Harbour and still further over the Waikato’s billiard-table green paddocks. I hailed ‘Bob’ to the Great Barrier island and ‘Orr’ to the Little Barrier, but no answer came chasing after. I sought you down the Harbour Heads, Hauraki Gulf, then all about the Waitemata. I found a thunderhead big as a container-load of sorrows and nowhere hard by were you toiling. ‘Bob Orr’ I called from Meola Reef to the outlandish fishing-tackle cranes along the docks; to Jellicoe wharf, Bledisloe wharf, Marsden wharf, Captain Cook wharf to the Admiralty Steps hoping I would find you gazing out upon the glaucous slick of trawlers, or catch you guiding a snub- nosed tug under the Western Viaduct. ‘Bob Orr’ I called down the unending roadsteads to Motutapu and Rakino Islands, back behind the wave screen at Okahu Bay to Freeman’s and St Mary’s Bay. And as I called into the Schooner Tavern, sought the drear interior of the Wynyard Tavern and the sailor’s talk told me. Y O U D O N ’ T R E M E M B E R D Y I N G Least, that’s what the Old Londoner told me who didn’t learn to relax till well past fifty, seated alongside his two mates: a Norwegian: ‘You’re not the same person now as you were ten years ago.’ And the Irishman: ‘I like the music it’s the noise I can’t stand.’ Each one, orphaned and aphoristic, deep into his sixties. NZ born and much younger, I offered: ‘You’re not the same person tomorrow as you were today.’ And then, ‘To your arrival in Melbourne,’ they singly toasted. (Great-grandfather, McCormack, arrived here in 1851. Twenty six years later in 1877, set sail for Dunedin aboard the Ringarooma). So our tale of the two cities unfolded: Sydney is get what you can. Melbourne, what have you got to offer, are we really interested. The afternoon floated by as did the trams with dry, asthmatic rush in this mellow town of bungalows and brass. you had fitted and trimmed your craft against every dire prediction to set sail on that other sea, Bob, the one that has no name and no horizon and is drowning you. G R A H A M C L I F F O R D After THE DUKE HOTEL’S demolition, (opp. Perrett’s Corner) one last joke: one DB beer bottle ringed by ten green cabbages as roseate or wreath for an empty lot. Close by, the mad bucketing fountain of Cuba Mall played on. Meanwhile, at his Manners street studio above the music shop, Graham Clifford, renowned for his Figaro, ululated profoundly through the scales. A window framed trolley-bus poles that, tacking, bluely flared along the wire. The maestro’s voice floated over harbour and city, capital and far-flung country, far from Covent Garden. A 1930s London partied on amongst black and white photographs plastered to the wall above a battered Steinway. On Brooklyn hills toi toi waved war plumes to the southerly gusts with unceasing applause. Through a hundred, sun-blown wintry afternoons he coached opera singers, actors, newsreaders, plucked notes off the yellow stained keys: - he guided, rolled golden vowels, before them. B R U N O L A W R E N C E Bruno, do you remember the Me and Gus stories, way before Barry Crump got keen, when a cow cocky was a bastard you met on gravelly roads? Recall the nights playing community halls, and days making a few records, only to break a few more? ‘Ricky May’s Jazz Combo’, ‘Max Merritt & The Meteors’, ‘Quincy Conserve’, plus, the all-stars-road-show Blerta( travelling Aotearoa, through khaki paddocks, down thistle blown highways in that diesel bus - seasonal rhythms you doubtless gathered, drummer extraordinaire, on your final journeying off Cape Reinga, the spirit freed to ride the rain - you backed the loner to the last, death the bottom line to stave off cancer. Bruno, you did that thing. R & B, jazzman, film star (didn’t Jack Nicholson say get on over to Hollywood?) but you preferred back-blocks, sought small towns, river shingle, the hollows of the land, and a home around Waimarama in the Hawke’s Bay. A shifting romantic, hoon and hangman, a real joker you played yourself-sans-bullshit in a heap of movies; The Wild Man, Ute, you leapt from life to art without a hitch; A Bridge To Nowhere, The Quiet Earth, how you loved women, warmth by the bus load, produced that classic - my 12 inch, record of the blues. ( Bruno Lawrence’s Electric Revelation and Travelling Apparition. S T O R K The scene is of a deep rural setting done by one unhurried Impressionist, say, pre-World War 1, c.1907. Every thing luxuriant, soft and round, the paint is combed out by cordial summer breezes. Countryside: Poland, a rained-on morning, the distant plash of milk into wooden pails sounds thinner than its clotted creaminess. The cobbled yard is blue and wet after the morning’s sluicing; alder, elm or poplar wind-breaks, but what shows through is the church spire you would observe if you lifted your gaze up from the unhitched wagon, its spars tilted off skyward from the fields, past chimney, gable, farmstead. The stork is afloat here on its top - though - bottom heavy nest of thickly woven twigs which throws the scene into surreal proportion, suggesting a still hour of witches and moonlight moving stealthily through the forest’s black patches. Stork, calm as a weather-vane (a model) presides over maize and barley crops, that brighten through weeks of high summer, stretch tight as a canvas to the nearby farms, and further still, to centuries old, grassy marshlands from which the stork feeds its nestlings. from T H E S T I L L W A T C H E S III Who can offer words unsullied by the age like the sad integrity of a Graham Greene? Generations pass on into unchartered waters, the lights out along the deck. Behind, the flood-lit logging of Malaysia gluts the Japanese market. Ahead, seals choke in the heavy metal swell of the Baltic Sea; or through a destiny as choppy as a Berryman sonnet, the earth seemed unearthly in a hold of love lashed to the bulkheads of youth one time, O it was sometime ago. But now, the hour hangs out centre-stage, a cat whiskered moon doffs into darkness and ushers in a Qantas jumbo to Kingsford Airport, down the runway to Eastern Standard Time, and a continent the memory of elsewhere. Welcome tourists to the whirl of Kings Cross, a caged fan spinning the night through, shredding the Sydney dreamers. Out along THE WALL you can solicit your night-long visas where the bare-chested boys thrust hips from the bonnets of old Holdens. High up on the bulging stonework and boldly sprayed: ‘It’s going to rain tonight, so take a bullet proof vest,’ or, ‘No war on the way, only a change in the weather.’ Welcome the eagle-eyed predators come to roost in the coops of the cities. Let us go down to the docks again to the fat silos that overshadow Iron Cove Bridge, toward the inner- harbour, where craft coloured and alive on the paintbox waterways streak around and about, caught up against the shark-net constructions of Patrick White. Welcome the waves of early morning fog that break upon the sky-gardens, and the iron clad poppy of Centre Point Tower. VI He will come urgent as a food riot. Beware the man who sheds tears of mercury. His cough alone will thin out the ozone. He grips oceans with the black fingers of trawlers. His voice is a slow leakage in the Third World night. Beware the waste-broker. He comes to paint your well-springs ivory black and chrome yellow. You will know him by his industrial oath: ‘$40 a drum! yes, only $40 a drum!’ Senegal, Nigeria, West Africa, the sun dangerous as a forty-gallon drum. Drums stacked on rotting pallets in the back yard of tropical forests. Drums swollen like the bellies of starved children with toxic waste. Under the red copper basin of the sun, under the broken crockery of stars, Senegal, Nigeria, West Africa. Meanwhile, George MacDonald flees the evil wood through the unreflecting mirror of 19th century time, a prophet of the cinema. O cine-romance! Tony Curtis (sword glint of light off teeth) and Natalie Wood, beautiful in white tulle (lungs not yet water-logged) in heady love. Follow their laughter with an open-top Lagonda down the white-walled roads of Mt. Aetna to the Port of Catania - a blood-boiling swerve to the red-chequer table, fishing boats moored in the blue dusk. Woody Allen steps from the screen to the dead crystal lakes of Sweden. A wavering moon-disc lies reflected there under an Excalibur beam of light. Clouds, too. Those ancient purities across my triptych window-view-of-the-sky package air as light as styrofoam. The lighthouse beam chills the sandhills and oceans gather up whale breath to cloud. Our civilisation bartered on the whale’s back. Love undrinkable as water. The silent film of fantasy which is night plays out through the ivory keys of stars. VIII Surgical strike of the stars at the Persian Gulf. Romance of the World! How deadly our longing for peace on this earth round as an ideal. Delicately, we remember WW2 bombers romanced in archival film-footage like forks tossed across a transformer dark sky. David Niven steps lightly under the arched stone bridge, and brushes the dust of a crushed building from finger-tips by the flares of a London sky. ‘Childhood is the last-chance gulch for happiness,’ he says. Havel plays the Pied-Piper astride his multi- coloured cavalcade. A wave of the hand old fashioned as anger, and he goes home to the Democratic Mountain, civilly. Salman Rushdie rides the magic carpet quicker than Qantas. ‘The World is surreal,’ he cries, ‘tis no more than a game of hide-and-seek,’ and whizzes past into the future. Lange gleefully corks the evil jinnee of Baghdad, then flies onto the green embrace of Aotearoa with the freed twelve. Where once the melancholy bombs from heaven fell to glut a village, 1000 grey cranes have returned to the Mekong Delta in the month of pure light. One herd of elephants also returned to the tropical jungle where before was none. A pure green is that light and not the green of crouching camouflage. I bend to my past, for there is a corner of the sky forever my childhood: Rupert Brooke frolics through the soft Edwardian light with Virginia, dreams of fish-heaven. Bad William thumps the shit out of poor Aunty Ethel. Every poem is the last will and testament of the soul, and every lover who breaks from lover, commits a crime unto passion. Romance of the World! IX Sun shines metallic off Footscray and out across Westgate bridge. Silver & green office blocks rise from a dun plain. Superman, bearing a stash of old money darts over the dockside and the hidden sea home to Melbourne. The thought of you adds weight to new memory - sad as lamplight on rain sodden guttering. Sadder still is the Romantic lapsed to obscenity, the swine tides that clog the spirit. Again, I drive my centre to the eye of your hurricane. Remember how the senses wrangled, anger like a vicious exorcism of betrayals not worded? To run is to hide is to freely admit the hidden hurt. Volscian woman, we flung our fire at each other heavy as fists. The old man sits in the park feeding pigeons; like his memories, they are grey-blue and flutter about him. My memory of you from any perspective falls along the flat face of this earth. No lamp lit up our consciousness, only the blade figured the light, Psyche. ‘The funeral of the sea’ sings the Italian documentary. The world’s rotting oil-fleet blanks out the Mediterranean from the French coast to the Bay of Naples. Six hundred burning black candles turn crude the Arab night and Red Adair pots another well. Oil Magnates! Corporate Cowboys! Have you built your little ship of death, O have you? And there in the deep the Great Underwater Colonialist, Jacques Cousteau, laments the dark night of the sea, his eyes are the colour of basalt. Today we have part-time cloud & the hours work at it cruel as barbed wire drawn across the face of the moon. What then is this other? It is the shadow personality, ‘evil comes from the power of evil.’ It is the third presence. O Romance of the World. X Crack of whips in sub-stations and the horizon lights up like a Lucas/Spielberg movie. Tonight toward Blacktown helicopters make astrological moves sideways. Earlier, a trail-blazer made one caesarean cut along the western sky. The 6 O’clock news brought with it race riots & rapes, an eclipse of weather which threatened the following day, the unsteady peace of tomorrow. 60 million hectares of saliferous planet, and a new desert creeps toward Central Europe. There is salt in the wound of the earth. Closer now comes the yearly pilgrimage with candleflame of lava to light up Mt. Fuji in ninety- nine turns of the track. Refuse of light and all that glitters. As the Stealth Bomber slides East night advances swift-footed over the Empire, over the roll-call of the New World Order. Watch the southern sky shuffle the South China sea & galaxies thick as krill. Japanese fishing boats stack the decks with amputated fins by the tonne. Sharks loll dumb as torpedoes on waters flenched in blood. The Yugoslav Republics grow tired and another 25 frames of tankfire roll off the screens from Croatia. ‘Pain is the visible urge to memory,’ says the Anchorperson. Radio KGB hits the airwaves with a global countdown from Tass and Reuter & AAP. Back in Ontario, escalators whisper to the underground shopping plazas and the Gallic snows fall loudest on Quebec. Frost at mid-night lies as silent as The American Dream, and all along the border night moves. ‘This train don’t run no more this train. Yo! this train don’t run no more and Canada’s cut in half,’ calls David Suzuki. Hush now, the cyber-freaks sleep. Soundlessly, the Hubble telescope gears its focus. XII O to wish upon a falling space shuttle! The sky tries hard to reveal itself as bluestone, but temperature and wrappings of cloud are against it. Rain falls hard as luck. Here you will see them lift up, a squadron of pigeons swinging to gun the light, wings ablaze, the bulky horizon thunderous where thunder lies cognisant. The Great Dividing Range runs this way and I am on the lee-side toward the sea. The setting sun awakens our ancestral demand for bonfires big as cities, and a leisurely parade of gulls passing overhead mistake the darkening hours for sea-cliffs. These coastal towns boast the best burgers, the newest surf club - while the RSL bends to the heavy metal swell which runs the raft of every sea-slap every weekend. The short, broad streets are abandoned early to the blue phosphorescence of the TV and the evening rustle of newspapers. Tomorrow, of course, is uninhabited and fresh as a child’s drawing. Further on through the minutes someone is hard at a hammer as if wanting to be let in. A news bulletin tells of avenues long as decades in a steepled town where tanks gather, ready to break through a hay barn in Kosovo. (Remember the Revolutionary Poet * who broke through a crowd?) No, this is only a rusted keel up-ended in the quarter-acre backyard. Not by some turbulence round Cape Horn but the tedium of a bankrupt dream loose as a cloud. The family seams have now sprung apart and the kids school the public bars. A day in the round for the father who breaks through the top-shelf like a picket-line. At the local cinema watch the astronaut yawn, unaware the alien prepares to storm the spaceport wordless as a threat. It’s dusk here, mist drowns streetlights, the earth for a time puts aside its hunger, and a delayed flight fills in for the evening star of Autumn. * Mayakovsky N E W P O E M S 1 9 9 8 - 2 0 0 0 O F R O O F S We encamp ever outward on the outskirts where flung cities are fringed with builder-men. We pay no heed to green-softened paddocks, we quoin the paced lot and the first nail driven home. When all is boxed and ribbed we sniff out the new roof-beams, chemical timbers, and to that emptiness install our kind in shadow, shavings; we lug our histories behind within us. Long surfaces, slate, tin or terra-cotta are the flat tilt inhabited by the roof-genii who once relished burnt offerings to hard seasons. Each surface directs an angled flatways that exists within the context of the sun, the rain and space, and notably presence is attributed wholly to the resonate cries of large birds, and the stooped, whispered inflexions of departed occupants; elusively, they avoid tricky zones of the fabled: (Golden Hesperides to leaden Boeotia). They inhabit the realm of chimney and the gable; here lies the true province of the roof-genii and bats, not witches click about these sentinels. T A F F Y T H E T U R T L E “ Poets run away to broadcasting like sailors to the sea ” - Dylan Thomas ‘...organ pipes of the luminous...’ I turned then, and there on the beach lay Dylan ‘the extravagant’ Thomas washed up in the spume in the guise of a turtle, no less! At first, I didn’t recognise him until he gaped and spluttered. ‘...glory..the sundering ultimate...’ peeping from beneath his carapace, round and bald as a Welsh hillock. After a respectful silence, I greeted him, ‘You’ve - come back?’ ‘...cathedrals of the sea...’ he intoned. ‘Those reports, retiring back into childhood, many of us came to believe...’ ‘Curlews and wrens’ eggs,’ he resonated. ‘That messy business abroad, the hell-raising...’ ‘Troy drowned in the eye of an albatross.’ ‘And the intoxicating affairs, surely?’ ‘O lovely Anna, thighs sweet as an estuary’ issued from the depths of the leathery chest. He turned then, hung on the crest of a wave, as quickly as he came, disappeared out to sea. T R E A S U R E I S L A N D Hidden in the sand dune of his dream the child engages his fancy for the unattainabe, the man he wishes to escape in the coming years; when hauling to the cove in deepest sleep of night, they arrive, bushy-bearded and cutlass-toothed, groaning through the breakers with the loot, pacing out the surf, they lay the chest beyond the reach of any map which he sketches in his dream to be plundered in a later year when all the bets are off. He – no longer beguiled, but tossed upon his learnéd ambitions, makes it through the adolescent scrub to the safe house found, his task to stave off discovery and finally mark that spot, open as a grave. L I T T O R A L Sickle clouds cut light down at dusk, bright silver from the blades thump earth. Rolling over a noisy sunset the rain deep green of the tropics. This is dance, the celebration of rhythm and physical memory upon mangroves. Coastal culture, it is the light which makes it seem so young, through this ancient dalliance rubs away at boundaries and the tanned bodies of girls with thighs round as roasts – how that laughter thins to tease the surf. As though some tired, or dying hand loosened its grip on the lit paper and the line of ink, flounced, indented, to create this coastline and its promise of islands, only later came the imposed resorts, each with its brighter cube of water, concrete curbed, safely contained from the lush foam and the off-station beat of the sea. “ O L D E S T P I N E ” A 10,500-year-old Huon pine, believed to be the world’s oldest tree, was handed back to Tasmania yesterday by mining company Pasminco. Sydney Morning Herald, April 24, 1998 Years grew in rings, but my earliest memories sought bird-dialect, the hush of water and wind. Men could hear then, stood with forest-silence; the leaf-like breathing at my base made speech. The loud and glacial grumbling of boulder - ice ceased in my first years, ferns eventually uncoiled. I thought myself ever which is now at a closing; yet I did not regard this end without mystery. Other pine-tree that built memory in fire onto their bark’s surface, recorded an earlier time; they hide mostly in the moist gullies and deep rift valleys (branches radial): an ancient pine tree. Unchanged - whose photo is found locked in the earth’s element, an old family and they are few. The wide-branched rivers that angled mirrors under the sun, are gone underground, they emerged from within the ice-tides, mountains fell when the sky opened, the seas had retreated. They are shadow leaves. They flow many-branched. They house every myth. They rise in me to air. T H I S W A Y That nightly sound is something else, hardly a series of chords, though through waves slur into a particular noise as through a lop-sided mouth; motor-bike, bus, laughter or scream. Yet underpinning this, that same uniform growl going nowhere intentionally but into itself, back into the city. If you could see them, you’d know that those boot-scuffed clouds are the dirty bits left over from the day; a star holds to the sky’s rounded toe, more stars and it’s steel-capped. It took centuries for the cities to get to this, from easy camp-fire cluster, shield and spear clatter or wood-crackle. Once the guttural rasps of yes and no had coagulated into walled-images, the blaze of blood and light gave over to these arteries, to the vessels of glass. The old migratory paths are soon rediscovered by armies in triumphal procession through the broad thoroughfares, and under arches as though into caves. ‘This way;’ it says, ‘this way,’ a call that is at once all utterance or none, a deep cave-sound, the primal rumour, conspiracy, beginnings, heat and cold. E R G O P O E M To grizzle away at truth, just me and my shadow in some private alchemy; these days, poets my be heard not whispered at. From my balconied-box, traffic slides its abacus of constants. If the clouds look fair, the sun pulls its gleety light onto Glebe dwellings. Hurrah! the neighbourhood. Think only this of me and a place I call home and away flits the mind from this southern realm though nowhere doth it fly radial. Evasive? Let me run that by again; commitment is forever saying in truth I told you so and though your eyes be grey as glass, I say, give it a rest here in my brushwood heart that you may fossick to a regular beat and your heart’s simple content: therefore, if alas ‘t is true, I have gone here and there, did march to a different drum, so be it. S U M M E R C U P * “Champions don’t win by lengths anymore” - Jack Ingham From tourney to cavalier, from huntsman to troubadour, the jockey, caparisoned in the silk of carnival for a spring race and a bet, with the best he was, Beadman. He tapped his luck and often as not eased quick to the finishing, to fall fast through to the line on a colt, chestnut or roan, to earn the applause and more, laurel you might say, the leaf or lictor’s rod to hold chalice-high several times he did the Melbourne, Caulfield and Gala Day Randwick ride; the glass or silver winner’s cup. Beadman rode with kind hand and long rein, exampled himself with the Greats of The Game: Breasley, Moore, Pike, Higgins, Munro - names gold-runged for the racing records. Beadman then, at 32 retired, become apostled by choice to clergy and God who made his undoing willingly, in this downunder, sometime O so underhanded country, he freshly apprenticed to his calling; a humble stable-boy, Lord, in a worldly manger. * The acclaimed jockey, Darren Beadman, ran his final race at Randwick on Boxing Day, 1997. He came out of retirement in 1999. E M B L E M F O R D E A D Y O U T H THERE ARE NO EXPERTS ONLY SURVIVORS Over the past five years in the Great South Land, a primary dissipation of energies; 2,500 youth suicides, in fact. We pause to consider this phenomenon: 2,500 small white crosses neat as napkins laid out in geometric patterns upon the parliamentary turf sweeping up to the Big House. Small white crosses, abstract as wing-nuts or butterflies, each one pinned to the yellow grass lapel though, hauntingly, branded onto the mind’s dumb hide. With each grief-prone parent, pain inflates safe as an air-bag. Small towns outback spin to emptiness. Moonrise is a chalk outline after the going down of the sun. Stars swing bright herds into the dark corrals. There’s movement at the station; a murmuring engine through woodland, sky velocity blue as gun-metal. T U N D R A F L I G H T The black blizzard has been at work for a week now, and even the huts (if there are huts) seem to sag under the snow. Soon the airport will open again, but the road to it will remain closed, such is the tundra landscape of Russia on a provincial airline in winter. The pilot is close to retirement, but his patience will never give up on the romance that is his life - whose skills remain memorable though the aircraft is missing the odd nut and bolt; only serves Turkish crackers for its one main meal. ‘If pilots drink,’ they say, ‘the last toast is a silent one between friends’ before departure. So it is. “Clear skies,” they raise their vodka glasses, “Soft landings,” the muted clink, muted as the snows which fold out over the tundra. The runway can be found here safe as a clothes-brush, sad as the heavy uniform and brocaded cap hangared at home for the last time: before we depart, a final toast! S A L L E D ’ A T T E N T E a portrait And what if they didn’t meet up, coupled by the twin lines that seemed to lead her thoughts endlessly out, coiling through the Rockies, through the mountain reaches and conifer; her lover on the oil-rumoured plateau snowed in, maybe, snowed under beyond the pass, working his claim? Luggage stacked on the platform, hat-boxes, portmanteau, steamer trunk as miniature of her country estate; she waited the engine’s plumed arrival. Fennel scent stung the nostrils in the late autumn air, and somewhere, vaguely distant, a storm detonated at the peaks, powdered a piece of sky. No voice reached her through the October afternoon in that waiting-room, and no one either came or went, only the signal-box mutely shuffled its gears. C O P E S T O N E F O R A N A T I O N Here is the place which flourished once in rampant dishonesties, and there stands the sheered monument erected to important absences, boldly the canker creeps and, like the last of the sun’s rays, heat fabricates a welcoming where none existed before, no traveller passed by these ruins, no winding silk road or camel track, no ancient canal, only an endless sheep-spill over river shingle, dogs heard working the memory with river boulder, that turns deeply, cold and hollowing; cloch - the same sound found in every river valley. While the hill terraces make some sort of corbelled framework for this scene, though slightly faded below, aslant upon the wall of recollection, behind glass (the car window) winding down toward what appears a solitary copse, to an indecipherable, ox-bow signature. While autumn sets up its garage sale with the season’s odds and ends, gravity leans into distortion; first orange, then pale yellow, a row of poplars shuffling close over the lake road, vying for another golden moment in the aging process, the putty-coloured cliffs behind you. Autumnal orange, yellow, black, as the first primitive frescoes from the ochre quarries, dank as rust or the smell of dead oxygen, these poplars lead this valley out onto the flood plains, birthplace of the city, upon whose heights the first rituals of praise were offered up as thanks against the flooding to each and every localised, individual God or climate, and in whose seasonal favours the inhabitants trusted, the city and the temple as one, the temple both defence and memory, commemoration of the river’s flow and speech, each flood mythically retold. Further still though ‘dull days of clouds’ announce your arrival: wayfarer, a windblown highway, the lantern on the hook; as now the neon panelled comfort-stop fuzzes with insects, a smell of oil and rubber, no attendant, the rolled back whites of numerals clicking up the dollars. Whatever passed this way, has past, passed away in the direction you’re headed, finally - to the cities of the plain; somewhere, the country breathes largely in the dark behind the comfort-stop. Overhead, the tilting crater lake of the night sky, stars caught up on its black surface. T H E M A N G A W E K A S After the viaduct was dismantled the Mangawekas and river valleys stayed on. The moon maintained its guardianship under sliding shadow and within the silent and abandoned hour of night. That massive boulder set in a creek-bed stands immemorial yet the bevelled morning light discovers bridge remnants - an arch truss, a foundation block. You passed this way before, are not likely to again. Your footprint on mud-dunes will soften by the next flax-woven eddy. I know of a river-bend, and the spread river-shingle slowly flung upon the slanted afternoon light, handfuls of young poplars scattered over the valley floor. On a downward drive through these ranges, soap grey slate could landslip you off a hair-pin, into this view that the rear-vision mirror spans beneath, or angles before you. T H E G O O D O L D D A Y S The old radiators heat elliptically, green painted pipes run up the walls with an elbow-sleeve right hand turn (optional) following off where the ceiling heads, that is, to venetian blinds, eternally slanting a dirty look at the day and down periscope through the thick, wide grained floor timbers but not before (alongside a wire-mesh In/Out tray) the cardiganed public servant languidly taps his pipe and pats the tea-urn, sips regulation Dept of: - cups, while the overhead fan blade stirs and stirs the air: Oh, Jane stayed on (marvellous with the Christmas balloons!) while Dorothy left, a promise of silk-stocking and musk. No forwarding, of course, (except, maybe, the ‘60s) a leather-strapped suitcase and a railway platform on the Overnighter headed God knows where into the interior I shouldn’t wonder (or the suburbs which amounts to the same thing) to what - tent city? No thoughts on that one Bunty! And no damned prospects most likely, still she’s got her own life to lead...those boards now varnished, the pipes detailed a ruffled and light grey; ‘superb apartments’ at the upper executive end of the scale, and no earthly sign of Dorothy, though the pipes continue to knock in that odd - annoying way. T R A N S M I S S I O N Clouds continue to unroll as blue-prints about the globe; ocean eddies newly discovered swirl off continental shelves. Old geological pressures continue to build and to slide, compacting profit and pollution along malleable fault lines. Prophecy’s fully indexed - one half a percentage point on the share and equities market, one step ahead of the curve. Grey medieval seaports open wide as clam shells to the invading tide, a lighthouse beacon flashes its pearl. After two millennia, one Acanthus leaf drops from a Corinthian capital, off the cliff into the Mediterranean sea. Eastward, the horizon lies in ruins, troubling storms gather to divide nations, tankers with empty decks ride at anchor. The Nigeria delta smokily wafts flambeaux, in Lagos under strung light bulbs, oil workers dully drink away their pay. A house sparrow pecks out rival sperm from its mate, repeats this performance in every port from Singapore to Dunedin. A brighter blue between warehouses, birdsong secretion, odours off dockyards suffuse sour alleys with chemicals. The sunset’s steel factory mills flat orange strips, the stars hang out broken signs, night slams shut like a factory gate. O B S E R V A T O R Y H I L L The perfect rose is only a running flare. That night, the cosmic rose garden under the Hubble glass-house played God’s footlights. The question becomes the hottest form of arrogance, unfolding unto itself the numbered petals of doubt. In my allocated time I track back across the grid but don’t link up with you. Later, a message came in late and unclear via the micro-wave: one non-digital discovery without your name on it. Dawn suggested something fresh off the mountain / a perfect, solar roseate. D I R E C T O R ’ S C U T The director doesn’t give a fig for the flat terrain that pans the horizon, high heels make little impression out here, her steps lightsome in this blazing void, elegant calf-muscles, sitting legs akimbo, a gangster’s mole abandoned to the Badlands, out of tune within this harshness - high cheek bones aglow, radiant and sweatless, the landscape set back from her Vegas body, a hip thrust defiantly at the brighter than neon sun. “Cut!” he shouts through cupped hands that sound hollow as a tin can out here. Her arm drops languid at her side, too heavy for boredom, she waits to be made over and makes for the caravan. The film guys give way to the riggers and construction crew, a dreary day’s schedule, the pneumatic drill rears up and resumes its place in the pecking order, mechanical and yellow. Bright orange jackets under bright white helmets - a wound, tricky as salt, appears alongside the new light rail works. Did the first assistant producer make off with the second? ask Red, but he walked out yesterday. Melanie fudged her lines the third day straight while the back up generator got the stutters. No way out of here for three weeks, he walked off into the desert, but who knows? Nights passed cool though, bugs rushed the lanterns and the beer stayed cold, stars piled up in a low budget sky. Sometime after, with the railway platform finished, out came the Winchesters, we hollered and hooted like old time pioneers, like celebrities at The Charlton Heston Golden Gun Anniversary Awards. T H E W O O L S H E D I came upon it by a clough in the hill, an involuntary turn upland, wheels holding to the rub of an old bullock track, by backblock and tableland, to unminded paddocks. A kennel whiff of the grease-curled fleece, flumped on long benches in a low-slung woolshed, the fangled wool press fallen into wrack and ruin, the dust, grease coated floor planks. A sense of something slowly tossed aside. And wind, the sound rusty and hollow, breathed down the chute to an empty holding pen, thickened with dockweed, purpled in Paterson's curse. F L A G O N D A Y S for Robert Franken But this one had stood three months, brooding its yeast amongst sultanas packed down in fathoms of vodka. Fermentation stalked patient as a terrorist upon the taste-beds; a Dutch custom, powerful as an Atlantic sea squall. A late ride pillion on Robert Franken’s scooter at Pauatahanui out along the coast road to Paekakariki. The black swans of the estuary, themselves a scattering of sultanas, glistening afloat in the dusk. Robert, you liked things pickled in bottles; homunculi, viscera, distorted on the glass-plate of your surreal word-view; a head on a stem like a cut-away tulip titled: TOO CLOSE TO NATURE That tale you told about leaving your lover’s bed before dawn to gather dewy grass, clippings that you packed roundly into your body-shape left warmly indented there. You sat hard by in a chair and watched her slowly wake, turn to embrace where you had lain. And we took another slug from that primal Dutch concoction filtered through vodka-soaked sultanas, back then in ’72. * * A tolerable variation on the traditional Dutch drink called Boerenjongens which translates as ‘farmer’s boys’. Strictly speaking, the drink is made with brandy and sultanas, but these were flexible times. P O R T R A I T S 1. Old Groover The cool had cooled somewhat, the heart suffered meltdown to a blackened lump of glass. The lines fed didn’t populate his bed with yearning Liliths as they once had; he came by the leather- skinned, dream-damaged ones whose youth had fled with the children out the door marked: ENDED. His words remained locked in the hip, haplessly peppered with jazz for his own and art’s sake. The mask hardened. The lies sank further back behind the eyes jaundiced as sulphur. What can we make of him now stopped at the limit of his talent; that he hadn’t far to go? Only the anger eating his entrails played back the one obvious truth. Pity him. 2. The Lonely Men Strung out in one long line across the falling ground, beating the brush for the Golden Bird of Youth, while behind them in the marbled light, Age gathers to cumulus, and each knows in his companion a darkening heart, coagulate of lust, how sex fades or flares in the blood; the sickening clutch at some receding life beyond the Vale of Fantasy. The game lies in casting forth atmosphere’s net, the troubled victim tough and vulnerable, snared unawares. 3. Lawman Sober all day he had nothing to blame himself for but the following morning. Reckoning that he had got off lightly, he put his guilt away like a discarded video and returned to his home comfortable as a holster. This customary, reflexive man would have lit a panatella or pulled a cork if conducive to a state of health which it wasn’t. Settled now, the hourly news chased him around the clock with its usual run of urgencies made or intended. At a school nearby, laughter and shuttered applause of prize-giving at the year’s end; fragile beginnings and unmade mistakes of lives not yet loosed upon others - to become more you and less of what you might have been. A few more thoughts along these lines about getting it right with the Fates, and plugging the day at High Noon. 4. Tour Guide Today your hair is freshly folded silk, something to do with flats of water and how it receives tone from different days. I don’t see your face it is elsewhere in other and distant brightness. I have no wish to locate you or make comprehensible your person about me; can I call you Miss? for already the intimate details are known: you are something I look forward to I mean, with line of sight, the isolated light and how it softens much in the way clouds never really concentrate themselves, that take their turn and assume elevations. Concentration is dry in this woman’s face; your face is warm air from an open doorway, people spilling past with indignation. You are so expansive that your lack of experience impresses me, your face is a wide curve of shoreline - the incurve of the runner against rain. Your face is empty as dead tallow (hallowed) and a dryness without detail. This beauty is equation in the geometric structure of your vision - yes, your calmness is past engagement. B R A D Y’ S G R A V E “Listen to the moaning of the pine at whose root they hut is fastened” - Old Danish proverb In front of the old Manse, Duck Creek weaves through bulrushes along the hillside striving with pine trees, slippery with copper needles home to magpie’s carolling. ‘There were three homes we had.’ Farther back into the hill, a tilted slab of concrete, rusty iron posts and chains mark it out amongst the tussock clumps – Brady’s Grave makes a slipway for the flying, full moon; and the local cats gather into a circle, under the yellow glare. A questioning silhouette of Black Swans at Pauatahanui ride easy, buoyant, on the inlet’s long tides away from view, behind the whistling pine grove. ‘W O L F H O U N D C E N T U R Y’ after Osip Mandelstam So by now you know it is time to leave, they have damaged the name of the city and time itself is imperilled; clocktowers stand by snow-capped and the hands splay crucified but this is no bridge to safety. St Petersburg [Petropolis] winds down gradually, shifts the granite block of night back from the tomb so dawn may enter in; places a small saucer of daylight to bath the eye. What sleds are heaped with we cannot tell, but it is not the jubilation of children’s cries - at the sight of the hill our hands drop to our sides black as fence posts. God himself rubs his hands at sunset but you cannot get warm. October 10, 2000 Index of Titles or First Lines --- Provided by LoyalBooks.com ---