The Still Watches
I
Autumn tinsel floats gold on
July leaves and up goes the memory
flare. The carbon rod of winter
burns low and the dark is a mammoth
locked within ice. Watch the simultaneous
reels of the seasons spinning before
your eyes. A plane passes, and
upsets the late sun to a shadow-print
upon the wall. With barely a
movement we come from the bleaker months
to where the picture pans briefly,
dissolves upon the softer ores
of spring. Ah, but the Captains of
Industry are wheeling! A building boom
amongst the trees after the first
few casual blossoms had fallen along
suburban driveways. Observe the birds
investing in the green shares of September.
This side of the documentary we
view in armchair safety, Our Planet:
a well heeled cloud pads across
the moons surface, under the
vast drift-net of the night tuna boats
swing light probes about the arresting
waters another country claims.
David Attenborough journeys through
deserts to break the ancient limestone
tablets, and proclaim that fossils
are the visual memory of stone.
We observe in awe the Environmental
Mysteries and ask, is the suns bald glare
through the Glory Hole truly the
pointing finger of God? Laurence Olivier
puts on his final mask, looking
deathly, Tell my friends that I
miss them, and then fades from the
ramparts. I name two from the camp
of Good Attitude, builders of the beauty
of this planet the givers, not takers
who direct our gaze upward from the
burning footlights of the closing century,
toward the language of our Common Future.
II
The seeing wears away the seer:
twelve years further on Voyager 2 putts
out through the pinball solar
system, past Neptune and beyond the
reach of time. Another day in
the round and the cliche of uneventful
incident has not yet arrived.
The balloon that is so majestic on
the plump air tumbles as heavy
as a plumb-bob onto the countryside,
trailing its fifty seconds of life
huddled to impact. The cattle
scattered, the sky did not change but
released names into the wispy
afternoon. Then all is as it was
before the tragic flight, except
the calm that betokens fear.
And clouds rich as coalmines gathered
from the chutes of mountainsides, over
the belts of grainfield to boost
the corporate climates, and to market
each end of the world gyrally.
A blotting paper sky, the soft
tear of thunder, then lightning. Who
would demand of the wise a word
to steer by? Nostradamus throws his
hands in the air after the event:
Mark well my words, I told you so.
Backward we look upon his bag
of tricks, and with each new calamity
a surreal rabbit lifts before your eyes.
Ribbed streets! Pneumatic heartbeat!
Prophecy is the Art of Boredom
for one who cannot stand his own company
from one moment to the next.
He pulls the hat trick, feigns the
future, argues the task of his breath
wearily on its way. Some ravel
dreams to cats cradles in whose
uninhabited solitude, slowly as a yawn,
wish to pull forth the superstrings.
Call it a living, this space
between meetings. Those encirclements
that bind us together temporally.
The distant applause of rain
and the weekend screaming of a girl.
The screech of a trains brake
as if a fire were being extinguished.
The exiles brain is a frozen, grey
sea-storm; from wave to wave
he stares down the barrel of the moon.
It is morning and the sun spreads
over Nicaragua slow as the slitting
of a throat. Consider Ernesto Cardinal
as he rises from his bed, how
he stacks his images practical as planks.
Ay, the roses blood dark as diesel!
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 wellsprings
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.
The Berlin Wall is falling down,
each chunk a souvenir sponsored by
Smirnoff. Who was that poet who
whispered, Death is a maestro from
Germany. Away in America,
Raymond Carver, as the provinces of
his body revolted, gasped our
daily losses from ruined lungs. It
comes down to love, he said.
What we hear is anger in its orbit.
Falling piano notes. The last
of the rain down brickwork. Guttering
full. Something like sounds of
water hitting a serving dish. A couple
of taps. Its that hour. A train,
of course, fading in and out of suburbs.
Time running off everywhere.
George Moore shuts his green door
against the catholic glare of Ireland.
A sense of things erased. The whole
night sliding down. Lamplight.
Gumleaves as strips of plastic bright
through a casual breeze. What can
later researchers make of this,
the Age of Rapidity? Things made which
had small use then cast aside.
The mirage of modern love. Something
swapped for something else. Made better.
And that charge of energy
varicose-veined as lightning, a little
kindness left to hover, unquestioned?
We know it as we get older.
V
O Bougainville! Flying foxes
plentiful as copper, gone in a waste
of tailings from the Island,
forever. The most pure black race on
earth in jungle fatigues armed
against the ravages of the Corporates,
wading the chemical rivers,
a cackle of gunfire to make the ABC
stringers dispatch. But not the
words of Randolph Stow: VISITANTS:
My body is a house and some
visitor has come. My house is echoing
with the footsteps of the visitor.
My house is bleeding to death.
O Bougainville! Your burnished blood
flows from the split chest of
Treasure Island. An opencast land
and an overcast sky. I think
of my mother and her breastbone
snapped back. A row of Xs marks it.
The sky: one vast, curving blue
wave. Blue was; then painted itself
into Time, sang Rafael Alberti
to the Bay of Cadiz. The day
a slow melting cube of ice. Bright
coldness of frost on the window,
in the silence, late at night.
The level rhythm of the taxi
down the street of streaming lights.
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 floodlit 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 nightlong
visas where the bare chested boys
thrust hips from the bonnets
of old Holdens. High up on the
bulging stonework & boldly sprayed:
Its going to rain tonight, so
take a bullet proof vest; and,
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.
IV
Lights ablaze in the House of
Europe, and the Party rolls from room
to room: Poland, Romania, Germany,
the black triangle of Czechoslovakia.
You can walk Europe comfortably with a
plastic shopping bag, Western
Europe, that is, forests and country
neatly manicured. A Sunday
stroll sort of feeling. In Eastern
Europe you can do the same thing
though must lift your steps higher,
over the rubble, that is.
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 waterlogged)
in heady love. Follow their laughter
with an open-topped Lagonda down the
white-walled mountain roads of Mt. Aetna
to the Port of Catania in a blood-boiling
swerve to the red-chequered table,
and the fishing boats in the blue dusk.
Woody Allen steps from the screen
to the dead crystal lakes of Sweden. A
floppy disc of moon lies reflected
there in 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
whales back. Love undrinkable as water.
The silent film of fantasy which is night
plays out through the ivory keys of stars.
VII
Abe Nathan dons black and says:
Nor shall I change the colour of my
dress until peace is declared in Israel.
He flies over Egypt to bomb Cairo
with flowers. The scent dispersed upon
the breeze the breath of the PLO.
He would dream the muffled explosions
in ancient streets the thunder
of looms and the moon over the Sinai
a Lady of Gallant Memory. He would dream
the sun a copper scroll, and of peace
perfumed with cedar and cypress, of
pomegranate, bitter herbs and balsam.
The thought that catches in the
throat wakes him the shout of
Iraq. I will waste half your country
with flame. He wakes to the taste
of Saddam Husseins binary spittle, rips
his garments in grief. In this clear
cut country, snap your fingers,
watch sound bounce off rock. He dreams
that one profound thought unspoken
will change the minds of humankind.
O America! a poet is a detective
shadowing himself. Dashiell Hammett,
your success too late, success too soon.
You didnt find sufficient fog in San
Francisco to cover as the Great American Op.
The McCarthy era burned you off
from the 50s, left the last twenty years
of your life a shredded, dud cheque,
the profound terror of the final breath
made thin the man you knew. Patriot
to the country which disowned you, your
last gasp became that of a silencer.
America, you try to cheer yourself up
but youre too easy on yourself.
Watch the coral reefs off Johnstons atoll
grow the black scabs of car tires.
Watch Hectors dolphin drown in
the gill-nets off Banks Peninsula.
From the North Sea watch the slick seals
wash up dead on the Island of Texel.
Watch the Pacific united all around us
lie snug and blue as a body bag.
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, he brushes
the dust of a crushed building from
fingertips 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, and
dreams of fish-heaven. Bad William
thumps the shit out of poor Aunty Ethel.
Every poem is the last will &
testament of the soul, and every lover
who breaks from lover 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
worlds 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 substations
and the horizon lights up like a
Lucas/Spielberg movie. Tonight toward
Blacktown helicopters make astrological
moves sideways. Earlier, a trailblazer
made one Caesarean cut along the western
sky. The 6 Oclock 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 candle-flame
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 midnight lies as silent as
The American Dream, and all along
the border night moves. This train
dont run no more this train. Yo! This
train dont run no more and Canadas
cut in half, calls David Suzuki. Hush now,
the cyber-freaks sleep. Soundlessly,
the Hubble telescope gears its focus.
Autumn tinsel floats gold on
July leaves and up goes the memory
flare. The carbon rod of winter
burns low and the dark is a mammoth
locked within ice. Watch the simultaneous
reels of the seasons spinning before
your eyes. A plane passes, and
upsets the late sun to a shadow-print
upon the wall. With barely a
movement we come from the bleaker months
to where the picture pans briefly,
dissolves upon the softer ores
of spring. Ah, but the Captains of
Industry are wheeling! A building boom
amongst the trees after the first
few casual blossoms had fallen along
suburban driveways. Observe the birds
investing in the green shares of September.
This side of the documentary we
view in armchair safety, Our Planet:
a well heeled cloud pads across
the moons surface, under the
vast drift-net of the night tuna boats
swing light probes about the arresting
waters another country claims.
David Attenborough journeys through
deserts to break the ancient limestone
tablets, and proclaim that fossils
are the visual memory of stone.
We observe in awe the Environmental
Mysteries and ask, is the suns bald glare
through the Glory Hole truly the
pointing finger of God? Laurence Olivier
puts on his final mask, looking
deathly, Tell my friends that I
miss them, and then fades from the
ramparts. I name two from the camp
of Good Attitude, builders of the beauty
of this planet the givers, not takers
who direct our gaze upward from the
burning footlights of the closing century,
toward the language of our Common Future.
II
The seeing wears away the seer:
twelve years further on Voyager 2 putts
out through the pinball solar
system, past Neptune and beyond the
reach of time. Another day in
the round and the cliche of uneventful
incident has not yet arrived.
The balloon that is so majestic on
the plump air tumbles as heavy
as a plumb-bob onto the countryside,
trailing its fifty seconds of life
huddled to impact. The cattle
scattered, the sky did not change but
released names into the wispy
afternoon. Then all is as it was
before the tragic flight, except
the calm that betokens fear.
And clouds rich as coalmines gathered
from the chutes of mountainsides, over
the belts of grainfield to boost
the corporate climates, and to market
each end of the world gyrally.
A blotting paper sky, the soft
tear of thunder, then lightning. Who
would demand of the wise a word
to steer by? Nostradamus throws his
hands in the air after the event:
Mark well my words, I told you so.
Backward we look upon his bag
of tricks, and with each new calamity
a surreal rabbit lifts before your eyes.
Ribbed streets! Pneumatic heartbeat!
Prophecy is the Art of Boredom
for one who cannot stand his own company
from one moment to the next.
He pulls the hat trick, feigns the
future, argues the task of his breath
wearily on its way. Some ravel
dreams to cats cradles in whose
uninhabited solitude, slowly as a yawn,
wish to pull forth the superstrings.
Call it a living, this space
between meetings. Those encirclements
that bind us together temporally.
The distant applause of rain
and the weekend screaming of a girl.
The screech of a trains brake
as if a fire were being extinguished.
The exiles brain is a frozen, grey
sea-storm; from wave to wave
he stares down the barrel of the moon.
It is morning and the sun spreads
over Nicaragua slow as the slitting
of a throat. Consider Ernesto Cardinal
as he rises from his bed, how
he stacks his images practical as planks.
Ay, the roses blood dark as diesel!
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 wellsprings
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.
The Berlin Wall is falling down,
each chunk a souvenir sponsored by
Smirnoff. Who was that poet who
whispered, Death is a maestro from
Germany. Away in America,
Raymond Carver, as the provinces of
his body revolted, gasped our
daily losses from ruined lungs. It
comes down to love, he said.
What we hear is anger in its orbit.
Falling piano notes. The last
of the rain down brickwork. Guttering
full. Something like sounds of
water hitting a serving dish. A couple
of taps. Its that hour. A train,
of course, fading in and out of suburbs.
Time running off everywhere.
George Moore shuts his green door
against the catholic glare of Ireland.
A sense of things erased. The whole
night sliding down. Lamplight.
Gumleaves as strips of plastic bright
through a casual breeze. What can
later researchers make of this,
the Age of Rapidity? Things made which
had small use then cast aside.
The mirage of modern love. Something
swapped for something else. Made better.
And that charge of energy
varicose-veined as lightning, a little
kindness left to hover, unquestioned?
We know it as we get older.
V
O Bougainville! Flying foxes
plentiful as copper, gone in a waste
of tailings from the Island,
forever. The most pure black race on
earth in jungle fatigues armed
against the ravages of the Corporates,
wading the chemical rivers,
a cackle of gunfire to make the ABC
stringers dispatch. But not the
words of Randolph Stow: VISITANTS:
My body is a house and some
visitor has come. My house is echoing
with the footsteps of the visitor.
My house is bleeding to death.
O Bougainville! Your burnished blood
flows from the split chest of
Treasure Island. An opencast land
and an overcast sky. I think
of my mother and her breastbone
snapped back. A row of Xs marks it.
The sky: one vast, curving blue
wave. Blue was; then painted itself
into Time, sang Rafael Alberti
to the Bay of Cadiz. The day
a slow melting cube of ice. Bright
coldness of frost on the window,
in the silence, late at night.
The level rhythm of the taxi
down the street of streaming lights.
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 floodlit 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 nightlong
visas where the bare chested boys
thrust hips from the bonnets
of old Holdens. High up on the
bulging stonework & boldly sprayed:
Its going to rain tonight, so
take a bullet proof vest; and,
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.
IV
Lights ablaze in the House of
Europe, and the Party rolls from room
to room: Poland, Romania, Germany,
the black triangle of Czechoslovakia.
You can walk Europe comfortably with a
plastic shopping bag, Western
Europe, that is, forests and country
neatly manicured. A Sunday
stroll sort of feeling. In Eastern
Europe you can do the same thing
though must lift your steps higher,
over the rubble, that is.
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 waterlogged)
in heady love. Follow their laughter
with an open-topped Lagonda down the
white-walled mountain roads of Mt. Aetna
to the Port of Catania in a blood-boiling
swerve to the red-chequered table,
and the fishing boats in the blue dusk.
Woody Allen steps from the screen
to the dead crystal lakes of Sweden. A
floppy disc of moon lies reflected
there in 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
whales back. Love undrinkable as water.
The silent film of fantasy which is night
plays out through the ivory keys of stars.
VII
Abe Nathan dons black and says:
Nor shall I change the colour of my
dress until peace is declared in Israel.
He flies over Egypt to bomb Cairo
with flowers. The scent dispersed upon
the breeze the breath of the PLO.
He would dream the muffled explosions
in ancient streets the thunder
of looms and the moon over the Sinai
a Lady of Gallant Memory. He would dream
the sun a copper scroll, and of peace
perfumed with cedar and cypress, of
pomegranate, bitter herbs and balsam.
The thought that catches in the
throat wakes him the shout of
Iraq. I will waste half your country
with flame. He wakes to the taste
of Saddam Husseins binary spittle, rips
his garments in grief. In this clear
cut country, snap your fingers,
watch sound bounce off rock. He dreams
that one profound thought unspoken
will change the minds of humankind.
O America! a poet is a detective
shadowing himself. Dashiell Hammett,
your success too late, success too soon.
You didnt find sufficient fog in San
Francisco to cover as the Great American Op.
The McCarthy era burned you off
from the 50s, left the last twenty years
of your life a shredded, dud cheque,
the profound terror of the final breath
made thin the man you knew. Patriot
to the country which disowned you, your
last gasp became that of a silencer.
America, you try to cheer yourself up
but youre too easy on yourself.
Watch the coral reefs off Johnstons atoll
grow the black scabs of car tires.
Watch Hectors dolphin drown in
the gill-nets off Banks Peninsula.
From the North Sea watch the slick seals
wash up dead on the Island of Texel.
Watch the Pacific united all around us
lie snug and blue as a body bag.
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, he brushes
the dust of a crushed building from
fingertips 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, and
dreams of fish-heaven. Bad William
thumps the shit out of poor Aunty Ethel.
Every poem is the last will &
testament of the soul, and every lover
who breaks from lover 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
worlds 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 substations
and the horizon lights up like a
Lucas/Spielberg movie. Tonight toward
Blacktown helicopters make astrological
moves sideways. Earlier, a trailblazer
made one Caesarean cut along the western
sky. The 6 Oclock 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 candle-flame
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 midnight lies as silent as
The American Dream, and all along
the border night moves. This train
dont run no more this train. Yo! This
train dont run no more and Canadas
cut in half, calls David Suzuki. Hush now,
the cyber-freaks sleep. Soundlessly,
the Hubble telescope gears its focus.
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