Chapter 1

Chapter 13,930 wordsPublic domain

Unmanned Stephen Oliver

Also by Stephen Oliver

& INTERVIEWS (Horizontal Press, 1978)

EARTHBOUND MIRRORS (Horizontal Press, 1984)

GUARDIANS, NOT ANGELS (Hazard Press, 1993)

ISLANDS OF WILDERNESS A ROMANCE (Penguin Australia, 1996)

HEADWORX WELLINGTON

First published 1999

ISBN 0-473-05753-0

Published by

HeadworX Publishers 26 Grant Rd, Thorndon, Wellington Aotearoa / New Zealand

Printed by

Otago Uni Print

Typeset by HeadworX Publishers in Elegant Garamond 11 pt

HeadworX is a registered trademark of HeadworX Publishers

This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of private research, criticism and review, no part may be reproduced without written permission from the author.

Contents

Cultural Misappropriation Word Maps 1. Down By The River 2. National Park Holiday 3. False Idols 4. Surveyors Party 5. Got Ourselves A Convoy! 6. Cultural Desert 7. Down By The Station 8. Continental Shelf Co. 9. Three Cheers The Militia! 10. Video Conference 11. Crow Country 12. Hills Of Home 13. Eco-Tourism Generation of Pat Boone & Tonto To Talk of Flags Words to Lure a Ghost Chistmas Emblems 1. Adam 2. Oblation 3. Detail 4. Born 5. Style 6. Beachcomber Transgenic Pigs Sheet Music Myth & Mariolatry Stork Unmanned Braidwood Modern Love Brilliant Losers Hotel Diligencias Wardrobe Drinkers Girl. Gold. Boat Domestic Pack Shots 1. The Gays Next Door 2. Working Hot 3. Hooking For Jesus 4. The Priest Across The Lane 5. Corruption Is Glorified Mateship 6. Inner City Camping Blues Tarts & Takeaways Who Killed Brett Whiteley Sugarbag Carpenter Aunty Eve Harold Lloyd Conrad & Wells & Co. Hoppalong Cassidy Bob Orr Dave Spencer You Dont Remember Dying Graham Clifford Bruno Lawrence The Still Watches

Poets have wrongd poor storms: such days are best; They purge the air without, within the breast.

George Herbert

Cultural Misappropriation

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 doorstep 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 & custom. It is not the thing itself, but the beautiful echo of a peoples harmonic which cannot be bounded nor weakened. Here lies the camouflage that protects the ancient matrix, the silent memory of our bloods journey & sound leads you to it.

Word Maps

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 arch anticipates t but the headwaters are held greyly back by a concrete-net on this dappled and uncaptured urban afternoon. He deftly flicks & spools back and forth from channel to channel.

2. National Park Holiday

If you go into the woods today you will be part of a task force moving in line-formation. You will allow that the plastic yellow tape which cordons off select areas does not imply a Sacred Grove. If you go into the woods today, disinterment, not picnics, is the order of inquiry. The Vegetable Kingdom remains thoroughly documented and every species is accounted for; some of whom are human, or parts thereof.

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 monorail running from Uluru clean through the Olgas.

4. Surveyors Party

These twin obelisks which guard the southern entrance to the Great Sandy desert, though partnered to a sun fiercer than anything Egypt had to offer, preside over a millennia of flat emptiness, and attest to the prowess, not of indigent cultures, but the engineering whim of the LAND BARONS who pray that one day, these too, will invoke an air-conditioned resort for the rich to dwell in, amongst hydro- mythological fountains, playing endlessly over sacred-site motifs.

5. Got Ourselves A Convoy!

Hi Ho! Hi Ho! But theyve been laid off. Round Oberon, the town spirit flat as a plank; then fury knots in pubs. The big rigs aim chrome cowlings at Canberra, Convoy! through the ring roads to circle Parliament House wagon-style. Hey, you cant knock it: logging by generations for generations have trod them down. Count the rings of the rigs revving. Each logger raw-red, necks blood-throttled. Say what, anger? You can put a ring around that, champ. Hi Ho! Hi Ho!

6. Cultural Desert

The earth is dismembered & what remains gives evidence; clues: history by blocks displaced as in the Aswan Dam & the Temple of Philae. Osiris rolls in the winding sheet of the Nile (O moisture of the World!) and vainly cry the well-wishers. Richard Burton tracked the source back to Lake Victoria, and back again to the Royal Geographical Society; no gushing waters from the cleft rock, only lameness, fever under the rays of the Sun God, Ra.

7. Down By The Station

Indecision. Doubt. A bungled liftoff, the bumpy landing. Of course, the forest dwellers who continuously run at you from tangled undergrowth onto the stubbled airstrip, dreamlike, dont make it: LAST CANNIBAL WORLD: lithe tribal girl hand jobs hero through bamboo cage. The spiked wooden ball swishes from tree canopy to impale support cast. Sunday matinee in country town. Farm boys lope under dirty clouds to crop-dusted paddocks, and water slips by the BP Service Station, somewhere.

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 Cousteauesque 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 & missiles from any epoch; whose task it is to float lines at once filigreed as plankton, filtered as sunlight.

9. Three Cheers The Militia!

What plays us back - death? That this worlds a stage and we upon it act to revolve the scenery with our yearning: and while the syrinx play, panic rebounds to the dead cry: ET IN ARCADIA EGO from the walled garden and far wilderness. O desert! O armour-plated sun! Under a scornful wind the madmen bellow and tribes cower amongst the rubble, caught in the sound bites & grabs of war: Tibet, Chechnya, Kurdistan, Iraq, Burundi, plus the boys in the hills back of Montana.

10. Video Conference

Like a hurried geology that arose out off glasshouses came the skyscrapers; meanwhile, History cut a swathe through the Natural World and architecture strove to regain it. Lost to the familiar, Age moved us out of living memory, unlike those tribes, the autochthons who saw the earths infancy still. Let us go, you & I, to re-invent the damage and call it discovery, to uniformly lift up our cry in schadenfreude, meek before Great Cities that bend as fenders to the glare.

11. Crow Country

A field of wheat, a paddock of stubble, the chafed dust-cloud staggers the pick-up at distance, the Rock of Ages rises over Plainville: pop: dead serious. No hermits, only the bowing pumps facing west for oil. Family photos hang easy next to the semiautomatic in each clapboard. The Long Horn Saloon boasts the one rule: NO SPITTING. NO STRANGERS. The hard hats passed round every Sunday and the big fists knuckle under prayer & flag real righteous like.

12. Hills Of Home

Greywacke mostly, & 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 bottled glass to the untouched cool clay hoping any moment to pot hole up into a paddy field through the earths centre. Every failed dig stayed a secret from adults, forever.

13. Eco-Tourism

Welcome to Smeltback Inc. copper, zinc, lead, uranium, iron, O mineral gardens of the Inland Sea! A company satellite tremulous as a divining-rod maps onto flow charts corporate terrain; prospectus for all the kingdoms of the earth. Radio Redneck pumps the poet who banks safe on a right-wing bet, steadies to subvert the norm for God and Clever Countrys sake. Prettily thus he underbends the knee to throw his best foot forward O.

Generation of 68

Frank OHara (here Im skating slow on sacred ice) has got a lot to answer for, yet who hasnt? Take the legacy of 60s poets, for example, who cant help but write like him; syntactically careering around his blizzard of words, elbow-jolting crazily, clutching at each others earmuffs, buttonholing opportunity. Seems they did that as par for the course till it got too dizzy. Round and round the freedom rink they went & those who zigzagged quick & 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 anyones guess; some unmarried, a good number courted hardship whatever. Nobody cares overly much. The 60s poets they go on to write like Frank OHara: fewer drop-by parties, meaner somehow.

Pat Boone & Tonto

White-shirted (not blue) they approach in twos: Excuse me Sir, a small moment of your time? Soft-selling eternity & 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 & discipled, backgrounded by a blandished brain. As a child, when the God was always friendly, big as a house, long as a street & 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 & bottle brushes, sandsoap & 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 & the Way, galloping round the outer handicapped districts; brainwashed right-wing angels confident as professional sportsmen on a World Tour.

To Talk of Flags

The flags fall like large, hollow, monochrome leaves, said Ritsos, but this isnt Greece. How can you talk of changing flags as blithely as you would a marriage? When we fly the flag its as label to proclaim attitude, and rightly so, too: the Remembrance Day Parades, Expansionism, other peoples 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?

Words to Lure a Ghost

An exiles 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 Hill,Jim, scattering the unposted Autumn leaves.

Christmas

Under the mining operations of the moon, continental drifts of cloud collude and a pelican scaffolds the air. In cities, bricks sweat. We are blinded by the rush to live; keep it moving, says the sense of loss, our common language. The information Super Highway informs to inform supra clicks the instinct. Hold on screens survival. We are built upon reflection; under the arch of the railway see the conduit flow & steady in the round. A piece of hill lights up and beneath it shadow so shakes the net. Hear the sheer drag of scythe on metal the shunter makes at the curve of the viaduct while, with elongated wail, rolls three spoil-wagons to the hollow hill.

Emblems

1. Adam

A lamp passed behind a perforated shield; stars leaked. What he thought thunder brought footfalls of lightning. He scanned over the plateau & nowhere found a neighbours spoor.

2. Oblation

The Island nations of the colder latitudes breed alluvial poets, it is believed, who convene once yearly under friendly, arched viaducts to talk of river shingle, boulder, and water birds.

3. Detail

The yellow machinery tracks on the freeway are as soldiers in single file stretching out into the late afternoon, slanting sun, shadow-crimson earth leaning forward to the compassed horizon.

4. Born

The year of my birth followed by a hyphen, by the solace of expectation, by a small measure of success, by a teasing out of hopelessness and of course, by another date yet to be fixed.

5. Style

Would he have leaped from the stern of the Orizaba, at noon on April 27, 1932 if hed known of the unfashionable rise in sea-levels 70 years hence; Hart Crane, a rhetorical gesture, surely?

6. Beachcomber

Pampiniform it writhes, bladder-wrack or kelp, a heavy swell that slops about rustily in the basalt trough, breaking through the sea rush; & solitary goes Heaney, curling at dictions.

Transgenic Pigs

The oink is a fugue, Baconian and philosophical. By a corncob moon they snaffle, silvery-hulled backs adrift & dolphin-arched in the mire. A litter of stars in the laboratory-bright sky. PUT SOME PORK ON YOUR FORK intones the television commercial. O but but these are no bristle & foam flecked boars of Arcadian Days, brutally twisting on some Danaan spearhaft, in a flying rage tearing at ilex roots, or blasting marble shards with iron-tough tusks. These are the sleek-lined, chrome-bright & delicate trottered. These with a call soothing as a computer bleat, ears alert as mobile phones, flesh pliable as an artichoke, temperament cool as a cold cut. These, the upwardly mobile, porcine delicacies, models of dinner-table decorum. Designer-label pigs, feted, wined & dined exemplars of taste, accepted in the most refined of social circles. These are the well-appointed pigs replete, with a privately funded education bred O so exclusively for the Export Drive.

Sheet Music

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 Trees 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 & 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. Its 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? Theres comfort in that mate, getting out.

Myth & Mariolatry

At a small village not far from Manila, in the house of armaments & munitions, in a house of grenades & 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 nearest mountain slope. Here under a glass blown moon, a cool wind shall leave this place sacred.

Stork

The scene is of a deep rural setting done by one unhurried Impressionist, say, pre-World War 1, c.1907. Everything 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 mornings sluicing; alder, elm or poplar windbreaks, 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, and farmstead. The stork is 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 forests black patches. Stork, calm as a weathervane (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.

Unmanned

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 seacliffs, 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 back yard hovering over the roped-swing in the pelting rain and neighbourhood of cat & 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 dissolves 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 & kicked aside incident.

You can still hear the settlers squeeze box & fiddle in suburban settlements & 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 & 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 cliche, the crazy party hat of Sydneys Opera House / the bat-eared shells

& 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 & 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.

Braidwood

for Judith Wright

Granite & quartz country, once gold rush, now cattle tread amongst

the white hawthorn and yellow broom; from Captains Flat to Majors 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.

November 4, 1996

Modern Love

They are survivors, the sole occupants of this one guarded world. The local repertory theatre packed up & departed elsewhere. These two old troupers stay on as the sweeper plays his broom against the grain backstage. They play out by agreement the familiar angers to a suspension of hostilities. A semi-believed in love tried but haunted by its past. A self-deceiving hope posturing the loss of lives that went before of youth, of partners had & names forgotten. What holds at the seasons close is passion flogged to life like a single-piston engine, a sputtering exchange of plenitude, the usual run of days & dishes. The couple come home to roost at last, tense & too aware.

Squinting back down the telescoped years as he had once through bombsights to that recently freed city, after the war & burnt out trams to how they first met. He posted to Berlin and the American sector, she from Baden Baden where he had fallen for her. So agile & aerial, a mermaid of the trapeze, star act of an old fashioned circus. A picture framed in time within the bleak cabaret of youth: he uniform crisp & she in sequined tights with her angels Wings of Desire flared from bared shoulder-blades. They are holding hands in celebration of the letter M. Now, married into age & ageless on an ancient Island, theirs is a love old as childhood & wise as water. Solidly based as the fist-backed rock of Uluru.

Brilliant Losers