Chapter 3

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.

XI

An extended mobile of galaxies. A prided installation. The dark, invisible matter of a riot in L.A. Three thousand buildings ripple out flame in the city of Lost Angels. And then an open sky, a banquet of beads after fire hoses roll out the light on any upright surface. Hollywood Hills are alive with the sound of security locks. The CNN anchor-team is too well dressed for the maddening flames, in the sear, ongoing segment of a news flash. In the break, gathered the rain as pure as static, unseen, but imagined whitely and curfew-wide. Along the crippled streets in the blood blare of sirens, night arrived under the guise of the National Guard. Heat rises from the grid of these sidewalks and the spirits of the Indian, afraid enough of death to die, whoop it up around the big campfires. I wake, uncomfortable in the lurk of a dream, and my breath draws up hope like an anchor, lifts my thoughts into the day where I follow. Let us go (you & I) into the glow, hand in hand with Virtual Reality and idly make up war-games. Let us pray that a supreme silence will be down-loaded at last. Moonrise, and a luminant coal sifts through the western grate of the world.

In cornfields elsewhere, so remembered though not so high as an elephants eye, images pressed round as a hotplate suggest some mystery or midnight vigil; this is what we wish, to stamp threat onto the inexplicable, seeking out totems and to hold the dance of the primitive sacred: this city, too, let it stand as Icon.

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 leeside 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 seacliffs.

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 childs 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 upended in the quarter-acre back yard. 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. Its 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.

Acknowledgements

Acknowledgements are due to Writers Radio, 5UV Adelaide and ABC, 2XX Canberra for broadcasting a number of these poems.

Many of the poems in this book first appeared in the following magazines:

Aabye/New Hope International (UK), The Antigonish Review (Canada), Antipodes (USA), The Weekend Australian Review, The Canberra Times, The Capilano Review (Canada), Cyphers (Republic of Ireland), The Dalhousie Review (Canada), Encore (Australia) The Fiddlehead (Canada), Hobo (Aus- tralia), Imago (Australia), Iota (UK), JAAM (NZ), Jacket (Australia), Landfall (NZ), Links (UK), the New Zealand Listener, Meanjin (Australia), New Coin Poetry (South Af- rica), OzLit, Poetry Ireland Review (Republic of Ireland), Poetry NZ, Salient (NZ), SideWaLK (Australia), Southerly (Australia), Southern Ocean Review (NZ), The Sydney Morn- ing Herald, Takahe (NZ), Tinfish (USA), Trout (NZ), Voices (Australia), Wascana Review (Canada).

Special thanks to David Sears of PAPERWORK, Melbourne, publishers of my text-based poster, S Y D N E Y T O W E R 2 0 0 0, a high quality art-work designed for the international market, for his generous support in the pro- duction of this book.

My gratitude to Pina Ricciu for her generous financial assistance, and to Mark Pirie for his strong belief in this book and personal commitment in marketing Unmanned successfully throughout New Zealand and Australia.