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 doc.u.mentary. 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. j.a.panese 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 Ta.s.s 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 s.p.a.ce 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 pa.s.sing 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 phosph.o.r.escence 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 s.p.a.ceport 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 grat.i.tude to Pina Ricciu for her generous financial a.s.sistance, and to Mark Pirie for his strong belief in this book and personal commitment in marketing Unmanned successfully throughout New Zealand and Australia.