Unmanned Part 7

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...o...b..t.

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 pa.s.s on into unchartered waters, the lights out along the deck.

Behind, the floodlit logging of Malaysia gluts the j.a.panese 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 fis.h.i.+ng 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 m.u.f.fled 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. Das.h.i.+ell 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-fas.h.i.+oned 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 s.h.i.+t 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 pa.s.sion. Romance of the World!

IX