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.