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.