Stephen Oliver

“ 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 conning-tower signals:
which came first, meaning or memory?
One flashlight winks hungrily under seacliffs, and then the flare. This setting becomes an habitual space, chosen era for commando or smuggler.
We make our choice, learn that grief comes regular as sunset.
The bow-wave turned in chrome coils as the coastline dropped from view.
Once in a metal-etched hour, people ran away to America to buildings the colour of gun-metal, to a sidewalk venting steam about the ankles of sable-stockinged girls.
How many of us cannot begin the adventure of the day upon its arrival? ”

“ The distant applause of rain and the weekend screaming of a girl. The screech of a trains brake as if a fire were being extinguished. The exiles brain is a frozen, grey sea-storm; from wave to wave he stares down the barrel of the moon. It is morning and the sun spreads over Nicaragua slow as the slitting of a throat. Consider Ernesto Cardinal as he rises from his bed, how he stacks his images practical as planks. Ay, the roses blood dark as diesel!
VI He will come urgent as a food riot. Beware the man who sheds tears of mercury. His cough alone will thin out the ozone. ”

“ So agile & aerial, a mermaid of the trapeze, star act of an old fashioned circus. A picture framed in time within the bleak cabaret of youth: he uniform crisp & she in sequined tights with her angels Wings of Desire flared from bared shoulder-blades. They are holding hands in celebration of the letter M. Now, married into age & ageless on an ancient Island, theirs is a love old as childhood & wise as water. Solidly based as the fist-backed rock of Uluru. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Beware the polemicists who define and so divide, who aggregate authority unto self where before lay none. Symbol becomes the circumference of time & custom. It is not the thing itself, but the beautiful echo of a peoples harmonic which cannot be bounded nor weakened. Here lies the camouflage that protects the ancient matrix, the silent memory of our bloods journey & sound leads you to it. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Lost to the familiar, Age moved us out of living memory, unlike those tribes, the autochthons who saw the earths infancy still. Let us go, you & I, to re-invent the damage and call it discovery, to uniformly lift up our cry in schadenfreude, meek before Great Cities that bend as fenders to the glare. ”

“ Lookout, right down the coast, the Pacific ironed flat far as the eye can see, a sky expanded metal-red nightly.
Girl. Gold. Boat
out of Port Moresby. The obese Oxford villain tumbles overboard speared by the fuzzy-wuzzies. Our hero, Captain Singleton, finally
puts his shirt back on and tilts his cap to the sunset. He places one arm around his sweetheart and the other at the helm. The sea falls into
suburbs of light, a topiary of Islands could be mist. He is American and at home in the world as he moves forward on the celluloid tides. ”

“ 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 orbit.
Falling piano notes. The last of the rain down brickwork. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Each waking is a starting out from the old country.
The responsibility of light beckons, unclothes the familiar objects and not so familiar ones.
Lightning leaves the expression surprised and the lone tree in the paddock startled with cinematic glare, unharmed and lovely.
In a homely way, the headlights sweep the back yard hovering over the roped-swing in the pelting rain and neighbourhood of cat & dog. This tells you that the family
is in deep trouble to be called into account in afteryears while the shutters slap wettish to little effect. ”

“ 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. ”

“ A self-deceiving hope posturing the loss of lives that went before of youth, of partners had & names forgotten. What holds at the seasons close is passion flogged to life like a single-piston engine, a sputtering exchange of plenitude, the usual run of days & dishes. ”

“ 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 ”

“ I name two from the camp of Good Attitude, builders of the beauty of this planet the givers, not takers who direct our gaze upward from the burning footlights of the closing century, toward the language of our Common Future. ”

“ 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. ”

“ If a delph-glazed moon with its O so delicate pattern pans over Holland, flat as a tack, it also comes by way of the Antarctic circle right to your doorstep in equal measure. If the sun clamps its golden torque on mosque or synagogue, pa, cathedral or sacred site, does this endorse any one people over another? ”

“ Most of us just bash the trees without seeing the kangaroos. You saw living mostly for what it is, a part-time job with bugger all security; the occasional softness of a woman, maybe, and of course grog by the bucketful. What was it you saw at the last, Dave, when passing through the ripped canvas of a thunderstorm, lightning flashing down the Hawkesbury, a good belt of rain after? ”

“ I called back down the unawakened dawn of the Tasman sea and along the East Coast from the pre-dawn light of my sleep, I called out Bob Orr soft as the punch of a howitzer to the Hokianga harbour & still further over the Waikatos billiard-table green paddocks. I hailed Bob to the Great Barrier Island & Orr to the Little Barrier, but no answer came chasing after. I sought you down the Harbour Heads & Hauraki Gulf then all about the Waitemata. I found a Thunderhead big as a container-load of sorrows & nowhere hard by were you toiling. ”

“ What plays us back - death? That this worlds a stage and we upon it act to revolve the scenery with our yearning: and while the syrinx play, panic rebounds to the dead cry: ET IN ARCADIA EGO from the walled garden and far wilderness. ”

“ In cities, bricks sweat. We are blinded by the rush to live; keep it moving, says the sense of loss, our common language. The information Super Highway informs to inform supra clicks the instinct. Hold on screens survival. We are built upon reflection; under the arch of the railway see the conduit flow & steady in the round. A piece of hill lights up and beneath it shadow so shakes the net. Hear the sheer drag of scythe on metal the shunter makes at the curve of the viaduct while, with elongated wail, rolls three spoil-wagons to the hollow hill. ”

“ The big rigs aim chrome cowlings at Canberra, Convoy! through the ring roads to circle Parliament House wagon-style. Hey, you cant knock it: logging by generations for generations have trod them down. ”

“ These twin obelisks which guard the southern entrance to the Great Sandy desert, though partnered to a sun fiercer than anything Egypt had to offer, preside over a millennia of flat emptiness, and attest to the prowess, not of indigent cultures, but the engineering whim of the LAND BARONS who pray that one day, these too, will invoke an air-conditioned resort for the rich to dwell in, amongst hydro- mythological fountains, playing endlessly over sacred-site motifs. ”

“ Of the brain, mushroom shaped as bomb blast, we project the image to fact; up river from the torrent, amongst the calmness of boulders, the angler shadow-casts looping the steady surface for the archetypal fish whose leapt arch anticipates t but the headwaters are held greyly back by a concrete-net on this dappled and uncaptured urban afternoon. ”

“ Mostly, beauty is nostalgia. The random motes of a rainbow end up on the garbage heap again. These sticks which encase the Great Lakes, Jim, are the Happy Hunting ground for the likes of you & me. Men picking on the chance sounds of emptiness. The daily round of campfire, man and nature, etc. ”

“ Under a scornful wind the madmen bellow and tribes cower amongst the rubble, caught in the sound bites & grabs of war: Tibet, Chechnya, Kurdistan, Iraq, Burundi, plus the boys in the hills back of Montana. ”

“ They come at the appointed hour when the boy who serves as runner to the Beautiful Lady arrives, breathless, with the Word. Occasionally, the statue weeps paint-fresh tears. They will leave once faith is gathered in abundance like so many wild flowers off the nearest mountain slope. ”

“ With barely a movement we come from the bleaker months to where the picture pans briefly, dissolves upon the softer ores of spring. Ah, but the Captains of Industry are wheeling! A building boom amongst the trees after the first few casual blossoms had fallen along suburban driveways. ”

“ Youre not the same person now as you were ten years ago. And the Irishman: I like the music its the noise I cant stand. Each one, orphaned & aphoristic, deep into his sixties. NZ born and much younger, I offered: Youre not the same person tomorrow as you were today. And then, To your arrival in Melbourne, they singly toasted. (Great-grandfather, MacCormack, arrived here in 1851 & 26 years later, in 1877, set sail for Dunedin aboard the Ringarooma) . So our tale of the two cities unfolded: Sydney is get what you can. Melbourne, what have you got to offer & are we really interested. ”

“ Quincy Conserve, plus, the all-stars-road-show Blerta1, travelling Aotearoa, through khaki paddocks, down thistle blown highways in that diesel bus t seasonal rhythms you doubtless gathered, drummer extraordinaire, on your final journeying off Cape Reinga, the spirit freed to ride the rain you backed
the loner to the last, death the bottom line to stave off cancer. ”

“ If you go into the woods today you will be part of a task force moving in line-formation. You will allow that the plastic yellow tape which cordons off select areas does not imply a Sacred Grove. If you go into the woods today, disinterment, not picnics, is the order of inquiry. ”

“ For some, perhaps, a continuous custom to hang together whatever sense of family may be had once the wild oats have passed into the photograph album: circa: June, in some tumbled month, the garden hose spurting champagne and the neighbour, suspect as an affair, out of shot.
2. Working Hot
Joe Hammer makes his move on screen and the girl cries out for Mamma. A family of sperm packs up and moves house. The removal of limbs. The images dim to an impotent mauve and the stage act begins. Shes only working warm, consistent as a vibrator. She hopes one day to make big bucks ”