Stephen Oliver

night of Warehouses

New and Selected Poems 1978 - 2000

Night of Warehouses

Stephen Oliver grew up in Brooklyn-west, and was educated at Marist Brothers, Newtown and St Patrick’s College, Cambridge Terrace, Wellington. He subsequently completed a one year diploma course in magazine journalism at Wellington Polytechnic. He has lived in Paris, Vienna, London, San Francisco, Greece and Israel, where he signed on with ‘The Voice of Peace’ radio ship broadcasting in the Mediterranean out of Jaffa. He has worked throughout New Zealand and Australia as a freelance production voice, newsreader, broadcaster, journalist, copy and features writer. Night of Warehouses: New and Selected Poems 1978 - 2000 is his sixth volume of poetry and spans two decades. Stephen Oliver is a transtasman poet based in Sydney.

B Y   S T E P H E N   O L I V E R

Henwise [poem cycle]
& interviews 
Autumn Songs [poem cycle]
Letter To James K. Baxter [poem]
Earthbound Mirrors
Guardians, Not Angels
Islands of Wilderness - A Romance
Unmanned 
Election Year Blues [poem]
Night of Warehouses: New and Selected Poems 1978 - 2000

S T E P H E N   O L I V E R 

night 
of 
warehouses

New and Selected Poems 1978 - 2000

HeadworX
W ELLINGTON

© Stephen Oliver, 2001

First published 2001

ISBN 0-473-07388-9

Published by

HeadworX Publishers
26 Grant Rd, Thorndon
Wellington
Aotearoa / New Zealand
http://headworx.eyesis.co.nz 

Printed by

Publishing Press

HeadworX® is a registered trademark
of HeadworX Publishers

The text of this book is set in 
Garamond 11 pt

This book is copyright.
Apart from any fair dealing for
the purpose of review, private research
and study, as permitted under the Copyright
Act, no part may be reproduced without 
written permission from 
the author.

A   C   K   N   O   W   L   E   D   G   E   M   E   N   T   S

I wish to thank the publishers of my previous books; Horizontal Press, Hazard Press, Penguin Books, Australia, and HeadworX Publishers, Wellington. Many of the poems originally appeared in a slightly different form.

Acknowledgements are made to the editors of the following magazines where a number of the New Poems originally appeared; The Weekend Australian Review, JAAM (NZ), Landfall (NZ), The Perfect Diary (Australia), Southerly (Australia), staple / New Writing (UK), Thylazine (Australia).

Several of the poems in this volume were read by the author as guest poet in Brisbane at: Subverse: Queensland Poetry Festival, 2000, and in Launceston at the Tasmanian Poetry Festival, 2001.

The poems, Cultural Misappropriation, Generation of ‘68, Bruno Lawrence first read and recorded by the author on Bookmarks, National Radio, and Plains FM 96.9, Christchurch, New Zealand.

poems without main titles as in the collection, Islands of Wilderness - A Romance are tabled by the first line and numbered as originally published. 

The selections from Autumn Songs were first published in 1978 as an accompanying booklet to & Interviews. The poems taken from this publication are properly included here as part of that collection.

A 35 mm film short, based on the poem “Something In The Air” from Earthbound Mirrors, narrated by the author to an original music score by Bob Jackson, jazz musician, and directed by Allan MacGillivray. The film screened at the Auckland International Film Festival, 1986. Screened, Roma Theatre, Sydney; dist. CEL, 1987.

A selection from Earthbound Mirrors recorded by the author at Mandrill Studios, and released through the Ode Records label, Auckland in 1984. This was the first undertaking by a recording company in New Zealand to put out a poet on cassette. 

/incident 34 (from) & Interviews appeared in the anthology, A Cage of Words, ed., Harvey McQueen, Longman Paul, 1980.

The Woolshed and Emblem for Dead Youth appear in the anthologies, Jewels in the Water, and Doors, respectively; ed., Terry Locke, Leaders Press, 2000, School of Education, University of Waikato, Hamilton, New Zealand. 

5/ The Departure (from) Autumn Songs, and, /answers 21 (from) & Interviews appear in REAL FIRE a counter anthology of New Zealand poets from the ‘60s / ‘70s, ed., by Bernard Gadd, Square One Press, Dunedin, 2001.

My gratitude to Laurence Aberhart, the New Zealand photographer, for generously supplying the front cover photograph: Dunedin [warehouse facade] 1975. The display lettering O F C A stands for ‘Otago Farmers Co-operative Association.’

My special thanks to Peter Ireland, friend of some thirty years standing, who from the very outset gave generously of his time and knowledge in honest support and encouragement of my early literary endeavours.

For those interested in learning more about my early days as a writer in Wellington, New Zealand, an autobiographical essay ‘Chalk, Talk and Asphalt Days’ appears in JAAM magazine, Issue No. 15 (May 2001). The Article puts in context my early development and literary '‘influences’ as an emerging poet.

John Pule and Denys Trussell have written on my poetics in JAAM, Issue No. `3 (March 2000). See also a listing in the recent Oxford Companion to New Zealand Literature in English (OUP, 1998).

I thank Pina Ricciu for her tireless support, Warren Dibble, playwright and poet, for his strong belief in my work over the years, and Professor Emeritius James Tulip, of the University of Sydney, for his early generosity.

My particular thanks go to Mark Pirie for his strong commitment in seeing through to publication Unmanned, as well as this representative selection of work spanning two decades.

C   O   N   T   E   N   T   S

Introduction

from & I N T E R V I E W S  1978
10    The wait.    15
/still life    16    The window falls down to earth that is certain    17
17    You can’t hear the clouds    18
19    Macrocarpa    19
/answers    21    there are of course, numerous combinations    20
30    Spring    out of October into the next month    21
/incident    34    Birds knew   (the wait   then the second shock)   23
/incident    36    10 O’clock   24
/sketches    45    Before the winds -    25
48    & anyhow, I would write you a sonnet    26
50    I   27
epilogue    28
from Autumn Songs   32
	  3/   The Flight
	  5/   The Departure
	  7/   The Encounter
	12/   The Orchardist

from E A R T H B O U N D  M I R R O R S  1984
Something in the Air    40
7.5 on the Richter Scale    45
Flotilla    46
A Meeting    50
Mosaic    51
Whistle Them Up    52
Ascension    53
Perspective    54
The Find    55

from Earthbound Mirrors    56
	 i. ii. iii. iv. v. vi. vii. viii. xi. xii.
Black Concentrations    64
Song of Gravity    65
Sang the Sailsurfer    66

from g U A R D I A N S,  N O T  A N G E L S  1993
Waltzing The Gods   69
Ace    71
A Far Noise from Near Things    72
Halley’s Comet    76
Manned Mission to the Green Planet    78
As The Painter Moves Toward His Canvas    80
Hallo Moon, Hallo Moon    81
Queen Street Riot    82
Guardians, Not Angels    83
Nicholas Charles Bochsa 1791-1856    84
Irina Ratushinskaya, Freed    85
And all the Goodtime Charlies    86
John Keats Came On Too Strong    87
The Decadeers    88

from I S L A N D S  o f  w I l d e r n e s s - A  R o m a n c e  1996
  15. Love is a way back    91
  22. As you wait to come    92
  29. Then the rats up and    93
  32. DEAR LADY, regard my heart    94
  35. All the tough kids got    95
  44. In the ancient city of Jaffa    96
  45. Yeah, there were props of    97
  51. ‘Spirit and flesh    98
  55. The tubular wind    99
  58. On her sad    100

   61. The Orient (lighted beads    101
   67. Night of Warehouses.    102
  76. Sparrows pack in a family    103
  78. On the dark side of a    104
  86. Rain solid as riot gear    105
  87. ‘Look pal, men do it    106
  91. Tank tracks down the    107
  92. True ham of the    108
  93. You promised you’d    109
  94. Disappointment hung    110
  98. Sails whiter than an    111
100. Pitiless is a word    112
101. The millennial turtle    113
103. What history, that of    114

from U N M A N N E D  1999
Cultural Misappropriation    117
from Word Maps    118
	  1.   Down By The River
	  3.   False Idols
	  8.   Continental Shelf Co.
	12.   Hills Of Home 
Generation of ‘68    120
Pat Boon & Tonto   121
To Talk of Flags   122
Words to Lure a Ghost    123
Sheet Music    124
Myth & Mariolatry   125
Unmanned    126
Braidwood    130
Brilliant Losers    131
Wardrobe Drinkers    133
Aunty Eve    134
Conrad & Wells & Co    136
‘Bob Orr’    137
You Don’t Remember Dying   138
Graham Clifford    139

Bruno Lawrence    140
Stork    141
from The Still Watches     
	III / VI / VIII / 1X / X / X11

N E W  P O E M S  [1998 – 2000]
Of Roofs    153
Taffy the Turtle    155
Treasure Island   157
Littoral   158
“Oldest Pine”    159
This Way    161
Ergo Poem    163
Summer Cup    165
Emblem for Dead Youth    167
Tundra Flight    168
Salle d’attente    169
Copestone for A Nation    170
The Mangawakas    172
The Good Old Days  173
Transmission    174
Observatory Hill   176
Director’s Cut    177
The Woolshed  178
Flagon Days   179
Portraits    180
	1. Old Groover
	2. The Lonely Men
	3. Lawman
	4. Tour Guide
Brady’s Grave   184
‘Wolfhound Century’   185

Index of Titles or First Lines   189

					Night of Warehouses

from
& I N T E R V I E W S
1 9 7 8

& I N T E R V I E W S 

						10

The wait.

		Then the second shock
& at low level the land rattles

my voice
a dry riverbed deep in your land

our pact       you/me
stand apart     unshaken     separate structures

we enjoy the echo
of the child who tracks the ground between each
	/

his voice building a ripple from your wall to mine.

	

No matter that you persist look upon
me as landmark with old block to new stone.

I have taken my measure
I size you to a scale beyond the ornamental moment.

you no longer turn upon me
you turn as ‘figurine’ it is a matter sensitive to style.

Sustain the ideal / the lie
and heap the words at your pedestal

on your bier maybe?
I hoist you upon the miles     (like shoulders).

Grass Street, Oriental Parade, Wellington, 1975

			/the still life		16

The window falls down to earth that is certain    
imperturbable    the window flows in gravity

a fly fixed there would take a hundred years to shift its
length on the glass tide

outside
I view the world as a hall of mirrors day by day the land distorts

the wind is buckled / the putty sound of skin stretched /
the turning of the head

tomorrow the clouds I hang neatly as curtains.

						17

You can’t hear the clouds.

Motionless as a glacier over Mt Cargill
how they tumble to the bay:

no movement / certain as a slow growth
this time of year the clouds could be happening

while the days spin    you/me    different ways.

The little changes that occur are:
(like the weather)

‘heartless’    wouldn’t you say?

						19

Macrocarpa
	holding green against sundown
where the last of these searchlights        dim

to that westward compound of cloud & the monotony of dusk
: is the drama of Sawyers Bay.

	Such luminant clichés
	ending each day     hold me.

This I understand is transferable (like habit)

moving against the casement windows the sun is over
the house & with one slow bounce outside the macrocarpa.

			/answers		21

There are of course, numerous combinations ....
my cells regard but don’t decide against your sex

I argue with my hormones
as the old tyranny exerts, again, you upon me.

Who gathers about you now?

I cannot hear your breath.

Even before your cells met in conference
to spill warmth one into the other

the brute impact fell you

knocked whole zones of flesh into silence

you do not know it, now
that absolute rejection flows smoothly through you.

						30

Spring     out of October into the next month
the winds chasing bits of broken growth

even against the deadened tree / that bird / & peeling bark
spring!

Oyster/catchers     dabs of tar on the factory roof
throats noisy & in on the act     right now

the whole crazy arithmetic of the species.
Sawyers Bay. Port Chalmers. Careys Bay. Deborah Bay.

			

The severe brush strokes of the sea at Aramoana.

Pulling at the tubers     ferns     pulling at the chopped
soil, at the neatly cropped rows 

pooling the pockets of the market/gardeners 
(God’s yards) in on the act. Spring.

Wisteria scrambles along the weatherboard
to     our casement windows, framing this.

Against cloudwork     the bruise spread yellow
with some dismantling to the west.

These structures of / distance / balance / perspective
tarnish their plaques     owning     (not us)

: words that doodle in cloudstrokes
to remake the boundaries & the commonplace of seasons.

			 

Mt Cargill continues under detonation to loosen
giant cubes     a mouth widening over the years

& elevated terraces look east to the harbour
where the dredge lets the shipping run back to the sea

					bluish.

			/incident 		34

Birds knew     (the wait   then the second shock)

I know it
that in the space of one morning / a space /

& the macrocarpa toppled to the next door paddock
because we heard it     the land rattled

as at low level the trunk was cut

			we saw the whole operation

through our casement windows that frame     now
more open air.

Durham Street, Wellington, 1975

			/incident		36

10 O’clock

	       still hangs thin under the Otago night.

Down the otherside of the hour
	I take the hill road to Reynolds town

a walk back up through the broken glass of the skyline
where the pieces scatter     (on)     the horizon:

		at this hour/
			      the moon shapes to a cocktail glass
its tube filling the harbour heads.

Here we boarded.

There were three homes we had     each in its own time
one celebration.

			/sketches		45

Before the winds -
		those trumpets!

The absolute length of the wall dropped
that is, the sea fell:     flat
			  /

lettering, graffito     (not words)
figures, hieroglyph     the unexplained billboard

lay down with much noise onto the land
& is still falling.

I do not ask you to match
your parenthesis of understanding

against that of the sea     still falling

before those trumpets - it is     inconclusive.

						48

& anyhow, I would write you a sonnet
as all the others     dear     to theirs

but can’t square off this account
(i.e.     mine with yours)

can’t wrap up this ongoing conference
I hold dear     with you/me

can’t square the deal as they say -
can’t square it off at the edges

neat as a quarter acre section.
Clichés we had were never that clear

& anyhow I would write you a sonnet
that is final:

Our son continues     yes     he continues;
our son is an unbroken sentence that’s final.

						50

	                        I
	                  call them
	          the floating triangles
	from Whangarei Heads, the land
         moves 1000 mls. back to Sawyers Bay

& where I rest    now    on the arrowhead of this island
there is a folding of the land behind.

It comes to this    no matter what moves me
I am squared to The Prevailings

as (once) a fugitive in your flesh
I slipped through the mesh

who has never fled such hunger?

:is: the third breath that quakes    you/me    quakes all

Whangarei / Onerahi, 1976

epilogue

The grey overcoat of the sky flung open!
A hundred buttons threaded with rain

wrapped about itself & as suddenly - stopped.

The air disintegrated,
or perhaps that’s too neat?

It becomes harder & harder to people
these lines

to lay them flat as on a slab of ice.
With a gun/shot I could evoke a crowd

but don’t wish that either. I am
a white/coated official hemmed within

& completely attendant on the Brueghel noises
of the mob;

wrapped about itself.

These lines then, are hurdles
they are poles to bruise the shins of the rabble.

The tongue that troubles
the top of the mouth 
			/ is a birdflight

that takes me back to initial ancestors
who coupled together in rhyme 

who created the memory of me
that takes me back     that turns me back.

I would like to say I am vintage
of all which consumes me; that I

would like to have said a lot of things
though have not scanned these yet.

Meanwhile, across the light
my shadow behind me     behind me walks out.

The moment drops as though dead/wood
& there is light slipping from it

& there is a breath of wind,
this wind that parts wooden mobiles.

The bleep of lie detectors
on the branches

on the sonic trees
pressed out under an over/pass

which takes a left/hand turn
into dusk,

from these birds piled high along the plane/trees.

For them & me the same repetition
the simple image of the hour to take refuge in.

If you wish,
I am making bricks out of air for them & me.

All it takes is for one bird to escape
one wing to drop like a half/moon

& then the thing is undone
as a girl who walks the middle of the street

at night. Who veers neither left nor right.

The air has gone clear.

Your whisper is a heated flat/iron
pressed to my ear

clear as the visibility of day. Clear as that.
Sounds are flying night/blind

as though a playground
or the vocals of it had assembled on the air.

I hear
that your voice takes too much of my vision

& crowds me in.
I elaborate     
	     /  why I make bricks out of air.

from   A U T U M N   S O N G S

3/

	The Flight

Grape/shot of blackbird
get there before the stars do,

Black Concentrations!

& so the fabric loosens
& the mesh of the centre is diffuse

(allows mist through).

Then, as they are about to settle
I see them scuffing the inches

off next season’s spring.
Over the rise & fall of the tree/line

such Black Concentrations!

5/

	The Departure

Flies have short memories

			     /

immediately toward the instinct of smell
they collect themselves,

there!

The comma softens the breath
and I wait

the possibilities of coldness
rejected as     meat

the blackness of my anger
setting to a stench.

Who is it falls from whom?

7/

	The Encounter

You would think sparrows
moved through pebbles.

That sound that falls behind them
that sound that flows behind them

somewhere,
a dog is boasting his bass notes
& moves on.

At fear     the body temperature drops
& the hair on the neck     rises

through the pricked/blanket of skin.

12/

	The Orchardist

The smell of largeness, of breath,
white destinations of rain

lift over the glass
these fragmented molecules:

the dizziness of a too upright man.

& how the motes before his eyes
catch at the skeins of pride

lungs big as a cloud -
who will take anything in his stride;

an obstacle course played in a
set of rhymes.

Purple leaves at his soles.

Wood Street, Ponsonby, Auckland, 1977

from
E A R T H B O U N D   M I R R O R S
1 9 8 4

S O M E T H I N G   I N   T H E   A I R

Auckland you big arsehole,
ah, soul is what the man meant, what you lack

on this pock/baked earth scraped from the barren uteri of
The Seven Dead Ones.

But that don’t matter a scrap
as you ease your carcass into the breech of summer

into the season of reprieve and airy flocculence.
It is summer.

Summertime, and the intersecting motorways
sparkle with loads of tinsel that dissolve and bubble

through long distances of heat.
There is something in the air,

and it is not that coruscant light
which burns down through the fluffy elements

that drift and break against the cold sides of the sky.
An unique breed here in Wood Street, in Wood Street,

which leads onto a home (in Elizabeth Street)
for them other citizens, there without fortune

have had (it) their souls slammed in the door of Auckland.

You would think it broke them, yes, their backs
that they carry so much weight

to and fro Wood Street they go

they carry the imaginary golden key to this city on back
bowed    it breaks them    them’s the breaks buddy.

To and fro Wood Street they go
bearing that weight, and I wonder

whether them broken backs feel it too,

they could be sniffing the air?

			**

‘O the Gulf
opens out a chest bare as Sir Dove Meyer Robinson
heaving

in the morning
light shapes up for another day of commercial
wham bam

(thank you mam)
O thank you for turning out and already one of them
days

where cloud
has discounted some of the brightness off the hours
(the weatherman tells us)

and nose-sense
tells me that here we’ve got a ring / ding / ding / 
of a Queen city.’

And only then is the air tight with warning.

			**

This is a poem and place of asides.

This is a town of asides; public ground has been set aside
for:
public walks have been set aside
for:

street corners have been set aside
for:
recreational purposes and pick/ups.

Victoria Park is a green depth swimming under an overpass
and the heavy pollen of petrol settles here ever so gentle.

O gently now still float the fumes over the public trees
and the public seats therefore

it is an open stillness right down here under the girdered
grip of the sky where cold edges of buildings and motors

flail by

on the other (wild) side of that band of leafy trees
still feeding off them metallic bees

that are getting nowhere    fast.

Auto/fellatio flippancies of ‘the good guys’
running rings round Auckland you vast arse
					    / soul

you’ve got your very own marketable twist
here at the top O’ the Isle,

never a truer phrase passed than the HAURAKI Gulf:

you know,
someone oughta builda Radio Station Heir   (ha ha).

			**

They’ve slapped a contraceptive writ on Aotea Clinic
while a darkening flood of women drag ripe bellies off

the international tarmac and down the long slide
to the Sydney skyscrapers incisive in the surgical light

for there is something in the air over the Tasman Sea
a free/load of immigrants

an airborne web/like gauze of foetal parachutists
raining down, still fallen on another soil.

			**

When the city has become one fluorescent tube
the Black Concentrations blockade the Gulf.

Islands and islands coast out of the bluestone waters
which slide like an abacus the tides,

the tides that short/change with spillage of distance
the numerous beaches here.

Rangitoto has a secret stash of water which no living soul
has seen or smelt, perhaps fed by the dark stream

that ran the course of Queen Street when Auckland
was nothing but scrub and ti-tree,

when Auckland was nothing. Now, in a thousand basements
buildings pump back the unseen sea unseen, back

to the thrumming tides before folk here get salt
in wounds and nostrils. Auckland is returning to the sea

undercover of dark, undercover of the eternal trig/stations
which mark out the cold boundaries of the sky

and this town won’t end with a bang, but smooth as any jingle
open-ended.

7. 5   O N   T H E   R I C H T E R   S C A L E

A metal/rod the colour of cloud vibrates on the trees.

‘Raw ore’ is the grain of birdsong fed back to the leaves.

And how the whole construction breaks.

And how the entire circuitry runs out upon
the sounding board of air.

Live/wires everywhere and a tonnage of breathing space.
From the harbour, ships sound out horns and depart

against the mist and along the metal/rod of cloud.

Through the Black Concentrations of Auckland
the metal/rod the colour of cloud vibrates like a tuning fork.

Tuneless,
the sounds gather into flatness and the whole construction
breaks.

F L O T I L L A

Suicide is the result of infinite faith in matter 
		- P.D. Ouspensky

Would you salute them
butterflies     or aggressors
			    /
switchblades in the Rangitoto channel?

On this furnace day it is summertime
and too much light for anger to stand tall

as it is, here,

compressed along the volcanic distances
without tint of shadow

to the band (lava) rotunda emerging from the Hauraki Gulf
where the switchblades betwixt and between them

show sail and colour.

			**

Point of relaxation
		     /
		      to idiocy.

And across the bent back of this city
a cool breeze withers into the bland mud/flats.

Jumbo/booted beyond the bridge, buildings
relax into the distances (would you salute them?)

Lifting switchblades against the back/wash sun
the idiocy of those eternal trig/stations

over the bent/back of the sky, flick into sight.

Today, they closed the outer lanes of the bridge,
the ‘Nippon-clip-on’ ran empty as an erased tape, over and over,

traffic running so fast it is oblique. A continuous fall
from balance toward the grace of the bridge from the city

over and over that bent back: an oblique return to the sea,
a lemming mentality.

How he flicks into sight! Sailsurfer
takes his body to the ‘point of balance we have not got’

a human switchblade / a dangerous stamen /
fixed to the full blossom of canvas

a diminished bead along the edge of the horizon.

Butterflies or aggressors, you will see them
twist obliquely back to the city slide like an abacus the tides

and those other citizens, to and fro over the bridge they go
over the bent back of Auckland the metal rod the colour of cloud

that something     in the air.

			**

And if you should decide to drop, an anguished plumb-bob
of flesh, from the bridge and the point of balance

(which you have just left) arms and legs
in salute of the air, yeah, you will be honoured

as a fully fledged citizen

in having met the full expectations of this city and
the bluestone waters where you have left your mark, prophetically.

			**

Should you decide to drop, the tilted head takes the end
of brightness in - of sky and of the sea.

Either way, it is the horizontal rod of balance that is broken

as you sink into the green depths of Victoria Park
where it could be under you that the surface recedes

back from the tree tops to the Black Concentrations
of stars. Flicked through the currents of air, your body

in its fall, arched as an astronaut, inverted as suicide

: as the brightened beads of traffic flip by the band of leafy trees

: as the girdered grip of the bridge falls away from you

know that there is enough of the sky and its innocence
(especially at the corners) to wipe a city clean, any dawn.

A   M E E T I N G

‘I got myself short. Should be two dollars. 
Have to get my cigarettes Wednesday.’

The other voice remains inaudible.

‘You see? Count it.’

The voice is inaudible though accepts one hand to the shoulder.

‘Three dollars. That’s all right. Where you going?’

The upright, inaudible voice slides away, smiling.

The hour rolls like a pinball across the hammock of Wood Street
this meeting of two hands    to and fro.

This is the monorail on which one preoccupation chimes
with another.

This is the attempted synchronisation of two blades
at an imaginary switch/point.

The surface of each face breaks recognition with the other.
Salute them.

Wood Street, Ponsonby, Auckland, 1978

M O S A I C

The colour plate of Auckland pressed against that cupola.

On the air and in that vibration
how the line distorts -

the inverted images of the city dropped into the round.

And how the enamel cubes express their light
within the dark fan of the sky, and how!

There ain’t nothing antique about this city when it has become

		one fluorescent tube

even in reflection is sliding back to the sea
into pre-biotic ruin.

O to slip quietly from the face of the sky and break the surface

and break the waters

and break the capillary tubes of the nostrils of the people here.

O to break recognition with one another (like a memory restored.)

W H I S T L E   T H E M   U P

The silent war blows me away,
not the Golden Hand Shake of foreign metals

where one history breaks recognition with the other,

it is the ‘inaudible’ slip of the key
where eyes meet in strict consultation.

O to break recognition with one another, that frightens.

Those long bass notes coast out on the horns
of the ocean liners and tankers

whose vibrations flick the whitened hulls.

Through different orbits deliver them from the volcanic distances
and the jaws of the roaring lion

beneath the moon which sheds its golden fleece
is a nursery rhyme to shake us, alarmingly.

O kill them softly O sweetly with that song.

A S C E N S I O N

Rangitoto does not possess light.

Rangitoto (sparkles as a tube of crystal water) inside.

Rangitoto absorbs itself.

			**

The baked charcoal island weighted on the bluestone harbour
brittle as the fluorescent tube

as the gulls lift over to it that something in the air.

Rangitoto of The Dead Ones / the seventh seal of the barren uteri
you would expect to explode colour like a Japanese graphic.

		‘A great mountain, all in flame.’

P E R S P E C T I V E

The physicist will tell you:
		God is matter of fact
equals
	/
	  no one need be surprised at guilt anymore, quoth
the lay poet.

The explanation holds the centre together.

Surprise: fear: suicide: surprise.
And that’s an equation like the man

arms and legs in salute of the air over and over the same problem
and so I remind myself that I must remind myself

•	the astronaut yawns life onto the universe

•	the poet draws breath back out of the earth

•	the sailsurfer plays the division between earth and sky.

T H E   F I N D

for Hone Tuwhare

They dug her up in Queen Street.
A fossilised colonial woman clutching a parasol,
stiff and rigid in her flannel frock.

Pince-nez clay encrusted on the bridge
of her nose, she was pointed toward
Alexandra Park, English settler fashion

when the pneumatic bursts shattered the
ear-bone. A couple of spades and they wedged
her out of the mould (intact) 

and leaned her against the side of a
Kenworth and then broke for ‘smoko’ -
propped there as though to advertise it.

She was carbon dated 1863, and by the salt stains
on her handkerchief (tucked under the sleeve)
she had either been crying or spending

too much time with the boys down at the
Whaling Station. Records failed to prove this.
One thing remained a mystery to authorities:

the stake, or rather, surveyor’s peg
driven through the breast bone, attested 
to an acquisitive quarrel over which

were her rights, and which weren’t?

from   E A R T H B O U N D   M I R R O R S

[i]

In these days, we don’t exult the sun.

Instead, we pay cheap coinage to
its reflection and I’m reminded

that there ain’t nothing new on a metaphor.

Who would dare praise the sun
that something close to our hearts?

Exult him then!

That great runner who sees the track before him
and that makes me feel real proudful.

In these days, we don’t exult the sun.

A man shot in the snow will distort
like a hall of mirrors     I mean;

there’s just too much other beauty about.

[ii]

A woman polished as an earthenware jug
filled with northern light:

and you know     there isn’t a chance of that.
Is that what beauty’s all about

what you’d like to give into most
to make a gift of it, to get what’s going?

Right through your eyes     allow me
to see these transparencies

which crush me like ice. Now, that’s beauty.

And so I practise at departure
as this light moving the trees - airily.

What saves me (if you can call it that)
are the words here which stick,

something like a rubber/boot on damp ash.

[iii]

O the renown of the writer who put it:
‘the arse end of nowhere’

this place which has light through
it as the wet across the back of a fish

and the whole damn island     rising.

The arse end of nowhere has got this
geological radiance, the likes of which

make an unwritable thesis.
The sun is resin all over the day it bubbles

and all over these pencil/scrapings
which have the sound of laughter.

O the renown of the chorus who sang it.

[iv]

A whistle draws the thread of response

from those small motors of the heart
the drum solo that prompt the limbs to beat.

A cough starts nothing but an audience -

the jubilant cord of breath (that’s different).
In the beginning was the whistle

and then believe it or not     the word
like a lead pellet stored in the lungs.

I would reckon it (personally) that the cough
is the beginning of speech though the word

has grown thick with hair and as dry as hurt.

On our hands the question is raised
which came first     the whistle or the word?

[v]

I turn my back on the world
my tendons between the shoulder/blades

set me against the pokings of this planet

like any other. I am a small corner into
which the noises of the continents

gather and eddy.
I turn my back on the world and feel

the sharp blows on the back of the neck,
in this way, I add to the noises of the earth.

I drive my centre to the eye of your hurricane.

(I say) that our love is a little
like a summit meeting, we swap histories,

we bargain for terms. Our own separate
bag of noises we throw at each other as

so many sticks and stones to break our bones
and with sudden percussion fall upon one another.

[vi]

Even from their dust they shall adore
(and done!) how the bits of peoples

stagger, dazed and numinous out into the sunlight.

Unbeliever calls it / divinity pollution
this light     the colour of chopped straw.

O hearts of dust puff up ambitions at the day.

Dust as a hand clap in the Roman Senate.

Dust as the ancient sound of the conquered tribe.

With a large effort I pull myself together,
so what (I ask) so what else is there then

as I concentrate myself onto the here and now
and feel the sun as blotched copper on my skin?

[vii]

Our bodies move through one single arc of sorrow.
(Forgive) them who haven’t noticed a whit.
					      /
					        Brother!
now that’s about as meek and mild as you can get:

like people setting up road blocks

like fright stretched to a piano wire

like people holding out against themselves

and I won’t let go of you till you let go of me
yes I will no I won’t yes I will you to the devil.

Our bodies move through one single arc of regret,
c’mon     be fair     that’s only afterwards.

Sister, I tell you that for the moment
them bells toll to kick the shit out of us (gently).

[viii]

Q: Why don’t us people just hold together
than set about with the purpose of dying?

and this is done expressly (the hidden wish)
nothing’s more tangible than the self-destruct

button we play our signature tune on.
O to synthesise our (very) selves to bits

and sometimes, that music squeezed is
O so very beautiful as smooth as cordial even

as water is the conductor to smell - well,
we can simply hear our own ending coming

as an untainted and complete intoxication, don’t we?

O to synthesise our (very) selves to shreds
the blood the beautiful flow of water as music.

Sometimes, that music     sanguine     is
O so very beautiful as smooth as cordial and even.

[xi]

Here I am then,
a spotted handkerchief and stick on my shoulder

the southern/hemisphere like a cairn behind me.

I whistle a merry tune
into the corners of the world sniff the prospects

my heart the colour of camouflage.
Under indifferent stars I don a different hat

buried as a worm in the northern half of this apple
I digest another set of sins.

Here I am then,
a spotted handkerchief and stick on my shoulder

O every so slightly worse for wear.

[xii]

I have as many jests as checks on my coat
and a smile as dry as a brush of chalk.

The black/band of the crowd holds me in -
but I show them my colours.

Overhead, the big tent of the Shooting Star Circus

and I know it is me who is phosphorescent.
I drift from north to south, from east to west

and they know it is me who is fun loving.

I have many jests as checks on my coat
and a smile as dry as a brush of chalk.

How I love them,
those women with crisp, sibilant voices,

whose eyes fall like rotten fruit about me.

B L A C K   C O N C E N T R A T I O N S

Morning, noon, evening who drinks the milk of darkness?

I consider the magic or aggression
gone out of it - entirely. Lives, that is.

A distinct peace.

The immediate slowed to peace / sans / colour.

Stillness plump as a cushion not sat upon.

Understanding if you wish and that is what you wish.

So much habitation and no one to hear me observe
and no one to inform me they do not hear me say

what sort of peace is this?

I am a small area of agitation. I am here
and everyone finding nourishment in other places.

Evening, noon, and morning who drinks the milk of darkness?

Vienna, 1979

S O N G   O F   G R A V I T Y

Icarus, torn from his focus on the sun, reached
the supreme consummation (like any woman)

and took unto himself a worldly weight -
the complete possession of centre and gravity.

Does the woman forever plummet the whole
like (in the masculine) how one helicopter

taken at a certain angle entering the skyline,
possesses an entire city?

The want to get more than gravity can provide
is simply an exercise in non/love.

Icarus should have taken a tilt of the head
to look down and see the sun the water.

Who can work that proposition with eyes open,
even buckle oneself to a question mark

and contemplate the centre of the earth?
(thoughts: shoving my muscle through black hair).

San Francisco, 1979

S A N G   T H E   S A I L S U R F E R

Wherein that zone of coming toward
(not quite rainbow) where all is possible

possession takes place the colours running
and the boundaries non-existent

and at once the reach of prophecies is present
before final settled things begin before

corybantic moon and the sun remunerative
resume their different and separate reserves.

And only then is the air tight with warning.

No hour can be appointed to this time
which decides against the rhythms of day

as the mind reels out in perfect balance
and with itself (is sought out in turn) 

and at once the reach of prophecies is present
a woman will foretell who plays with light

this is the song of the Black Concentrations
in the scooped hollow at the back of the head.

And only then is the air tight with warning.

from
G U A R D I A N S,   N O T   A N G E L S
1 9 9 3

W A L T Z I N G   T H E   G O D S

As if they could not lift themselves high enough
children who unfold into fantasies

kites over Philopappou Hill
from string, pull cloud out of thin air

the way a comma tugs when the line runs out.

The clouds I spoke of, augmented, became italic
and passed through the stilled serif of the Acropolis

as did the kites that worked the air – bluish
like the freshly exposed socket of a bone.

As if they could not lift themselves high enough
where sideways

a 747 snipped to view and halved the sky
and cut the string that played the fingers that lifted

the hands that tossed the kites the children built.

Behind certain white walls you can hear
the untroubled plumbing of the flute

and you would propose that here, the player
transposed fingertips to a flock of doves.

Or at certain quay-sides,
brake drums within the throats of mules, screech.

On the sounding-board of these cobbled ways (that is)
from the whitewashed alley-ways

noisy with the approach of mules, events of sound.

Then the heavy swallowing of the bell-tower
makes solid the hour and you would conclude that

it was here events had collected
as though people, objects exchanged substances.

As marble broke down against the skyline –
broken and suggestive of an absent architecture

the half dome of the observatory rose – frozen,
locked up the moon for the night on an empty sky.

And the Acropolis, silent as a construction site,
held down the curled blueprint of the stars

a tiny model made to house a universe while
over Philopappou Hill closed the dark shutters of bats:

closed the theory of darkness we call night

opened the small recognitions we call the stars

parted the vast separations we call the winds

revolved the minute gravities we call stillness.

		Ano Petralona, Athens 1979

A C E 

Sky ploughs and grades to
partial storm, quick moments
of darkness, casual rain.
An aircraft drags badly taped
sound through another hour.
The engine rocks its mounts
confident. The prop turns,
autodidactic. Quartz landing
lights calculate a downward
path. An early idiom of
stars surface upward. He gives
his scarf one comic flick,
college style. He taxis in.
By planets and galaxies of gas
light he dreams ambition
high as a stealth bomber,
swerves o’er massy thunderhead.
With eyes blitzed as Beirut
his Gatling laughter strafes.
Or, tearing a dotted line
down the Dead Sea - noise
chasing after - he sways that
horizon cradle fashion, sweeps
the Left Bank, banks to the
Apollo glare of the Sinai high
noon. He dreams his family
safely bunkered and quartered
suburbwise, happy as a neatly
clipped hedge, kids hopping
Frisbee quick on the broad lawn.
His spouse, blond as bread,
awaits the whisperings of his
black-box heart, mooning for
dog fight love at home coming.

A   F A R   N O I S E   F R O M   N E A R   T H I N G S

That which has gained a little
further, high enough to curve out the
earth, the diminished rainforests

of Brazil, the hole in the ozone above
Antarctica, the lessened bushtribes of
Africa, the years pushed out by light,

the greenhouse globe over-photographed
is how we picture ourselves back,
falling. Or rice paper moon in the

July afternoon. Bulkheads of tankers
whitelit on the horizon. Night,
underground with a silence of escalators.

Sky and cloud, a dream of snakes.
A fallen leaf against the skylight.
A leaf against the skylight fallen, so.

And we then who engage the light
take ourselves to the work of aerial
attention the Ancients were part of - 

remembrance of time, atomistic. 
The seasons knew us as we learned. 
Our lessons learned well, too. 

Around the roulette wheel of the world, 
throught he yellow pages of the sun flicking
over decades what migrations made,

from the micro-chip to Star Wars,
digital sex to right wing abstinence,
eclipse of personal vision, limitation of

immediate memory, the object of 
our desires objective love, love at several
removes in our falling. Sangsara.

The great lesson came in a sudden hurt
of killing, our first knowledge
reflected through caves ochre-images

of the slain. We began worship,
measured time, and built against the
shock, the pain. These sentiments amongst

the tumbled blocks of older verse are
gone from the heart, the darkest galaxy,
and memory alone promotes sorrow.

It is today always, green as a computer
screen and elsewhere, unrecorded, 
the high surgery of the supernova which

never exploded now, but once.
Child dream. An abandoned railway
siding overgrown with nettle, hide-

out for a wizard. Backdrop of gentle
slopes, elms at distance. 
Adolescent visions of Irish barrows, 

hollowed darkness, whisperings, a wish
to locate the signal in self back in time.
This resides still. Downwards and over

the garden (a dark, humped square) 
my neighbour shadows through dropblinds
before a startled TV. Dirtied cloud

frames a full moon that is sideways in
this movingly. Gravity takes hold
and accentuates. Gestures weigh in their

orbits. Bright as cufflinks, radio
telescopes revolve on red tablelands
to uncover one more sacred site between

the stars. A brain-based society
ornately tracks the lusty technologies
and the years recognise our whereabouts.

In the beginning wooden paddles echoed
from atoll to island. Air whitened,
thunder reverberated. A riot of leaves

under malarial rain. Then came the
creak of rigging, came the off-shore
companies, came synthetic drugs 

and salvation, and finally, came migration
back to Vanuatu, Samoa, Tonga, Niue
to light up the rim of the Pacific.

The hour turns, an electric train flicks
blue flashes over suburb and hoarding,
brick arch and emptied streets.

The day’s news ceases amongst the
satellites. High enough to curve out earth, 
painted prows of long boats are falling 

on Southern skies, dragging their keels
across some coral harbour where - fitfully,
gracious guns of goodwill ride at anchor.

Chelmsford Street, Newtown, Sydney, 1987

H A L L E Y ’ S   C O M E T

“ Bushy as a great broom held across the sky ” 
	- Wang (c. AD 120) trans. Arthur Waley

At first there was
brilliant sunlight
anticipating earlier

years. A breath of
lit wind that did not
possess any location

dissolved back into
the evenness of day,
became a gift-wrapped

surprise from an
unknown friend unthought
of until then.

Earthquakes which
rumoured those things
done and forgotten

were sufficiently
compacted in some other
and inhuman memory,

for every creature
must have its fair say
at the end as did these.

The anti-climax 
had been expected 
and surprised one.

Without a scream
the disasters continued
unhurried, as if it

were an appointment
that had to be kept; 
for this had always been

arriving beyond any
personal memory of the
wisest man that might

have served as an
invitation, warning. When
the comet finally

described the finitude
of the heavens, coming
back a millennium

later, we remembered
his words about the
serpent consuming its tail.

M A N N E D   M I S S I O N   T O   T H E   G R E E N   P L A N E T

Behind some night bush Rousseau green, 
some dwelling in one place, some in another,
it had been agreed between us by courier
and hesitation to meet in the village centre
at midnight. The first figure to emerge
was to be greeted this: America comes to
interpret its humour: the hurried reply; 
community halls abound. Back, beyond our
allotted frequency, The General who had
not been posted gathered over another Power
Lunch. After the brief and the oiling of
rifles we set forth across the causeway
through the marble green of foothills, 
into the grey of higher ground. The thought,
like a saffron scarf caught on a thorn
bush seemed even now on the closed terrain a
crusade of sorts, - kept us ahead. Amply,
unnumbered rivers plashed into the battery
green of immeasurable hollows. So it was
that we became inseparable, spirit creatures
to the forest life, the journey boundless,
the orders which concerned the depot, unread.

A S   T H E   P A I N T E R   M O V E S   T O W A R D   H I S   C A N VA S

1.

Momentarily; we knew we could
own nothing. An orchestra crackled
in parenthesis on the emergency
band as if from another age. Through
mountain passes the white dirigible
tilted at electrical storms. Yet,
what felt like fear looked like a
pink, tropical orchid in close up,
deadly in every detail. The colour
plate said it, though got mixed with
others after the catalogue got
lost. An afternoon hot and steamy.
After the rain had finished the
thought came through like a gilded
sun that we could luxuriate our
every wish, music too, if we wanted.

Civic Leaders pushed their pitch:
the tallest building in the southern
hemisphere (Sydney) was soon 
to rise beyond the computer graphic,
apparitional as a water spout!
O the half sunk water wheel rests its
spokes on the ancient river basin,
only to re-emerge as the harbour
bridge into early morning, traffic fog.
And passing by the Western Quarter,
open frontages, cotton shirts, rack
upon rack, hot smell of metal on felt,
often backing onto smaller factories
and interwoven lanes, sometimes
a glimpse of whitewash hanging out 
picket-fence lettering: EVERY SPECIES
IS AN ENDANGERED SPECIES and claims

to long-lost sacred sites. Charcoal
flaked fences under yellow gorse,
the valley falling away to memory of
bush fires which swept long before
his boyhood took this place as playground,
an image now taut as comprehension.

11.

Pull in from celluloid an early
afternoon from 1954 (Rpt) pulsing
cloud up mountain valleys seen on
location in Peru as you recalled then
someone toppling two miles through
thin air - Chuck, our hero, black leather 
jacket hard-pressed against the 
mountain. Yet, it was the light which 
figured, flickering there in your
young matinee years some found memory,
reservoir to intelligence, long ago.
Not the mop-topped birds, nor the sun
heading toward warmer seasons
built out of piano notes from the
echoing school facing the little park.
But turning through those chords,
something you had to say lies behind
where it always was. That empty
space calls you now, asks your energy
and faith more than the body can
give, to finally give out. The day
shoulders through our personal gravities.
With a slight shift on the wind
current as if to eventually make up its
mind, the white dirigible turns cloud
faint over the long horizon - its
guy-ropes whisker thin, the day languid.

H A L L O   M O O N,   H A L L O   M O O N

Janis Joplin had duende, made her feel
good but can you take it? The Stone Age people
worshipped the heart, hardline love of elements.

The vision meets the image perfectly.
MOON BOUNCING radio operators call it - Kepler
dreamed this too. Signals bounce back visually.

If you’ve the right equipment you become
the man without qualities, a prism in your hand.
You don’t know the weight of heartwood.
And, who do you love anyway? You went past
your original, became mud only to become human
once more. Something remembered you.
With a kind of irradiance, your soft focus
fell back upon me through an arch of greenery.

Q U E E N   S T R E E T   R I O T

The breaking of the shield.
Clouds beat out their gongs, call
the pohutukawa bloom to the
Auckland summer. Above glass
office blocks, black as tornadoes,
the gong beat out again, boomed
the length of Queen Street.
At Aotea Square the crowd smiles,
hangs in the balance under an
overturned moon. A hundred heads
turn as one to meet recognition.
And the dream? That becomes
the body working inside its costume.
The breaking of the shield.
Night falls with a thickness of
batons. Riot police, armed,
visored, moving upon the hobbled
hearts of the people (violent
against property and themselves)
moving from side-streets under
shields, riot police moving in one
black net to catch Auckland.
And the deed? That becomes a 
moment in time. The moon thumps 
the blue wrists of Queen Street 
up from a darkening sea. The Lady 
Mayor walks by flashing cameras, 
walks by the doll-house city broken 
on the black and white screen of 
Aotea Square. And this hour turns 
the colour of pale, lemon light.
The breaking of the shield.

G U A R D I A N S,   N O T   A N G E L S

Lake Wairarapa? I think it
the eye of the fish Maui hauled.
A still place at sea level,
brackish. A grey pupil over which
weather comes makeshift to
Martinborough from the coast.
For each of us there exists a
mystic-scape drawn from fact; 
the image recurs stealthily.
Lake Wairarapa waits for the
keeper of its colours through
dream vigilance.
Lake George? Gold tussock suggests
it. A deepening breath defines
to a temporary surface,
vapours through heat, sinks, rises
again. As though it wished to
retrieve itself back through
time and is remembered elsewhere.
No one knows how,
yet a certain guesswork stays,
like the way Turner blurred the sky
and smeared the shock of living,
made a moist gauze of light.
Could it be done?
To reshape the globe into a cube
not flung elliptical,
but rolled upon its points.
Continuously, the unseen figure
stumbles out of the park
made perfect by a perfect hand,
and under a scapula moon chases
thought toward contentment.

N I C H O L A S   C H A R L E S   B O C H S A   1 7 9 1 - 1 8 5 6

		Camperdown cemetery, Sydney

I liked your story and the
stone placed by your lover, Ann
Bishop, in St Stephen’s cemetery.
How Ann left her composer
husband Henry to his knighthood
and in Paris found you, Nicholas
Bochsa. You became lovers,
travelled the continent giving
concerts, she with her magical voice
and you with your lyre. Then you
sailed on to Sydney and your final
curtain call at the Royal.
Did the ‘Agents of Napoleon’ truly
track you down under, pay you
off for crimes of embezzlement?
You knew return to France meant
immediate arrest and jail.
Knowing you were dying you wrote
your own requiem, a loud laugh
at Catholicism. After, Ann gave you
an Anglican burial and the whole
town turned out. She never looked
back, continued on to China.
So you took thousands from the
emperor, shows you knew a good rort,
were pretty good with your hands.

I R I N A   R A T U S H I N S K A Y A,   F R E E D

Something has lit up your
Motherland. Whose eyes? What flock
of birds? Camplights?
Late summer eve and the freeway
insists its traffic through wind.
Rubbed off sound. Handfuls of
enjoyment coming and going.
Not the noise of barbed wire dragged
through snow, and not the dull
weight of concrete at Zone 4 Mordovia.
Irina Ratushinskaya, would this
have reached your last address
before your Russian God brought you
safe to England, and safely to
her hospitals, to the freeworld and a
million little decisions?
Handfuls of shouting reach out from
solitary confinement, your breath
amplifies and your words
bite warmth. Something has lit up
your Motherland.

A N D   A L L   T H E   G O O D T I M E   C H A R L I E S

	for my mother, Cecily Joan McCormack, 1920 - 1990

Striding girls spill from
office blocks, cool light through
May leaves. The moon, a hayrick
unsettled before palings of cloud.
A bat caught on wire makes
one buckled lampshade. 
Your generation ends with you now.
Swell, so long! I see chrome hubs
spinning backward along green
embankments under a tribute of elm.
Something carries through laughter
like a klaxon, and shuffles
black swans over the Taieri river.
The town clock ceased sometime
back in 1920, when brassy sounding
trams halted by the Band Rotunda.

J O H N   K E A T S   C A M E   O N   T O O   S T R O N G

To Fanny his girl he did. 
To think, if telephones existed in 
those days, what a mess he would’ve 
made of it. Verily, the best Romantic
is an isolated one. Post-by-carriage.
Reflection through a long
sea-cliff stroll. A quiet cough in
Rome, or blood the colour of
port? So he’d write Fanny and say:
‘On the 21st of this month,
Sunday at 10.30 a.m. precise, check out
Shakespeare’s sonnet No. 38,
ditto, I’ll do the same. Thinking of
you.’ She didn’t give a rat’s
arse for John as genius and he never
got to bonk the woman. He just
couldn’t cope. O My Belovéd, so it is
that in the mind’s eye I scale 
you down to little dimensions, and
you but a gentle cough away.

T H E   D E C A D E E R S

Yi-yippee-yo! The picket line of
verse slingers stretches back to the ‘50s.
The decadeers ride on in anthological
gallop to blaze the way with found
poetry into one more famous sunset.
Kerouac is laid back on the trail, strung
out beneath the bo-tree. Bukowski has
lit out for the badlands of L.A.
Stead’s skull hangs over the ripped off
limbs of embryo poets at El Academia.
Jacques Derrida signs up, notches
a trope on the butt of language: -
they ride on off the page onto the stage.
All that day smoke rose untroubled
from the desk-top mesas into a blank sky.
In the borderless regions the racist
ape yawled through the stadiums of Europe.
Then night came fast as a fax, 
and as they leaned into saddles on that
wordless waste, each writer pondered: what
had been altered by the observation of it?
The furor poeticus sang like a
great wind down the Information Highway.

from
I S L A N D S   O F   W I L D E R N E S S
A   R o m a n c e
1 9 9 6

15.

Love is a way back
to the first sense before
association, beyond the large,
lit city of mind, to
departure before it became
loss, to memory before it became
sorrow, and so on back to
original models before we bought
the bright, imitative ones.
On hearing the above,
her brow arched into a bow,
dismissively. His discoveries
sank, this in turn gave
rise to pity, and so on.

Grafton, Auckland, 1981

22.

As you wait to come
back, lives mass to concussion.
Past sunsets froth up
like fizz from a bottle.
You are left with hat in hand
before the task had begun.
What is discovered is
the backward gesture. The gun
returns to the holster
and the victim judders upright.
We do not worry forward
but stalk the old securities.
The rest is ambush.

29.

Then the rats up and left.
Much later, the pied-piper
and the townsfolk,
following upon the greedy heels
of illusion, walked into
the mountain. Tough.
So she plays the song she wants
to hear inside another’s head.
Or did. Until the echo
came back like a boulder telling
the same old story:
in the beginning was ‘The Word’
for those with heart enough
to hear.

32.

DEAR LADY, regard my heart
as a waiting room. The
magazines lie fanwise on
the empty seat. The poster
reads: SAVE THE BEECH FORESTS.
An undergrowth of light through
bamboo blinds warms
the body’s mind. My hands
make an appointment with your
breasts, and that mountainous
plateau of exquisite flowers
where you hail me from.

35.

All the tough kids got
married and made a homework
full of kids who went to school
and got tough and didn’t
believe what mum and dad said.
I let loose my dart at you.
But the message inside was too
heavy and I missed. I wanted
to say I would walk you
home because that’s where
the heart is, and, if I am
to find yours it’s the first
place I would look.

44.

In the ancient city of Jaffa
yellow steps descend to the whale’s
belly, to white weddings in cool,
stone rooms. Shalom. Between
the explosions and the weather
life is matter-of-fact. But today
space is tense and boasts occupations,
like bunkers built on the moon.
At the dead centre of this
amphitheatre the echo laps back
from my feet.
	Unavoidable.

45.

Yeah, there were props of
wind, gusty and folded, and the
weather satellite did its job days
ahead of schedule. Other signs,
too. The picture jolted sideways
a bit but no one felt it.
Significance came later, after the
laughter swung on a boom
around the room. None dared to name
it. About then, the dame in furs
pulled the grate on the lift,
leaving the wise-guys to hang out
in the vestibule.

51.

‘Spirit and flesh
don’t work,’ she said, ‘together.’
Upon this thought stole
the man with stockinged head.
Her words climbed as broomsticks
over the willow trees.
‘To avoid the rape,’ she said,
‘allow the aggression.’
And so she had been beaten
into division. Softly, the night
with its protective arm drew
across her eyes.

55.

The tubular wind.
The motorcycle beat of
snow on Arctic wastes. 
That’s me moving into frame.
A hunched figure fur-edged
against the cold.
O bring back the ghosts.
Against the closed set of my
heart, under the laddered
sky, O my love, this is
a preview to let you know
I don’t mean it. This is
an emerald iceberg I float
			   /	
			     to you.

58.*

On her sad
pilgrimage she leaned into
hills on her way home, forever
bent against nostalgia, to
where she has always been, that
childhood round as a world.
Impossible now. And this is why
she is still going,
caught there on the track
under the green cliff, as
though it were merely a day’s
walk away.

*Under the collection’s original title, Romances, No 58 was taken by the New Zealand painter, Tony Fomison (1939-1990) as title and dedication to a work which depicted this scene.

61.

The Orient (lighted beads
quickly flipped through the hands
of darkness) Express.
The gentleman with the black
fedora didn’t move a muscle.
The lady with diamond
fingers, languished. And then, the
thin-lipped man. A hiss
of steam under the vaulted roof.
The dream ended abruptly on
a high note as the lady slumped
forward onto the sign:
R18. SUITABLE FOR ADULTS ONLY.

Awatea Rd, Parnell, Auckland, 1983

67.

Night of Warehouses.
The wind of God blows through
ventilation ducts rank as
carbolic. Lucky Luciano makes
a deal with Dutch Schultz.
Rat-ta-tat-tat-tat.
‘Even if you ain’t seen it,
you’ve heard it all before.’
‘Sure, it reminds me of
a dream I never had.’
And the two old priests drink
and roll dice and each harbours
a gangster in his heart.

France Street, Newton, Auckland, 1984

76.

Sparrows pack in a family
above the sea-sound of traffic.
Under busted cornices
and behind neon billboards
night rain saddens to yellow.
Sparrows pack in a family
on the green, underwaterstreets
of May, in Vienna.
I once looked with hard knowing,
the seeing is circular now.
Gulls turn through the gusty
wet of this hour, and so
I hear you.

78.

On the dark side of a
cold hill (they sang) bullets
were the one light, and roses
blossomed from out his chest
(they sang) against a green,
green sky. He dreamed then
of being tossed into the Spanish
night on the horns of the sun.
Federico Garcia Lorca,
the most humble of village fountains
lifts its sword to clash
against the icicles of the moon,
your silence.

86.

Rain solid as riot gear
on beach palms, the day flexible
under Cyclone Gaddafi.
A landing barge pulls to the cove
and the General proclaims
a Banana Republic. 
Props: pink canvas chairs 
and lettuce green towels.
Back on Lava Mountain natives
fire up the Bicentennial Beacon.
The South Pacific sure has
a lot to answer for but -,
that’s cool.

Chelmsford St, Newtown, Sydney, 1988

87.

‘Look pal, men do it
for prestige, and women for
security, so write that across
the sky. Both demand different
things, relationships, that is.’
      Roman de le Rose 
was rooted out centuries ago, killed
off with a high powered mix
of cynicism and freedom.
In fact, the last couple seen
heading into the labyrinth
was Laurel and Hardy,
looking terribly confused.

91.

Tank tracks down the
arm of Afghanistan. Supertankers
plunge into the Persian Gulf.
We forever enact a terrible
knowledge, that all of us contain 
the negative of the ‘Big Bang,’
are those self-same atoms.
Energy continuously surfaces as
anger, creation turned inside-out.
Sacred domes on the
highest mountains revolve toward 
that farthest point of
fleecy light.

92.

True ham of the
heart, you inflect attic-sad
at the moon, farm affections out
on the car phone. Vowels
populate over mansard roofs,
you’re in Paris; over ganoid slick
of gutters, you’re in New York;
over stained counterpanes,
you’re in Kings Cross.
‘When I hear the word heroin
I reach for my magnum,’
says the ansaphone.
Well - how do you feel?

93.

You promised you’d
show me an Argentinian
rainforest where the butterflies
harvest moisture from
massive waterfalls!
I thought of Lord Greystoke
who couldn’t hack the fashions of
the ‘90s: char-a-bancs,
steam engines, banners and brass,
frock-coats, the formaldehyde;
and with force majeure (leaving
Sir Ralph skidding on a tea-tray
off the landing) went back.

94.

Disappointment hung
slack like rope on a bollard.
town planners downed pens
when we missed out on the America’s
Cup. Seminal designs for the
Auckland harbour boulevard
went up in smoke.
And when Mlle Leprieur blew up
the ‘Rainbow Warrior’ she got
the perfect ‘gitaway’ holiday!
a South Pacific Hideaway.
Now she’s home and pregnant, a
little live corpse afloat
inside her.

98.

Sails whiter than an
Opera House tilt toward the
continent flat as a postage stamp,
lift to the Centre Point Tower.
Discovery Day is, what it is.
And give the blacks the old heave-ho
in the wake of the first fleet.
There’s the balloon hike
and Expo 88, there’s the woodchip
graft from a grateful parliament,
futons and Snugglepot Awards.
Discovery Day is, what it is.
And give the blacks the old heave-ho
in the wake of the first fleet.

100.

Pitiless is a word
disowned. It is honour minus
object, subsumed, majestic 
as a Shade. Buried metres 
down and locked in ice, it is
irretrievable as a mammoth.
Pitiless is a word
like extinction. It is rain
sweeping vast tracts of basalt.
It haunts the migratory
paths of ungulates and birds.
Pitiless is a word of 
immense resource, and wakes 
in delicate, ancient heat.

101.

The millennial turtle
parted ocean plates. Goldrush on
the Pacific rim of Fire,
Misima Is. Papua New Guinea.
On quarried thermal reserves of
Rotorua. On open-cut volcanoes
of Polynesia. On atolls
landscaped as heliports, and mines
worked by repatriated ethnic groups.
Ladies and Gentlemen,
I unveil this devolutionary
model, an infrastructure worthy
of Disney or Darwin.

103.

What history, that of
Cultural Apologists, or the
Individual Egoist?
A.M. on the semiotic main,
post-modern pirates plunder 3-D
ghost ships for Found Booty.
Kierkegaard makes a leap but hit
the deck. Umberto Eco makes
a movie. In the Captain’s quarters
a Chubb safe and mementos
of Miss O’Hara.
The word processor broadsides:
COME. AS. YOU. WERE. PM.

from
U N M A N N E D
1 9 9 9

C u l t u r a l   M I s a p p r o p r i a t I o n

Is that what I hear you cry, citizen?
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 door-step
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? Is it your wish
to head off the cultural bandits at the
historical impasse, citizen, by placing a
patent on your mana? Beware the polemicists
who define and so divide, who aggregate
authority unto self where before lay none.
Symbol becomes the circumference of
time and custom. It is not the thing itself,
but the beautiful echo of a people’s harmonic
which cannot be bounded nor weakened.
Here lies the camouflage that protects the
ancient matrix, the silent memory of our
blood’s journey and sound leads you to it.

from   W O R D   M A P S

1.	Down By The River

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 arc anticipates -
but the headwaters are held greyly
back by a concrete-net on this
dappled and uncaptured urban afternoon.
He deftly flicks and spools back 
and forth from channel to channel.

3.	False Idols

It was always wood, wood
along the way, and exits went from
grove to sacred grove till deeper wood
lay beyond the Roman shield and sword;
that, though, belongs to another
picture book. The lyre-bird mimics the
chainsaw and Birds of Paradise
spit chips. Along the Hume Hwy. east
of Eden, a concrete Mountain Ash
dubbed ‘Yggdrasil’ boasts a
wide-screen computer enhanced vista:
an arrow-straight mono-rail running
from Uluru clean through the Olgas.

8.	Continental Shelf Co.

I officially declare the millennial
Poets’ Symposium on the Age of Inner
space now open: Welcome to OCEANISM.
poets are required to be proficient
in submarine mythology of an exploratory
and Cousteau-esque manner, able to
identify myriad life-forms luminescent yet
undiscovered (except, perhaps, for the
Vampire Squid) at depths unsounded, 
in sea-trenches unknown, free, hopefully of
maritime wrecks and missiles from any epoch;
whose task it is to float lines at once
filigreed as plankton, filtered as sunlight.

12.	“Hills of Home”

Greywacke mostly, and fat pale
clay where I troubled the hills about
Wellington (Brooklyn-west) that
you dug through to reach China as a
kid out-the-back of our place.
The gorse gully and yellow flowers,
black seed-pods bursting in the summer
heat. Down you went past broken
bottle glass to the untouched cool
clay hoping any moment to pot-hole up
into a paddy field through the
earth’s centre. Every failed dig
stayed a secret from adults, forever.

G E N E R A T I O N   O F   ‘68

Frank O’Hara (here I’m skating slow
on sacred ice) has got a lot to answer
for, yet who hasn’t? Take the legacy
of ‘60s poets, for example, who can’t
help but write like him; syntactically
careering around his blizzard of words,
elbow-jolting crazily, clutching at
each others’ ear-muffs, button-holing
opportunity. Seems they did that as
par for the course till it got too dizzy.
Round and round the freedom rink they
went and those who zigzagged quick 
or cut up rough fell back upon the railings
youth-exhausted to exhale worn, cautious
success, though tried not to show it.
What happened to the stragglers in the
maul is anyone’s guess; some unmarried,
a good number courted hardship - whatever.
Nobody cares overly much. The ‘60s poets
they go on to write like Frank 0’Hara:
fewer drop-by parties, meaner somehow.

P A T   B O O N E  &  t o n t o

White-shirted (not blue)
they approach in twos:
“Excuse me Sir, a small
moment of your time?”
Soft-selling eternity 
and the clean-cut Hereafter.
The boyish accent downloads
the serious side of the
American dream, eyes fixed
computer bright. The other
is slower, slope-shouldered
and discipled, backgrounded
by a blandished brain.
As a child, when the God
was always friendly,
big as a house, long as a
street and the day endless,
the knock upon the door
signalled: “Excuse me
young man, is the lady of
the house in?” Welcome
the suitcased salesman; the
Bon-Brush Man: big-bristled,
wooden-backed scrubbing
and bottle brushes, sandsoap
and Brasso for hard domestic
usage. Not now. These two
modern peddlers head out
to the brick bungalows of
the inner-city suburbs
selling the light and the Way,
galloping round the outer
handicapped districts;
brainwashed right-wing angels
confident as professional
sportsmen on a World Tour.

T O   T A L K   O F   F L A G S

‘The flags fall like large, hollow,
monochrome leaves,’ said Ritsos, but
this isn’t Greece. How can you talk of
changing flags as blithely as you
would a marriage? When we fly the flag
it is as label to proclaim attitude,
and rightly so, too: the Remembrance
Day Parades, Expansionism, other
people’s wars; the main street of every
country town at the dying of day lights
up the ‘Unknown Soldier’ - the long 
lists of the Dead written in lead. No,
these things will always hold, rung up
once yearly regular as a poker-machine.
Change flags, to acknowledge what? Whose
domestic honour, what custodial deaths?

W O R D S   T O   L U R E   A   G H O S T

	an exile’s soliloquy

Henley Pub? I am one year from
your death, and a mad mile from your
achievement
		twenty or so years
down the track. I think you may have
killed a few of us off, brother,
who rejoiced
in your thicket of sorrows.
				Jim Baxter,
if a cabbage tree marks your spot by
the river,
		I am glad of it.
After you went, we were too eager
for another Apollo, and the laurel
was tossed from
hand to poetic hand like a hot kumara.
Most dropped it. A number were swept
by the winter river with the eels
into the underworld.
			The God Love
and the God Vengeance sat down
in a burnt out warehouse to share out the
small morsels
			of pain.
The poets
		are playing hide-and-seek
with each other in and out of marriage.
The sharing 
		is done.

			A southerly
whistles up over the gun emplacements on 
Brooklyn Hills,
		Jim, scattering
the unposted autumn leaves.

S H E E T   M U S I C

Like some murky storm that presages
pain, or engine that mauls the curb, 
the stereo wallows its bass notes at the top 
of the head, lands soft as afterbirth.
‘If you place a white sheet over America
500 Indian Nations show like bloodspots,’
said Jim Harrison at Lake Superior,
‘the buffalo and the Big Tree’s gone 
too. Greed!’ 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 and me. Men picking on the chance
sounds of emptiness. The daily round
of campfire, man and nature, etc. A moon
patient as an escalator, maybe. It’s all
been done before, anyhow. What was
that about Indians leaving a flaw in the
fabric for the soul to escape? Ours
is the gift of factory seconds, well made, 
well meant through to a public we detest
if you think about it. And the quickest way
to solitude is via a four wheel drive, eh?
There’s comfort in that mate, getting out.

M Y T H  &  M A R I O L A T R Y

At a small village not
far from Manila, in the house
of armaments & munitions,
in a house of grenades 
and ammunition, the plaster
statue of the Virgin Mary as
humble as a trademark,
stands splashed in carmine
tears like some peasant
shot on a quiet morning bearing
water from the creek.
The hovels strewn about
the hills are so many broken
boxes. The sun is spinning
clockwise for hope. One
cloud out of nowhere , then a 
drape of blue that might
be the sky. The gathering of
people is more impressive
than a food drop. 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 near mountain
meadow. Here, under a glass
blown moon, a cool wind shall
leave this place sacred.

U N M A N N E D

Take this day, lonely as a man in
an empty house, at his window, the wintry yard
below.

Sea calm. The moon scatters its
coinage. A rubber dinghy bucks an orectic
surf. Pebble beach. The conning-tower signals:

‘which came first, meaning or memory?’

One flashlight winks hungrily under sea-cliffs,
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 ablutions of the night done
with, the half-bad dreams wiped away, the tensions
of the muscles adjusted in preparation for the

perpendicular, the carpet rolled back, the masks
hung up once more upon the wall at the ready. 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 backyard hovering over the
roped-swing in the pelting rain and neighbourhood
of cat and 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.

Shaped as an emu neck, steam extends
over the factory stack from the industrial sector
in this small, southern city. A yellow band
of horizon suggests sunset. The steam darkens out.

Now runs at 4:15 the see-through veins of rain from
window-to-sill. A splashed up forest of drops tap out what
is left of this late, ruined day in July.

Here there is no history, if by history you mean
the soul fired in the kiln of time. Here there is only
the compilation of event in a scrap-yard of days
and kicked aside incident.

			You can still hear the
settlers’ squeeze box and fiddle in suburban settlements 
and tavern, the landscape-flat accents, the sky channel
applause and throat-clearing of smoke exhaust.

We remember the po-faced poets who went away never to
return from the Ambition Wars and Success Sorties.

As always, cars chittering in long queues in the
persimmon light of dusk, on freeways dreary with drizzle
and distance, at the encoded city-bound intersections.

He makes his heroine his addiction and vice versa,
becomes the object of obsession into which safe-zone he
precipitates himself, unmanned.

		Away now from that well worn cliché,
the crazy party hat of Sydney’s Opera House / the bat-eared
shells

and clouds that muscle reflective buildings

to the O so cloacal coil of green hills round the
rectangular cattle, prominent as so many out-of-town acts
in provincial centres.

You pass smoothly in your car the valley below 
and there, an intimate scene: a family gathered shock still: 
the overhanging forest imaged on the coffin-lid,

					momentarily;
then lowered into shadow. The town lies behind you.

The world will change to that which forgets you,
and your enthusiasms will be as a passing fashion. In this
you come to understand the nature of illusion

				and the hoped for
expectations of youth, a too-well travelled dream. Here
where life recedes further into distance

you will know yourself as unmanned.

B R A I D W O O D

	for Judith Wright

Granite and quartz country, once
gold rush, now cattle tread amongst

the white hawthorn and yellow broom;
from Captain’s Flat to Major’s Creek

the creek-beds cut the empty vein.

Hail or heat, the hanged ghost
of Thomas Braidwood rolls out his

oaths big as boulders upon the town:
‘dust, poverty, despair, drunkenness’

before he choked his rage at the
end of a rope, phlegm thick as gossip.

Annandale, Sydney, November 4, 1996

B R I L L I A N T   L O S E R S

on reading Geoff Cochrane’s Tin Nimbus

The gay psychologist quoting ‘The Divine
Right of Kings’ and the lexicographer, his life’s
dream of the Great New Zealand Dictionary,

both entrenched alcoholics, both the originals
Dostoyevsky might have claimed, although
both stark losers by the world’s brute standards.

Yes, I was there too, that late Saturday night
after the Duke, riding the Kelburn cable-car up
under the shadowy, Gothic pile of Victoria

University, where furtive as hedgehogs, we found 
a handhold to jemmy open an illegal window,
fossick the disused office for carton stacked upon

carton, each one packed with indexed filing 
cards, meticulous references, NZ arcana, forgotten 
dialects, fables rare as moose from Southland, 

obscure derivations, etc., incalculable musings
of an idealist (this he showed us) and dreamer. Here
lay the singular industry of a reverential scholar,

abandoned - yet thirty years on, The Oxford
Dictionary of New Zealand English first appeared,
penned by an academic of that selfsame city.

We are the last of the witnesses Geoff, like the
derelicts who took the sun sitting behind the Public
Library, or sheltered in Pigeon Park, days long

gone (along with The Duke and THE GRAND
HOTEL) a city newly syllabled, yet the light remains,
much the same milky white and pale as stone.

W A R D R O B E   D R I N K E R S

is what they are in Austinmer.
Yuppies from the North Shore $300,000
homes on the beach front sending
the RSL broke and the greenies
blocking development for a few birds
up an estuary. Could be worse,
given the Japs on the Gold Coast
going off like mobile phones.
The miners and cottages are long gone,
so is full employment. In 1941
as a telegraph Delivery Boy I made
13 shillings 10 a week. Across
the Harbour Bridge to the North Shore
on a regulation red bike. Sunday
was the day for casualty messages,
the dead and wounded delivered
all over Sydney except Vine street,
Darlington, where Darcy the Crim lived
and the most dangerous place in town.
I came to Austinmer 30 years ago
before the Wardrobe Drinkers
in the days of the miners and cottages.
Take those grain and coal carriers
upwards of 250,000 tonnes with a 12
man crew, anchored stern to wind,
off ‘Hill 60’ out of Port Kembla -
navigated by satellite direct to Japan.
You want the best view? Sublime Pt.
Lookout, right down the coast, the
Pacific ironed flat far as the eye can see, 
a sky expanded metal-red nightly.

Austinmer, NSW, 1993

A U N T Y   E V E

who always kept the Aspidistra
flying high up in her Georgian house on
the windy Terrace from marble urns

		had lipstick bomber-pilot red
and nails the colour of flame.

It was often ‘elevenses’ in her lounge
with Gordon’s served on a silver platter,
THE CITY HOTEL, DUNEDIN 1932 engraved

on the rim. ‘Another “stim” dear? ’
from the mahogany sideboard repository to dozens
of weighty 78 jazz records in brown paper
jackets stacked like so many ossified flap-jacks.

Oh, she had the most beautiful hands (in her
day) they said, used for ‘commercials’ in the
Women’s Weekly & Booths the Chemists.

Who could forget her gravel voice and make up
mannequin thick

	not remember her gin-sweet
breath warm upon the neck? And how some Yank
billeted during WW2 (here) ‘ducky!’
thought she was a ‘real living doll.’

Oh, such beautiful hands she had and the crystal light
streaming forth from those great bay windows

	onto the iron railings below.

C O N R A D   &   W E L L S   &   CO

Great to have met Joseph Conrad
or for that matter, H.G. Wells, who said,
‘Let’s go upstairs and do nice things
with our bodies,’ and who did just
that to take a tilt at the waitress.
I saw them once, Conrad and wells, 
in a photograph, standing together.
A courtyard setting beside a few bamboo
chairs. The hour was mild in a black
and white afternoon. Trees, too,
green galleons shipping oars in autumn.
Conrad had, perhaps, cast off the last line
of a novel: the indigo lump upon the
horizon is an island: behind it the sun
spilling its treasure trove: the rent
sail-cloth of a sea-squall. Anyway,
he could still smell the coast wobble from
the deck of the tartane, her weight
to the wind. Wells, maybe, was thinking on
socialism and science, and in some
melancholic way of the waitress - and she, 
scented. By what conversations did
they measure each other, these two voyagers
who possessed that sense of the bigness
of the world? For Wells, an electrical
spark that arced across the white page, 
and for Conrad, each word creaking on
the blocks, the woman pale before the moon,
her eyes black as tornadoes at sea.

Melbourne, 1994

‘ B O B   O R R ’

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 and still further over the
Waikato’s billiard-table green paddocks.
I hailed ‘Bob’ to the Great Barrier
island and ‘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 and nowhere 
hard by were you toiling. ‘Bob Orr’ 
I called from Meola Reef to the outlandish
fishing-tackle cranes along the docks;
to Jellicoe wharf, Bledisloe wharf,
Marsden wharf, Captain Cook wharf to the
Admiralty Steps hoping I would find
you gazing out upon the glaucous slick of
trawlers, or catch you guiding a snub-
nosed tug under the Western Viaduct.
‘Bob Orr’ I called down the unending
roadsteads to Motutapu and Rakino Islands,
back behind the wave screen at Okahu Bay
to Freeman’s and St Mary’s Bay. And as
I called into the Schooner Tavern, 
sought the drear interior of the Wynyard
Tavern and the sailor’s talk told me.

Y O U  D O N ’ t  r e M E M B E R  D Y I N G

Least, that’s what the Old Londoner
told me who didn’t learn to relax till well
past fifty, seated alongside his two
mates: a Norwegian: ‘You’re not the same
person now as you were ten years ago.’
And the Irishman: ‘I like the music it’s
the noise I can’t stand.’ Each one,
orphaned and aphoristic, deep into his sixties.
NZ born and much younger, I offered:
‘You’re not the same person tomorrow as
you were today.’ And then, ‘To your
arrival in Melbourne,’ they singly toasted. 
(great-grandfather, McCormack, 
arrived here in 1851. Twenty six 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. The afternoon floated by
as did the trams with dry, asthmatic rush
in this mellow town of bungalows and brass.

you had fitted and trimmed your craft
against every dire prediction to set sail on 
that other sea, Bob, the one that has 
no name and no horizon and is drowning you.

G R A H A M   C L I F F O R D

After THE DUKE Hotel’S demolition,
(opp. Perrett’s Corner) one last joke: one DB
beer bottle ringed by ten green cabbages

as roseate or wreath for an empty lot. Close by,
the mad bucketing fountain of Cuba Mall
played on. Meanwhile, at his Manners street

studio above the music shop, Graham
Clifford, renowned for his Figaro, ululated
profoundly through the scales. A window framed

trolley-bus poles that, tacking, bluely flared
along the wire. The maestro’s voice floated over
harbour and city, capital and far-flung country, 

far from Covent Garden. A 1930s London
partied on amongst black and white photographs 
plastered to the wall above a battered Steinway.

on Brooklyn hills toi toi waved war plumes
to the southerly gusts with unceasing applause.
through a hundred, sun-blown wintry afternoons

he coached opera singers, actors, newsreaders,
plucked notes off the yellow stained keys: -
he guided, rolled golden vowels, before them.

B R U N O   L A W R E N C E 

Bruno, do you remember the Me and Gus stories,
way before Barry Crump got keen, when a cow cocky
was a bastard you met on gravelly roads? Recall
the nights playing community halls, and days making
a few records, only to break a few more? ‘Ricky 
May’s Jazz Combo’, ‘Max Merritt & The Meteors’,

‘Quincy Conserve’, plus, the all-stars-road-show
Blerta travelling Aotearoa, through khaki paddocks,
down thistle blown highways in that diesel bus -
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. Bruno, you did that thing. R & B, jazzman, 
film star (didn’t Jack Nicholson say get on over 
to Hollywood?) but you preferred back-blocks, sought 
small towns, river shingle, the hollows of the land,
and a home around Waimarama in the Hawke’s Bay.

A shifting romantic, hoon and hangman, a real joker
you played yourself-sans-bullshit in a heap of movies;
The Wild Man, Ute, you leapt from life to art 
without a hitch; A Bridge To Nowhere, The Quiet
Earth, how you loved women, warmth by the bus load, 
produced that classic - my 12 inch, record of the blues.

 Bruno Lawrence’s Electric Revelation and Travelling Apparition.

S T O R k

The scene is of a deep rural setting done by one unhurried
Impressionist, say, pre-world war 1, c.1907. Every thing
luxuriant, soft and round, the paint is combed out by cordial
summer breezes. Countryside: Poland, a rained-on morning, 
the distant plash of milk into wooden pails sounds thinner
than its clotted creaminess. The cobbled yard is blue and wet
after the morning’s sluicing; alder, elm or poplar wind-breaks,
but what shows through is the church spire you would observe 
if you lifted your gaze up from the unhitched wagon, its spars
tilted off skyward from the fields, past chimney, gable, farmstead. 
The stork is afloat here on its top - though - bottom heavy 
nest of thickly woven twigs which throws the scene into surreal 
proportion, suggesting a still hour of witches and moonlight 
moving stealthily through the forest’s black patches. Stork,
calm as a weather-vane (a model) presides over maize and barley 
crops, that brighten through weeks of high summer, stretch tight 
as a canvas to the nearby farms, and further still, to centuries 
old, grassy marshlands from which the stork feeds its nestlings. 

from   T H E   S T I L L   W A T C H E S

		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 flood-lit 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 night-long
visas where the bare-chested boys
thrust hips from the bonnets
of old Holdens. High up on the
bulging stonework and boldly sprayed:
‘It’s going to rain tonight, so
take a bullet proof vest,’ or,
‘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.

		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. 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 well-springs
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.
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 water-logged)
in heady love. Follow their laughter
with an open-top Lagonda down 
the white-walled roads of Mt. Aetna to 
the Port of Catania - a blood-boiling
swerve to the red-chequer table, 
fishing boats moored in the blue dusk.
Woody Allen steps from the screen
to the dead crystal lakes of Sweden. A
wavering moon-disc lies reflected
there under 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 whale’s back. Love undrinkable as water.
The silent film of fantasy which is night
plays out through the ivory keys of stars.

		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, and brushes
the dust of a crushed building from
finger-tips 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, 
dreams of fish-heaven. Bad William
thumps the shit out of poor Aunty Ethel.
Every poem is the last will and testament 
of the soul, and every lover who 
breaks from lover, commits 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
world’s 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 sub-stations
and the horizon lights up like a
Lucas/Spielberg movie. Tonight toward
Blacktown helicopters make astrological
moves sideways. Earlier, a trail-blazer
made one caesarean cut along the western
sky. The 6 O’clock 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 candleflame
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. 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.
Radio KGB hits the airwaves with
a global countdown from Tass and Reuter
& AAP. Back in Ontario, escalators whisper
to the underground shopping plazas
and the Gallic snows fall loudest on Quebec.
Frost at mid-night lies as silent as

The American Dream, and all along
the border night moves. ‘This train
don’t run no more this train. Yo! this
train don’t run no more and Canada’s
cut in half,’ calls David Suzuki. Hush now,
the cyber-freaks sleep. Soundlessly,
the Hubble telescope gears its focus.

		XII

O to wish upon a falling space
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 lee-side toward the
sea. The setting sun awakens our
ancestral demand for bonfires
big as cities, and a leisurely parade
of gulls passing overhead mistake
the darkening hours for sea-cliffs.
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
phosphorescence of the TV and the evening
rustle of newspapers. Tomorrow,
of course, is uninhabited and fresh as a
child’s 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 up-ended
in the quarter-acre backyard. 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 spaceport wordless as
a threat. It’s 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.

* Mayakovsky

N E W   P O E M S
1 9 9 8 - 2 0 0 0

O F   R O O F S 

We encamp ever outward on the outskirts
where flung cities are fringed with builder-men.

We pay no heed to green-softened paddocks,
we quoin the paced lot and the first nail driven home.

When all is boxed and ribbed we sniff out
the new roof-beams, chemical timbers, and to that

emptiness install our kind in shadow, 
shavings; we lug our histories behind within us.

Long surfaces, slate, tin or terra-cotta
are the flat tilt inhabited by the roof-genii

who once relished burnt offerings to
hard seasons. Each surface directs an angled

flatways that exists within the context
of the sun, the rain and space, and notably

presence is attributed wholly to the
resonate cries of large birds, and the stooped,

whispered inflexions of departed occupants;
elusively, they avoid tricky zones of the fabled:

(Golden Hesperides to leaden Boeotia).
They inhabit the realm of chimney and the gable;

here lies the true province of the roof-genii
and bats, not witches click about these sentinels.

T A F F Y   T H E   T U R T L E

“ Poets run away to broadcasting like sailors to the sea ”
			- Dylan Thomas

‘...organ pipes of the luminous...’
I turned then, and there on the beach lay

Dylan ‘the extravagant’ Thomas
washed up in the spume in the guise of a

turtle, no less! At first, I didn’t 
recognise him until he gaped and spluttered.

‘...glory..the sundering ultimate...’
peeping from beneath his carapace, round

and bald as a Welsh hillock.
After a respectful silence, I greeted him,

‘You’ve - come back?’
‘...cathedrals of the sea...’ he intoned.

‘Those reports, retiring back
into childhood, many of us came to believe...’

‘Curlews and wrens’ eggs,’ he resonated.
‘That messy business abroad, the hell-raising...’

‘Troy drowned in the eye of an albatross.’
‘And the intoxicating affairs, surely?’

‘O lovely Anna, thighs sweet as an estuary’
issued from the depths of the leathery chest.

He turned then, hung on the crest of a wave,
as quickly as he came, disappeared out to sea.

T R E A S U R E   I S L A N D

Hidden in the sand dune of his dream
	the child engages his

fancy for the unattainabe, the man he
	wishes to escape in

the coming years; when hauling to the
	cove in deepest sleep

of night, they arrive, bushy-bearded
	and cutlass-toothed,

groaning through the breakers with the
	loot, pacing out the surf,

they lay the chest beyond the reach of
	any map which he sketches

in his dream to be plundered in a later
	year when all the bets are off.

He – no longer beguiled, but tossed upon
	his learnéd ambitions,

makes it through the adolescent scrub
	to the safe house found, his

task to stave off discovery and finally mark
	that spot, open as a grave.

L I T T O R A L

Sickle clouds cut light down at
dusk, bright silver from the blades thump
earth. Rolling over a noisy sunset

the rain deep green of the tropics.
This is dance, the celebration of rhythm
and physical memory upon mangroves.

Coastal culture, it is the light
which makes it seem so young, through this
ancient dalliance rubs away at

boundaries and the tanned bodies
of girls with thighs round as roasts – how
that laughter thins to tease the surf.

As though some tired, or dying
hand loosened its grip on the lit paper
and the line of ink, flounced,

indented, to create this coastline
and its promise of islands, only later
came the imposed resorts, each with

its brighter cube of water, concrete
curbed, safely contained from the lush foam
and the off-station beat of the sea.

“ O L D E S T   P I N E ”

A 10,500-year-old Huon pine, believed to be the world’s oldest tree, was handed back to Tasmania yesterday by mining company Pasminco. 
	Sydney Morning Herald, April 24, 1998

Years grew in rings,
but my earliest memories
sought bird-dialect, the 
hush of water and wind.

Men could hear then,
stood with forest-silence;
the leaf-like breathing 
at my base made speech.

The loud and glacial
grumbling of boulder - 
ice ceased in my first years,
ferns eventually uncoiled.

I thought myself ever
which is now at a closing;
yet I did not regard
this end without mystery.

Other pine-tree that
built memory in fire onto
their bark’s surface,
recorded an earlier time;

they hide mostly in the
moist gullies and deep rift
valleys (branches radial):
an ancient pine tree.

unchanged - whose
photo is found locked in 
the earth’s element, an old
family and they are few.

The wide-branched
rivers that angled mirrors 
under the sun, are gone
underground, they

emerged from within 
the ice-tides, mountains fell
when the sky opened, the
seas had retreated.

They are shadow leaves.
They flow many-branched.
They house every myth.
They rise in me to air.

T H I S   W A Y

That nightly sound is something
else, hardly a series of chords, though
through waves slur into a particular
noise as through a lop-sided mouth;

motor-bike, bus, laughter or scream.
Yet underpinning this, that same uniform
growl going nowhere intentionally
but into itself, back into the city.

If you could see them, you’d know
that those boot-scuffed clouds are the
dirty bits left over from the day;
a star holds to the sky’s rounded toe,

more stars and it’s steel-capped.
It took centuries for the cities to get to
this, from easy camp-fire cluster,
shield and spear clatter or wood-crackle.

Once the guttural rasps of yes
and no had coagulated into walled-images,
the blaze of blood and light gave over
to these arteries, to the vessels of glass.

The old migratory paths are soon
rediscovered by armies in triumphal
procession through the broad thoroughfares,
and under arches as though into caves.

‘This way;’ it says, ‘this way,’
a call that is at once all utterance or
none, a deep cave-sound, the primal rumour,
conspiracy, beginnings, heat and cold.

E R G O   P O E M

To grizzle away at truth,
just me and my shadow in some
private alchemy; these

days, poets my be heard
not whispered at. From my
balconied-box, traffic slides

its abacus of constants.
If the clouds look fair, the
sun pulls its gleety light onto

Glebe dwellings. Hurrah!
the neighbourhood. Think only
this of me and a place I call

home and away flits the mind
from this southern realm though
nowhere doth it fly radial.

Evasive? Let me run that
by again; commitment is forever
saying in truth I told you

so and though your eyes
be grey as glass, I say, give it
a rest here in my brushwood

heart that you may fossick
to a regular beat and your heart’s
simple content: therefore,

if alas ‘t is true, I have
gone here and there, did march to
a different drum, so be it.

S U M M E R   C U P *

“Champions don’t win by lengths anymore” - Jack Ingham

From tourney to cavalier, from huntsman
    to troubadour, the jockey, caparisoned in

the silk of carnival for a spring race
    and a bet, with the best he was, Beadman.

He tapped his luck and often as not
    eased quick to the finishing, to fall fast

through to the line on a colt, chestnut or
    roan, to earn the applause and more, laurel

you might say, the leaf or lictor’s rod
    to hold chalice-high several times he did the 

Melbourne, Caulfield and Gala Day Randwick
    ride; the glass or silver winner’s cup.

Beadman rode with kind hand and long rein,
    exampled himself with the Greats of The Game:

Breasley, Moore, Pike, Higgins, Munro -
    names gold-runged for the racing records.

Beadman then, at 32 retired, become apostled
    by choice to clergy and God

who made his undoing willingly, in this
    downunder, sometime O so underhanded country,

he freshly apprenticed to his calling;
    a humble stable-boy, Lord, in a worldly manger.

* The acclaimed jockey, Darren Beadman, ran his final race at 
Randwick on Boxing Day, 1997. He came out of retirement in 1999. 

E M B L E M   F O R   D E A D   Y O U T H

there are no experts only survivors

Over the past five years in the Great South Land,
a primary dissipation of energies; 2,500 youth suicides,
in fact. we pause to consider this phenomenon:

2,500 small white crosses neat as napkins laid 
out in geometric patterns upon the parliamentary turf 
sweeping up to the Big House. Small white crosses,
abstract as wing-nuts or butterflies, each one pinned

to the yellow grass lapel though, hauntingly, branded
onto the mind’s dumb hide. With each grief-prone parent, 
pain inflates safe as an air-bag. Small towns outback 
spin to emptiness. moonrise is a chalk outline after the

going down of the sun. Stars swing bright herds into the
dark corrals. There’s movement at the station; a murmuring
engine through woodland, sky velocity blue as gun-metal.

T U N D R A   F L I G H T 

The black blizzard has been at work for a week
now, and even the huts (if there are huts) seem to
sag under the snow. soon the airport will open

again, but the road to it will remain closed, such is
the tundra landscape of Russia on a provincial
airline in winter. The pilot is close to retirement,

but his patience will never give up on the romance
that is his life - whose skills remain memorable
though the aircraft is missing the odd nut and bolt; 

only serves Turkish crackers for its one main meal.
‘If pilots drink,’ they say, ‘the last toast is a silent
one between friends’ before departure. So it is.

“Clear skies,” they raise their vodka glasses, “Soft
landings,” the muted clink, muted as the snows
which fold out over the tundra. The runway can be

found here safe as a clothes-brush, sad as the
heavy uniform and brocaded cap hangared at home
for the last time: before we depart, a final toast!

S A L L E  D ’  A T T E N T E

a portrait

And what if they didn’t meet up,
coupled by the twin lines that seemed
to lead her thoughts endlessly out,
coiling through the Rockies, through

the mountain reaches and conifer;
her lover on the oil-rumoured plateau
snowed in, maybe, snowed under
beyond the pass, working his claim?

Luggage stacked on the platform,
hat-boxes, portmanteau, steamer trunk
as miniature of her country estate;
she waited the engine’s plumed arrival.

Fennel scent stung the nostrils
in the late autumn air, and somewhere,
vaguely distant, a storm detonated
at the peaks, powdered a piece of sky.

No voice reached her through the
October afternoon in that waiting-room,
and no one either came or went, only
the signal-box mutely shuffled its gears.

c o p e s t o n e   f o r   a   n a t I o n

Here is the place which flourished once in rampant
dishonesties, and there stands the sheered monument 
erected to important absences, boldly the canker creeps 
and, like the last of the sun’s rays, heat fabricates
a welcoming where none existed before, no traveller 

passed by these ruins, no winding silk road or camel
track, no ancient canal, only an endless sheep-spill 
over river shingle, dogs heard working the memory with
river boulder, that turns deeply, cold and hollowing;
cloch - the same sound found in every river valley. 

While the hill terraces make some sort of corbelled
framework for this scene, though slightly faded
below, aslant upon the wall of recollection, behind glass
(the car window) winding down toward what appears
a solitary copse, to an indecipherable, ox-bow signature.

While autumn sets up its garage sale with the season’s
odds and ends, gravity leans into distortion; first orange,
then pale yellow, a row of poplars shuffling close
over the lake road, vying for another golden moment in 
the aging process, the putty-coloured cliffs behind you.

Autumnal orange, yellow, black, as the first primitive
frescoes from the ochre quarries, dank as rust or the
smell of dead oxygen, these poplars lead this valley out
onto the flood plains, birthplace of the city, upon whose
heights the first rituals of praise were offered up as

thanks against the flooding to each and every localised, 
individual God or climate, and in whose seasonal favours
the inhabitants trusted, the city and the temple as one, 
the temple both defence and memory, commemoration of
the river’s flow and speech, each flood mythically retold.

Further still though ‘dull days of clouds’ announce your
arrival: wayfarer, a windblown highway, the lantern
on the hook; as now the neon panelled comfort-stop fuzzes
with insects, a smell of oil and rubber, no attendant, the
rolled back whites of numerals clicking up the dollars. 

whatever passed this way, has past, passed away in the
direction you’re headed, finally - to the cities of the plain;
somewhere, the country breathes largely in the dark 
behind the comfort-stop. overhead, the tilting crater lake
of the night sky, stars caught up on its black surface.

T H E   M A N G A W E K A S

After the viaduct was dismantled the
Mangawekas and river valleys stayed on.

The moon maintained its guardianship
under sliding shadow and within the 

silent and abandoned hour of night.
that massive boulder set in a creek-bed

stands immemorial yet the bevelled
morning light discovers bridge remnants -

an arch truss, a foundation block. You 
passed this way before, are not likely to 

again. Your footprint on mud-dunes
will soften by the next flax-woven eddy.

I know of a river-bend, and the spread
river-shingle slowly flung upon the

slanted afternoon light, handfuls of young
poplars scattered over the valley floor.

On a downward drive through these ranges, 
soap grey slate could landslip you off a

hair-pin, into this view that the rear-vision
mirror spans beneath, or angles before you.

t H E   g o o d   O L D   D A Y S

The old radiators heat elliptically, green painted 
pipes run up the walls with an elbow-sleeve right 
hand turn (optional) following off where the 

ceiling heads, that is, to venetian blinds, eternally 
slanting a dirty look at the day and down periscope 
through the thick, wide grained floor timbers 

but not before (alongside a wire-mesh In/Out tray) 
the cardiganed public servant languidly taps his pipe 
and pats the tea-urn, sips regulation Dept of: - cups,

while the overhead fan blade stirs and stirs the air: 
Oh, Jane stayed on (marvellous with the Christmas 
balloons!) while Dorothy left, a promise of 

silk-stocking and musk. No forwarding, of course, 
(except, maybe, the ‘60s) a leather-strapped suitcase 
and a railway platform on the overnighter headed 

God knows where into the interior I shouldn’t 
wonder (or the suburbs which amounts to the same
thing) to what - tent city? No thoughts on that

one Bunty! And no damned prospects most likely, 
still she’s got her own life to lead...those boards now 
varnished, the pipes detailed a ruffled and light 

grey; ‘superb apartments’ at the upper executive end of 
the scale, and no earthly sign of Dorothy, though 
the pipes continue to knock in that odd - annoying way.

T R A N S M I S S I O N

Clouds continue to unroll
as blue-prints about the globe;
ocean eddies newly discovered
swirl off continental shelves.

Old geological pressures
continue to build and to slide,
compacting profit and pollution
along malleable fault lines.

Prophecy’s fully indexed -
one half a percentage point on
the share and equities market,
one step ahead of the curve.

grey medieval seaports
open wide as clam shells to
the invading tide, a lighthouse
beacon flashes its pearl.

after two millennia, one
Acanthus leaf drops from a 
Corinthian capital, off the cliff
into the Mediterranean sea.  

eastward, the horizon lies
in ruins, troubling storms gather
to divide nations, tankers with
empty decks ride at anchor.

The Nigeria delta smokily
wafts flambeaux, in Lagos under
strung light bulbs, oil workers
dully drink away their pay.

A house sparrow pecks out
rival sperm from its mate, repeats
this performance in every port
from Singapore to Dunedin.

A brighter blue between 
warehouses, birdsong secretion,
odours off dockyards suffuse 
sour alleys with chemicals.

The sunset’s steel factory
mills flat orange strips, the stars
hang out broken signs, night
slams shut like a factory gate.

O B S E R V A T O R Y   H I L L

The perfect rose is only
		a running flare.

		That night,
the cosmic rose garden
under the Hubble glass-house
played God’s footlights.

		The question
becomes the hottest form of
arrogance, unfolding unto
itself

	the numbered petals
of doubt.

In my allocated time
I track back across the grid
but don’t link up with you.

		Later,
a message came in late
and unclear via the micro-wave:
one non-digital discovery
without your name on it.

		Dawn
suggested something fresh off
the mountain
		/
		a perfect, solar roseate.

D I R E C T O R ’ S   C U T

The director doesn’t give a fig for the flat terrain
that pans the horizon, high heels make little impression
out here, her steps lightsome in this blazing void, 
elegant calf-muscles, sitting legs akimbo, a gangster’s
mole abandoned to the Badlands, out of tune within
this harshness - high cheek bones aglow, radiant 
and sweatless, the landscape set back from her Vegas

body, a hip thrust defiantly at the brighter than neon
sun. “Cut!” he shouts through cupped hands that sound
hollow as a tin can out here. Her arm drops languid 
at her side, too heavy for boredom, she waits to be made
over and makes for the caravan. The film guys give
way to the riggers and construction crew, a dreary day’s
schedule, the pneumatic drill rears up and resumes

its place in the pecking order, mechanical and yellow.
Bright orange jackets under bright white helmets -
a wound, tricky as salt, appears alongside the new light
rail works. Did the first assistant producer make off
with the second? ask Red, but he walked out yesterday.
Melanie fudged her lines the third day straight while
the back up generator got the stutters. No way out

of here for three weeks, he walked off into the desert,
but who knows? Nights passed cool though, bugs rushed
the lanterns and the beer stayed cold, stars piled up
in a low budget sky. Sometime after, with the railway
platform finished, out came the Winchesters, we hollered
and hooted like old time pioneers, like celebrities at
The Charlton Heston Golden Gun Anniversary Awards.

T H E   W O O L S H E D

I came upon it by a clough in the
hill, an involuntary turn upland, wheels
holding to the rub of an old bullock
track, by backblock and tableland, 

to unminded paddocks. A kennel whiff
of the grease-curled fleece, flumped
on long benches in a low-slung woolshed,
the fangled wool press fallen into

wrack and ruin, the dust, grease coated
floor planks. A sense of something slowly
tossed aside. And wind, the sound
rusty and hollow, breathed down the chute to
an empty holding pen, thickened with
dockweed, purpled in Paterson's curse.

F L A G O N   D A Y S

for Robert Franken

But this one had stood three months,
brooding its yeast amongst sultanas packed
down in fathoms of vodka. Fermentation
stalked patient as a terrorist upon the
taste-beds; a Dutch custom, powerful as
an Atlantic sea squall. A late ride pillion
on Robert Franken’s scooter at Pauatahanui
out along the coast road to Paekakariki.
The black swans of the estuary, themselves
a scattering of sultanas, glistening afloat
in the dusk. Robert, you liked things pickled
in bottles; homunculi, viscera, distorted
on the glass-plate of your surreal word-view;
a head on a stem like a cut-away tulip

						titled:

		TOO CLOSE TO NATURE

That tale you told about leaving your lover’s
bed before dawn to gather dewy grass,
clippings that you packed roundly into your
body-shape left warmly indented there.
You sat hard by in a chair and watched her
slowly wake, turn to embrace where you
had lain. And we took another slug from that
primal Dutch concoction filtered through
vodka-soaked sultanas, back then in ’72. *

* A tolerable variation on the traditional Dutch drink 
called Boerenjongens which translates as ‘farmer’s boys’. 
Strictly speaking, the drink is made with brandy and sultanas,
but these were flexible times.

P O R T R A I T S

1. 	Old Groover

The cool had cooled somewhat,
the heart suffered meltdown to a

blackened lump of glass. 
The lines fed didn’t populate his bed

with yearning Liliths as they
once had; he came by the leather-

skinned, dream-damaged ones
whose youth had fled with the

children out the door marked:
ENDED. His words remained locked

in the hip, haplessly peppered
with jazz for his own and art’s sake.

The mask hardened. The lies
sank further back behind the eyes

jaundiced as sulphur. What can
we make of him now stopped at the

limit of his talent; that he
hadn’t far to go? Only the anger

eating his entrails played back the
one obvious truth. Pity him.

2. 	The Lonely Men

Strung out in one long line
across the falling ground, beating

the brush for the Golden Bird of
Youth, while behind them in the

marbled light, Age gathers to cumulus,
and each knows in his companion 

a darkening heart, coagulate of lust,
how sex fades or flares in the blood;

the sickening clutch at some
receding life beyond the Vale of Fantasy.

The game lies in casting forth
atmosphere’s net, the troubled victim

tough and vulnerable, snared unawares.

3. 	 Lawman

Sober all day he had nothing to
blame himself for but the following

morning. Reckoning that he had
got off lightly, he put his guilt away

like a discarded video and returned
to his home comfortable as a holster.

This customary, reflexive man
would have lit a panatella or pulled

a cork if conducive to a state of
health which it wasn’t. Settled now,

the hourly news chased him around
the clock with its usual run of

urgencies made or intended. At a
school nearby, laughter and shuttered

applause of prize-giving at the year’s 
end; fragile beginnings and unmade

mistakes of lives not yet loosed upon
others - to become more you and less

of what you might have been. 
A few more thoughts along these lines

about getting it right with the Fates,
and plugging the day at High Noon.

4. 	 Tour Guide

Today your hair is freshly folded silk,
something to do with flats of water 
and how it receives tone from different days.

I don’t see your face it is elsewhere in
other and distant brightness.
I have no wish to locate you or make

comprehensible your person about me;
can I call you Miss?
for already the intimate details are known:

you are something I look forward to
I mean, with line of sight,
the isolated light and how it softens

much in the way clouds never really
concentrate themselves,
that take their turn and assume elevations.

Concentration is dry in this woman’s face;
your face is warm air from an open doorway,
people spilling past with indignation.

You are so expansive
that your lack of experience impresses me,
your face is a wide curve of shoreline -

the incurve of the runner against rain.
Your face is empty as dead tallow (hallowed)
and a dryness without detail.

This beauty is equation in
the geometric structure of your vision -
yes, your calmness is past engagement.

B R A D Y’ S   G R A V E

“Listen to the moaning of the pine
at whose root they hut is fastened”
-	Old Danish proverb

In front of the old Manse,
Duck Creek weaves through
bulrushes along the hillside
striving with pine trees,
slippery with copper needles

home to magpie’s carolling.
‘There were three homes we had.’
Farther back into the hill,
a tilted slab of concrete, rusty
iron posts and chains mark it out

amongst the tussock clumps –
Brady’s Grave makes a slipway
for the flying, full moon;
and the local cats gather into
a circle, under the yellow glare.

A questioning silhouette
of Black Swans at Pauatahanui
ride easy, buoyant, on the inlet’s
long tides away from view,
behind the whistling pine grove.

‘W O L F H O U N D   C E N T U R Y’

after Osip Mandelstam

So by now you know it is time 
to leave, they have damaged the name 
of the city and time itself is imperilled; 
clocktowers stand by snow-capped 

and the hands splay crucified but 
this is no bridge to safety. St Petersburg 
[Petropolis] winds down gradually, 
shifts the granite block of night back 

from the tomb so dawn may enter in; 
places a small saucer of daylight to bath 
the eye. What sleds are heaped with 
we cannot tell, but it is not the jubilation

of children’s cries - at the sight of 
the hill our hands drop to our sides black 
as fence posts. God himself rubs his hands 
at sunset but you cannot get warm. 

October 10, 2000

Index of Titles or First Lines