He will come urgent as a food
riot. Beware the man who sheds tears of
mercury. His cough alone will thin
out the ozone. He grips oceans with
the black fingers of trawlers.
His voice is a slow leakage in the Third
World Night. Beware the Waste-Broker.
He comes to paint your wellsprings
ivory black and chrome yellow. You will
know him by his industrial oath:
$40 a drum! yes, only $40 a drum!
Senegal, Nigeria, West Africa,
the sun dangerous as a forty-gallon drum.
Drums stacked on rotting pallets
in the back yard of tropical forests.
Drums swollen like the bellies
of starved children with toxic waste.
The Berlin Wall is falling down,
each chunk a souvenir sponsored by
Smirnoff. Who was that poet who
whispered, Death is a maestro from
Germany. Away in America,
Raymond Carver, as the provinces of
his body revolted, gasped our
daily losses from ruined lungs. It
comes down to love, he said.
What we hear is anger in its orbit.
Falling piano notes. The last
of the rain down brickwork. Guttering
full. Something like sounds of
water hitting a serving dish. A couple
of taps. Its that hour. A train,
of course, fading in and out of suburbs.
Time running off everywhere.
George Moore shuts his green door
against the catholic glare of Ireland.
A sense of things erased. The whole
night sliding down. Lamplight.
Gumleaves as strips of plastic bright
through a casual breeze. What can
later researchers make of this,
the Age of Rapidity? Things made which
had small use then cast aside.
The mirage of modern love. Something
swapped for something else. Made better.
And that charge of energy
varicose-veined as lightning, a little
kindness left to hover, unquestioned?
We know it as we get older.
V
O Bougainville! Flying foxes
plentiful as copper, gone in a waste
of tailings from the Island,
forever. The most pure black race on
earth in jungle fatigues armed
against the ravages of the Corporates,
wading the chemical rivers,
a cackle of gunfire to make the ABC
stringers dispatch. But not the
words of Randolph Stow: VISITANTS:
My body is a house and some
visitor has come. My house is echoing
with the footsteps of the visitor.
My house is bleeding to death.
O Bougainville! Your burnished blood
flows from the split chest of
Treasure Island. An opencast land
and an overcast sky. I think
of my mother and her breastbone
snapped back. A row of Xs marks it.
The sky: one vast, curving blue
wave. Blue was; then painted itself
into Time, sang Rafael Alberti
to the Bay of Cadiz. The day
a slow melting cube of ice. Bright
coldness of frost on the window,
in the silence, late at night.
The level rhythm of the taxi
down the street of streaming lights.