Unmanned | Page 3

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?
Words to Lure a Ghost
An exiles 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 Hill,Jim, scattering?the unposted Autumn leaves.
Christmas
Under the mining operations of?the moon, continental drifts of cloud?collude and a pelican scaffolds?the air. In cities, bricks sweat. We?are blinded by the rush to live;?keep it moving, says the sense of loss,?our common language. The information?Super Highway informs to inform?supra clicks the instinct. Hold on?screens survival. We are built upon?reflection; under the arch of the railway?see the conduit flow & steady in the?round. A piece of hill lights up and?beneath it shadow so shakes the net.?Hear the sheer drag of scythe on metal?the shunter makes at the curve of the?viaduct while, with elongated wail, rolls?three spoil-wagons to the hollow hill.
Emblems
1. Adam
A lamp passed behind a perforated shield;?stars leaked. What he thought thunder brought?footfalls of lightning. He scanned over the?plateau & nowhere found a neighbours spoor.
2. Oblation
The Island nations of the colder latitudes?breed alluvial poets, it is believed, who convene?once yearly under friendly, arched viaducts?to talk of river shingle, boulder, and water birds.
3. Detail
The yellow machinery tracks on the freeway?are as soldiers in single file stretching out into the?late afternoon, slanting sun, shadow-crimson?earth leaning forward to the compassed horizon.
4. Born
The year of my birth followed by a hyphen,?by the solace of expectation, by a small measure?of success, by a teasing out of hopelessness?and of course, by another date yet to be fixed.
5. Style
Would he have leaped from the stern of the?Orizaba, at noon on April 27, 1932 if hed known?of the unfashionable rise in sea-levels 70 years?hence; Hart Crane, a rhetorical gesture, surely?
6. Beachcomber
Pampiniform it writhes, bladder-wrack or?kelp, a heavy swell that slops about rustily in?the basalt trough, breaking through the sea rush;?& solitary goes Heaney, curling at dictions.
Transgenic Pigs
The oink is a fugue, Baconian?and philosophical. By a corncob moon?they snaffle, silvery-hulled backs?adrift & dolphin-arched in the mire. A?litter of stars in the laboratory-bright?sky. PUT SOME PORK ON YOUR FORK?intones the television commercial. O but?but these are no bristle & foam flecked?boars of Arcadian Days, brutally twisting?on some Danaan spearhaft, in a?flying rage tearing at ilex roots, or?blasting marble shards with iron-tough tusks.?These are the sleek-lined, chrome-bright?& delicate trottered. These with a call?soothing as a computer bleat, ears?alert as mobile phones, flesh pliable as?an artichoke, temperament cool as a cold?cut. These, the upwardly mobile,?porcine delicacies, models of dinner-table?decorum. Designer-label pigs, feted,?wined & dined exemplars of taste, accepted?in the most refined of social circles.?These are the well-appointed pigs replete,?with a privately funded education bred O?so exclusively for the Export Drive.
Sheet Music
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 Trees 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 & 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. Its 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??Theres comfort in that mate, getting out.
Myth & Mariolatry
At a small village not?far from Manila, in the house?of armaments & munitions,?in a house of grenades &?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.