Unmanned Part 2

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. They come at the appointed hour when the boy who serves as runner to the Beautiful Lady arrives, breathless, with the Word. Occasionally, the statue weeps paint-fresh tears. They will leave once faith is gathered in abundance like so many wild flowers off the nearest mountain slope. Here under a gla.s.s blown moon, a cool wind shall leave this place sacred.

Stork

The scene is of a deep rural setting done by one unhurried Impressionist, say, pre-World War 1, c.1907. Everything 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 mornings sluicing; alder, elm or poplar windbreaks, 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, and farmstead. The stork is 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 forests black patches. Stork, calm as a weathervane (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, gra.s.sy marshlands from which the stork feeds its nestlings.

Unmanned

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 seacliffs, and then the flare. This setting becomes an habitual s.p.a.ce, 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 back yard hovering over the roped-swing in the pelting rain and neighbourhood of cat & dog. This tells you that the family

is in deep trouble to be called into account in afteryears while the shutters slap wettish to little effect.

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 dissolves 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 sc.r.a.p-yard of days & kicked aside incident.

You can still hear the settlers squeeze box & fiddle in suburban settlements & 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 & 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 cliche, the crazy party hat of Sydneys Opera House / the bat-eared sh.e.l.ls

& 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 pa.s.s smoothly in your car the valley below & 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 pa.s.sing 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.

Braidwood