Unmanned Part 3

for Judith Wright

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

the white hawthorn and yellow broom; from Captains Flat to Majors 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.

November 4, 1996

Modern Love

1.

They are survivors, the sole occupants of this one guarded world.

The local repertory theatre packed up & departed elsewhere. These two old troupers stay on as the sweeper plays his broom against the grain backstage. They play out by agreement the familiar angers to a suspension of hostilities. A semi-believed in love tried but haunted by its past. A self-deceiving hope posturing the loss of lives that went before of youth, of partners had & names forgotten.

What holds at the seasons close is pa.s.sion flogged to life like a single-piston engine, a sputtering exchange of plenitude, the usual run of days & dishes. The couple come home to roost at last, tense & too aware.

2.

Squinting back down the telescoped years as he had once through bombsights to that recently freed city, after the war & burnt out trams to how they first met. He posted to Berlin and the American sector, she from Baden Baden where he had fallen for her. So agile & aerial, a mermaid of the trapeze, star act of an old fashioned circus. A picture framed in time within the bleak cabaret of youth: he uniform crisp & she in sequined tights with her angels Wings of Desire flared from bared shoulder-blades. They are holding hands in celebration of the letter M. Now, married into age & ageless on an ancient Island, theirs is a love old as childhood & wise as water. Solidly based as the fist-backed rock of Uluru.

Brilliant Losers

On reading Geoff Cochranes Tin Nimbus

The gay psychologist quoting The Divine Right of Kings and the lexicographer, his lifes dream of the Great New Zealand Dictionary,

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

Yes, I was there too, that late Sat.u.r.day 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 hand-hold 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 and dreamer (this he showed us) 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.

Hotel Diligencias

In Veracruz dusk troubles with a scent of gardenias after the last tramcar pa.s.ses by, and the rocking chairs begin their small breeze-making on the balconied terraces between the family photographs and little statues.

The dancing couples revolve at an angle in the great brewery mirrors marked:

Cerveza Moetezuma

before the globes lighting the plaza die out at 9:30 pm sharp.

But this was Villahermosa.

Lightning burns like mescal in the throat of night.

The whisky priest skulks about the mountain roads where you are headed, at Chiapas or Las Casas, charging so many pesos per baptism in the illegal night.

With or without him thrive the false saints & miracles in these remote regions, pure homage to superst.i.tion.

O comfort of Poverty! O lie of Pleasure!