|
|
About
Contact Archive Donations Subscribe to Today's Situation | ||
 News from Israel
|
 Peace: Educational Resources
|
 Pleasure:Poetry and other Arts |
 Ariga's Amazon Bookstore
|
Home
Poetry || Submissionsfrom The Still WatchesBy Stephen Oliver I Autumn tinsel floats gold on July leaves and up goes the memory flare. The carbon rod of winter burns low and the dark is a mammoth locked within ice. Watch the simultaneous reels of the seasons spinning before your eyes. A plane passes, and upsets the late sun to a shadow-print upon the wall. With barely a movement we come from the bleaker months to where the picture pans briefly, dissolves upon the softer ores of spring. Ah, but the Captains of Industry are wheeling! A building boom amongst the trees after the first few casual blossoms had fallen along suburban driveways. Observe the birds investing in the green shares of September. This side of the documentary we view in armchair safety, OOur Planetı : a well heeled cloud pads across the moonıs surface, under the vast drift-net of the night tuna boats swing light probes about the arresting waters another country claims. David Attenborough journeys through deserts to break the ancient limestone tablets, and proclaim that fossils are the visual memory of stone. We observe in awe the Environmental Mysteries and ask, is the sunıs bald glare through the Glory Hole truly the pointing finger of God? Laurence Olivier puts on his final mask, looking deathly, "Tell my friends that I miss them," and then fades from the ramparts. I name two from the camp of Good Attitude, builders of the beauty of this planet - the givers, not takers who direct our gaze upward from the burning footlights of the closing century, toward the language of our Common Future. II The seeing wears away the seer: twelve years further on Voyager 2 putts out through the pin-ball solar system, past Neptune and beyond the reach of time. Another day in the round and the cliche of uneventful incident has not yet arrived. The balloon that is so majestic on the plump air tumbles as heavy as a plumb-bob onto the countryside, trailing its fifty seconds of life huddled to impact. The cattle scattered, the sky did not change but released names into the wispy afternoon. Then all is as it was before the tragic flight, except the calm that betokens fear. And clouds rich as coalmines gathered from the chutes of mountainsides, over the belts of grainfield to boost the corporate climates, and to market each end of the world gyrally. A blotting paper sky, the soft tear of thunder, then lightning. Who would demand of the wise a word to steer by? Nostradamus throws his hands in the air after the event: Omark well my words, I told you so.ı Backward we look upon his bag of tricks, and with each new calamity a surreal rabbit lifts before your eyes. Ribbed streets! Pneumatic heartbeat! Prophecy is the Art of Boredom for one who cannot stand his own company from one moment to the next. He pulls the hat trick, feigns the future, argues the task of his breath wearily on its way. Some ravel dreams to catıs cradles in whose uninhabited solitude, slowly as a yawn, wish to pull forth the superstrings. Call it a living this space between meetings. Those encirclements that bind us together temporally. 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 & boldly sprayed: 'Itıs going to rain tonight, so take a bullet proof vest,ı and, 'No war on the way, only a change in the weather.ı 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. IV Lights ablaze in the House of Europe, and the Party rolls from room to room: Poland, Romania, Germany, the black triangle of Czechoslovakia. You can walk Europe comfortably with a plastic shopping bag, Western Europe, that is, forests and country neatly manicured. A Sunday stroll sort of feeling. In Eastern Europe you can do the same thing though must lift your steps higher, over the rubble, that is. The Berlin Wall is falling down, each chunk a souvenir sponsored by Smirnoff. Who was that poet who whispered, ODeath is a maestro from Germany.ı Away in America, Raymond Carver, as the provinces of his body revolted, gasped our daily loses from ruined lungs. OIt comes down to love,ı 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. Itıs 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 Omost pure black race on earthı in jungle fatigues armed against the ravages of the Corporates, wading the chemical rivers, a cackle of gunfire to make the ABC stringerıs 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.ı O Bougainville! Your burnished blood flows from the split chest of Treasure Island. An open-cast land and an over-cast sky. I think of my mother and her breast-bone snapped back. A row of Xıs marks it. The sky one vast, curving blue wave. 'Blue was; then painted itself into Time,ı 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. The distant applause of rain and the weekend screaming of a girl. The screech of a trainıs brake as if a fire were being extinguished. The exileıs brain is a frozen, grey sea-storm; from wave to wave he stares down the barrel of the moon. It is morning and the sun spreads over Nicaragua slow as the slitting of a throat. Consider Ernesto Cardinal as he rises from his bed, how he stacks his images practical as planks. Ay, the roseıs blood dark as diesel! 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 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. 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-topped Lagonda down the white-walled mountain roads of Mt. Aetna to the Port of Catania in a blood-boiling swerve to the red-chequered table, and the fishing boats in the blue dusk. Woody Allen steps from the screen to the dead crystal lakes of Sweden. A floppy disc of moon lies reflected there in 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 whaleıs back. Love undrinkable as water. The silent film of fantasy which is night plays out through the ivory keys of stars. VII Abe Nathan dons black and says: ONor shall I change the colour of my dress until peace is declared in Israel.ı He flies over Egypt to bomb Cairo with flowers. The scent dispersed upon the breeze the breath of the P.L.O. He would dream the muffled explosions in ancient streets the thunder of looms and the moon over the Sinai a Lady of Gallant Memory. He would dream the sun a copper scroll, and of peace perfumed with cedar and cypress, of pomegranate, bitter herbs and balsam. The thought that catches in the throat wakes him - the shout of Iraq. OI will waste half your country with flame.ı He wakes to the taste of Saddam Hussienıs binary spittle, rips his garments in grief. In this clear cut country, snap your fingers, watch sound bounce off rock. He dreams that one profound thought unspoken will change the minds of humankind. O America! a poet is a detective shadowing himself. Dashiell Hammett, your success too late, success too soon. You didnıt find sufficient fog in San Francisco to cover as the Great American Op. The McCarthy Era burned you off from the 50s, left the last twenty years of your life a shredded, dud cheque, the profound terror of the final breath made thin the man you knew. Patriot to the country which disowned you, your last gasp became that of a silencer. America, you try to cheer yourself up but youıre too easy on yourself. Watch the coral reefs off Johnstonıs atoll grow the black scabs of car tires. Watch Hectorıs dolphin drown in the gill-nets off Bankıs Peninsular. Stephen Oliver b. 1950, Wellington, New Zealand. Poems widely represented in New Zealand, Australia, Ireland, USA, UK, South Africa, Canada, etc. Books published: Henwise (1975), & Interviews (1978), Autumn Songs (1978), Letter To James. K. Baxter (1980), Earthbound Mirrors (1984), Guardians, Not Angels (1993), Islands of Wilderness - A Romance (1996), Election Year Blues (1999), Unmanned (1999). Night of Warehouses: Poems 1978-2000, HeadworX (2001). Covers five collections of poetry and spans two decades. In addition, Stephen Oliver's work can be found in a number of online literary magazines including, Comrades, Drought: A Literary Review, 42Opus, Gangway, Melic Review, Southern Ocean Review, Southern Cross Review, Trout, Turbine, The Poetry Warehouse, Stride, Blackmail Press. Zuzu's Petals. Recent prose work in: Deep South [Contempt: A Survey]. Thylazine [One Day In The Life of Vicki Viidikas]. Stephen Oliver is a transtasman poet based in Sydney, Australia. Email him at: sao@smartchat.net.au Visit his home page Previous poetry by Stephen Oliver at Ariga Today's Situation
Back to the top
If this page was useful, please consider making a donation or use Amazon links at Ariga to go to the biggest online store in the world and help keep Ariga going. Click over to the bookstore, check out Ariga's latest recommended book, or visit one of the subject areas that interest Ariga visitors: Yiddish || Middle East Affairs || Military Affairs || Religion || Hippotherapy (Horses and Feldenkrais) || Women's Issues || Pop Culture || Cooking || American Issues || Or click over to Amazon's Top 100 Best Sellers
|
Ariga Recommends:
|
