Part 7 (1/2)

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...o...b..t.

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.

III

Who can offer words unsullied by the Age like the sad integrity of a Graham Greene? Generations pa.s.s on into unchartered waters, the lights out along the deck.

Behind, the floodlit logging of Malaysia gluts the j.a.panese 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 nightlong visas where the bare chested boys thrust hips from the bonnets of old Holdens. High up on the bulging stonework & boldly sprayed:

Its going to rain tonight, so take a bullet proof vest; and, No war on the way, only a change in the weather. 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.