Part 3 (1/2)

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 fas.h.i.+oned 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.