Part 7 (2/2)

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 waterlogged) 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 fis.h.i.+ng 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 whales 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: Nor shall I change the colour of my dress until peace is declared in Israel.

He flies over Egypt to bomb Cairo with flowers. The scent dispersed upon the breeze the breath of the PLO.

He would dream the m.u.f.fled 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. I will waste half your country with flame. He wakes to the taste of Saddam Husseins 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. Das.h.i.+ell Hammett, your success too late, success too soon.

You didnt 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 youre too easy on yourself.

Watch the coral reefs off Johnstons atoll grow the black scabs of car tires.

Watch Hectors dolphin drown in the gill-nets off Banks Peninsula.

From the North Sea watch the slick seals wash up dead on the Island of Texel.

Watch the Pacific united all around us lie snug and blue as a body bag.

VIII

Surgical strike of the stars at the Persian Gulf. Romance of the World!

How deadly our longing for peace on this earth round as an Ideal.

Delicately, we remember WW2 bombers romanced in archival film-footage like forks tossed across a transformer dark sky.

David Niven steps lightly under the arched stone bridge, he brushes the dust of a crushed building from fingertips by the flares of a London sky. Childhood is the last-chance gulch for happiness, he says. Havel plays the Pied-Piper astride his multi- coloured cavalcade. A wave of the hand old-fas.h.i.+oned as anger, and he goes home to the Democratic Mountain, civilly. Salman Rushdie rides the magic carpet quicker than Qantas. The World is surreal, he cries, tis no more than a game of hide-and-seek, and whizzes past into the future.

Lange gleefully corks the evil jinnee of Baghdad, then flies onto the green embrace of Aotearoa with the freed twelve.

Where once the melancholy bombs from heaven fell to glut a village, 1000 grey cranes have returned to the Mekong Delta in the month of pure light.

One herd of elephants also returned to the tropical jungle where before was none. A pure green is that light and not the green of crouching camouflage.

I bend to my past, for there is a corner of the sky forever my childhood: Rupert Brooke frolics through the soft Edwardian light with Virginia, and dreams of fish-heaven. Bad William thumps the s.h.i.+t out of poor Aunty Ethel.

Every poem is the last will & testament of the soul, and every lover who breaks from lover a crime unto pa.s.sion. Romance of the World!

IX

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