Stephen Oliver
LETTER TO PETER OLDS
I don’t know much about the mechanical hawk
ravaging doves, though multiple rapes performed by
the machine we are witness to on a daily basis.
‘We’ve both changed a bit,’ you said on meeting -
Peter, I take small consolation from Orwell’s remark that
‘After forty, everyone gets the face they deserve.’
Thanks for the two small black & whites snapped
in minutes of each other thirty years ago - I made copies
for a book of never-to-be written memoirs.
You, me and Jeannie, the redoubtable Bill Dean,
captured back then in ‘73 on the porch at Noyna Road,
Sawyers Bay. That grand old weather-board that
I would soon enough leave behind, and a young
family forfeit to God knows what fate …
The two photos show us on a Sunday, mid-morning
maybe (judging by the light) after the night before
in fine camaraderie, starting in on the left over booze.
Framed there on the porch, flanked by wooden Doric
columns in a theatrical setting, the day’s light filling
our hearts, tides of future disasters and departures for one
moment stilled - we are kinsmen on the ramparts
at Fort Apache - is there a wraith of smoke, an Autumn
fire in the middle distance? I am thankful for that
moment through you remembered. Tonight here in Sydney,
the moon is rounding out full, (a torch held by an
invisible hand) tracking the waves back across the Tasman
to pass over in sea mist, dissolve the telegraph poles
along the beach toward The Spit at Aramoana.
Peter, I guess some might say we are as pieces removed
from the chess board, out of the main game, set aside
as though to recall past battles and forays into other
peoples’ lives – collectors of facts and figures, maintaining
our Book of Tithes, tally of worn down hurts and hungers.
Dispatches from behind the lines and times till Doomsday
rings through the heart’s emptied chambers, that deep
belling sound as tectonic plates shift in the Southern Ocean.
May 5, 2004
This poem 1st appeared in Cordite, Issue #19, 2004" http://www.cordite.org.au
(NOTE: Peter Olds bio. -- he has published several collections of poetry,
most recently his selected titled, It Was A Tuesday Morning. Poems
1972-2001.)
THE STREET SWEEPER
1.
As Hundertwasser hides out in his bunker studio
about the colonial hills of Kawakawa up in the Bay of Islands
amongst kahikatea and the punga ferns,
insistently unseen and steadfastly uninterviewed -his predecessor,
Gustav Klimt, painted the chromatics of Autumn
and sex, whose women, birds of paradise,
glitter in the Kunsthistorisches Museum - so typical!
yet, even the cigarette smoke curlicues across coffee tables,
out under the full-leafed plane trees, stolid
with the talk of the Viennese bourgeoisie; the dandy in the soft
grey suit, face grey-weathered as a cornice,
unfolds the memory’s frieze (decades, past seductions)
with all the fervour of a dying minnesinger and sighs;
become voyeur to ancient indiscretions,
as the streetsweeper, impeccably dressed in black evening attire
and white gloves, fastidiously collects the leaf motifs
left in gutters with the manifold dreams of the citizenry:
the trams looped back from the ringstrasse,
and stone fountains played on in parks pram-filled, tree-hooded.
2.
Streetsweeper’s brain goes snap, then snap again:
sweet little Adolf in his dolly outfit, O cute little Adolf in his
sailor-
suit. How Autumn thickens its shadows
under the imperial archways, and leaves gather about the basins of
fountains, while in each civic garden comes a
clattering salute, the branches in their bent nakedness
arrange themselves into wartime insignia.
And what of the emigres gone to the New World to assume yet other
emotional identities, whose hatreds remain closeted,
desire a close guarded secret? ‘Loss,’
says streetsweeper, ‘is nothing less than hate - its strongest recognition.’
salute the New World Citizens and cultural Imperialists;
furtive elitists playing the old bohemianism that
allows them to condemn the bourgeoisie while swigging, guzzling
their way into favour as though privilege were a
plate of canapes; history, entitlements, daughters for the taking!
from OCCUPATIONS
1.
Such forests strewn over Poland! wintry
sticks. And snow. These things I have not seen.
The indigene tells of this; those blackened
things caught between - like birch trunks, heavy
coated soldiers over drift - deepening loss.
2.
Every night it is the same, greenly spun
in the iced-cube light of skyscrapers, the Master
Chef dreams he is pitched from the highest
viewing deck in all the world: Grollo Tower,
down through boiling mist into the river Yarra.
3.
July is the coldest month; odours freeze
on the air, vowels solid as hail-stones can slip
centimetres off the tongue in the mouth’s
burrow. Somebody is pierced by silence as with a
bayonet, there! standing hard by the tumulus.
4.
Snow bound, snow blind, the sleety night,
road signs indicate left or right are one breath.
Rocket mist settles over Lake Baikal -
the forecast promises another successful launch;
tomorrow, we extend our sight further yet.
5.
Nostalgia killed her, my mother, for the
Ireland she’d never seen - that, and the harsh
realities of family; a catholic cocktail, why
it sheered off into a broken dream, drunkenness,
children become Priests of the Pragmatic.
DANGER, IMAGIST AT WORK (2)
(The gentleman, having thrown her car keys into bush,
decides that he will be the one to walk home.)
I cannot say, my darling, whether that spangled glitter
caught in the coupe’s yellow headlights on this lonely stretch
of country road truly constitutes our love’s demise -
where you hurled bare toothed oaths, and I, - keys out into the
night beyond possible retrieval and hope, or that morning’s
triumphal light, lifting its lid on this horror show, will discover
your lifeless body, broken-limbed, crumpled in the middle
of this fennel-edged back road, once I get my hands on you?
The “Coroticus” Epistle
My name is Odhran, Patrick’s charioteer -
and I set down this account as witness.
‘ There is not enough death to accommodate
the scum of the earth ’.
Where it is written:
“ A prophet in his own land hath no honor”
as found in St Patrick’s ‘ “ Coroticus” Epistle’
I first heard that wide morning when he cried out -
“ The day wherein my white-robed neophytes -
The chrism still wet and glistening on their brows -
Passed at the sword’s edge of these murderers. ”
Small consolation, I reckoned, for those slain that
they should enter the Kingdom of Heaven,
a deathless land, via death first visited.
The rest as captives sold into slavery by those selfsame
soldiers, men and women, to the heathen Picts and Scots.
Little spoil to be had from the Brotherhood of Poverty.
The Age of Barbarity is never ended, I can vouchsafe
that, it is the measure of our days, and has always
been so unto eternity.
I who delivered this epistle from Patrick to Coroticus
who ordered this crime - heard the words of
the bishop read aloud in his municipality
amidst spears beating at shields and raw echoing laughter.
I who once served as Cordwainer and Shield-maker
am trusted servant to this humble-angry man,
he has blessed me and given me bread and lodging.
Patrick, who convened the famous Committee of Nine
at Tara, put his objectivity of learning over the
fairy mounds of Ireland, yet during his slavehood
here as youth, found his first vision, that some call
ancient and druidic. He escaped back to Britain,
but lost the glimmering - returned to Ireland as apostle
to recapture brightness as Godly grace - often he
lamented this loss in the circuit of his ministry at my side.
For faith cast his mind abstract - he could no longer
see ancient memories or ways - that first gift
Ireland gave him during his youthful shepherding.
Great was his regret and belief from that time onwards.
Servant to his bondmaster, Milchu, I did come with
Patrick from slavery back into Nemthur by South Britain.
After his coming from Gaul and thirty years study under
Germanus, at Auxerre - I went with Patrick into Hibernia.
Brogan the Scribe took down the words of St. Patrick
in his Confessio and Coroticus Epistle and I made circuit
of Ireland from sliab and monastery to deliver them.
My name is Odhran, Patrick’s charioteer -
and I set down this account as witness.
(NOTE: According to one account the members of St Patrick’s family or
household were: Sechnall, his Bishop; Mochta, his priest;
Bishop Erc, his judge; Bishop Maccaeirthinn, his champion;
Benen, his psalmist; Coemhan, his chamberlain; Sinell
his bell-ringer; Aithcen, his true cook; priest Mescan his
friend and brewer; priest Bescna, the chaplain of the son of Alprann;
his three smiths, Macecht, Laebhan, and Fortchern;
his three artificers, Aesbuite, Tairill, and Tasach;
his three embroiderers, Lupaid, (or Lupita, Patrick’s
own sister - his other sister was Liemania, otherwise known as
Darerca) Erca, and Cruimthiris; Odhran, his
charioteer; Rodan, his shepherd; the five (spiritual) sisters in
St Patrick’s retinue, Ippis, Tigris, and Erca, and Liamhain,
with Eibeachta; Carniuch, who baptised him; German,
his tutor; Manach, his wood supplier; his sister’s son, Banban;
Martin, his mother’s brother (some accounts give a Conchessa,
as St Patrick’s mother); Mochonnoc, his hospitaller; Cribri
and Lasra, makers of mantles; Macraith the wise, and Erc;
Brogan, the scribe; priest Logha, his helmsman; Machiu,
his true fosterson. For a full account of this anonymous poem, and additional
personages to the household list, mentioned in a poem by Flann Mainistrech,
i.e. Flann of the Monastery, abbot of Mainistir-Buithe, now
Monasterboice, in the country of Louth, who died in December, 1056 - see:
John O’Donovan’s translation of the Annals of the Kingdom Of
Ireland, Vol. 1, pp: 135-141.)
THE GREY GLAS SONG
I am the cold watery current of the air,
I am the wreathing hand of mists,
I am the many-windowed firmament,
I am the coloured winds on the cloth of night,
I am the cloudy shell around the earth,
I am the four chief winds of creation,
I am the speckled winds riding the world,
I am the beaked-boat emerging at dawn,
I am the eight encircling servant winds,
I am a thousand lamps breaking in the wave,
I am the weight of a waterfall from a cliff,
I am the red plain of the earth at sunset,
I am the spear thrust of streams from a hill,
I am the lake bursting forth upon the plain,
I am the tall stones circled for strong memory.
Who counts the stars at the well’s bottom?
Who is it follows the sun in his circuit?
Who is it keeps the sun fixed on his path?
Who thrice blesses the tides lifting and falling?
Who welcomes the morning of grey dews
knows fiery arrows pierce the breast for vision.
The poet’s breath empties up into the night
who calls his answer across deep waves.
PRELUDE TO A TIME MACHINE
Tin goods sheds, the cantilevered skyline reconfigure throughout the day, the airport busy as a pavement. From here its twenty four hours in the air to the Northern Hemisphere; older foundations, battle thick walls, multi-layered atmospheres, studded and embossed. One regime after another - history’s gargantuan form from whose ‘rybes they make bowes to shoot with’. Sheep graze the old battlefields pretty as a picture, amongst the hawthorn and pylons.
Looking south toward Botany bay, sinking beneath long rooflines, planes drift a bright tail fin along the east-west runway, or suddenly appear before you stuck on the sky like in a child’s drawing, cushioned on volumes of engine roar, big colours loading the foreground, movement that is the elongated removal of time in the lifting sweep, diminuendo to a quiet speck, climbing out over the ocean - silvered shafts from a yeoman’s bow falling far off to become traffic somewhere.
The mind says that memory is filtered through gauze. And immediately you are there. Banked up yellow soil-rubble along the coastline toward Jaffa port, fuel storage depot tabernacled in the Mediterranean light, winding through the dockside at Piraeus, (backstreets of Newtown reminiscent of Ano Petralona) and the air sweet with petroleum. The day shimmering in youthful heat.
THE HOME AS HOMICIDE
The Magnolia flower bruise-purple, cream cupped, under September. Long haul promise of summer heat and forests illuminated in scripts of flame, the sky’s pinafore blue a bleached out migraine.
The land insisting upon it’s climactic heritage beyond the roar of air conditioning in a million suburban homes, within the short term memory loss of kitchen and living room; discrete zones for the petty crimes of the heart. Clearing rooms for hoarded angers given over to street cred.
Clouds troop from the southern horizon, lightning lays down its picket fence through the postal zones. Hamid pulls up alongside Zang Wei in the slow lane, and pumps a crescent of bullets into the driver’s seat. Intersection lights-gone-yellow-gone-red-gone-green. High Season of Taxi Wars along the Princes Highway. The Channel Ten ‘eye-in-sky’ helicopter reports traffic banked up to Bankstown.
Follow the Metallic serpent with scales flashing back down Parramatta road to Rockdale. Tomorrow a dawn of middle eastern appearance will rise over Newtown: Gateway To The East.
Sydney, September 10, 2002
Stephen Oliver is the author
of twelve titles of poetry, including: Night of Warehouses: Poems 1978-2000,
HeadworX Publishers, 2001. Lived in Paris, Vienna, London, San Francisco,
Greece and Israel. Signed on with the radio ship, ‘The Voice of Peace’
broadcasting in the Mediterranean out of Jaffa. Free lanced as production
voice, newsreader, announcer, voice actor, journalist, radio producer,
copy and features writer. Poems widely represented in New Zealand, Australia,
Ireland, USA, UK, South Africa, Canada, etc. Recently published, Deadly
Pollen, a poetry chapbook, Word Riot Press, 2003, and, Ballads,
Satire & Salt – A Book of Diversions, Greywacke Press, Sydney, 2003.
Three of his books, Unmanned, Night of Warehouses: Poems 1978-2000,
Deadly Pollen are freely available as e-books from Project Gutenberg:
http://gutenberg.net/find and Oxford Text Archive. Stephen is a transtasman
poet and writer who lives in Sydney. website: http://people.smartchat.net.au/~sao/
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 (2001),
Deadly Pollen (2003), Ballads, Satire & Salt - A Book of Diversions
(2003).
