y.

The distant applause of rain
and the weekend screaming of a girl.
The screech of a trains brake
as if a fire were being extinguished.
The exiles 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 roses 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.

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 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. 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 ri