vers,
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
pass on into unchartered waters, the
lights out along the deck.
Behind, the floodlit logging of
Malaysia gluts the Japanese 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 blac