n 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-fashioned 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 shit 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
passion. Romance of the World!

IX

Sun shines metallic off Footscray
and out across Westgate bridge. Silver &
green office blocks rise from a
dun plain. Superman, bearing a stash of
old money darts over the dockside
and th