Poems 1960-2000 (22 page)

Somewhere in the bush, the last moa

is not still lingering in some hidden valley.

She is not stretching her swanlike neck

(but longer, more massive than any swan’s)

for a high cluster of miro berries,

or grubbing up fern roots with her beak.

Alice McKenzie didn’t see her

among the sandhills at Martin’s Bay

in 1880 – a large blue bird

as tall as herself, which turned and chased her.

Moas were taller than seven-year-old

pioneer children; moas weren’t blue.

Twenty or thirty distinct species –

all of them, even the small bush moa,

taller than Alice – and none of their bones

carbon-dated to less than five centuries.

The sad, affronted mummified head

in the museum is as old as a Pharoah.

Not the last moa, that; but neither

was Alice’s harshly grunting pursuer.

Possibly Alice met a takahe,

the extinct bird that rose from extinction

in 1948, near Te Anau.

No late reprieve, though, for the moa.

Her thigh-bones, longer than a giraffe’s,

are lying steeped in a swamp, or smashed

in a midden, with her unstrung vertebrae.

Our predecessors hunted and ate her,

gobbled her up: as we’d have done

in their place; as we’re gobbling the world.

What is it, what is it? Quick: that whiff,

that black smell – black that’s really brown,

sharp that’s really oily and yet rough, 

a tang of splinters burning the tongue,

almost as drunkening as hot tar

or cowshit, a wonderful ringing pong. 

It’s fence-posts, timber yards, the woodshed;

it bundles you into the Baby Austin

and rushes you back to early childhood. 

It’s Uncle’s farm; it’s the outside dunny;

it’s flies and heat; or it’s boats and rope

and the salt-cracked slipway down from the jetty. 

It’s brushes oozing with sloshy stain;

it’s a tin at the back of the shed: open it,

snort it ! You can’t: the lid’s stuck on. 

‘The time is nearly one o’clock,

or half past twelve in Adelaide’ –

where the accents aren’t quite so…Australian

as in the other states, the ones

that were settled (not their fault, of course)

by convicts. We had Systematic

Colonisation, and Colonel Light,

and the City of Adelaide Plan. We have the Park Lands.

It’s time for the news at 1.30 –

one o’clock Central Time in Adelaide. 

It’s early days in Hobart Town,

and Maggie May has been transported

(not such fun as it sounds, poor lass)

to toil upon Van Diemen’s cruel shore.

It’s 1830 or thereabouts

(1800 in Adelaide?

No, no, this is going too far –

as she might have said herself at the time). 

The time is three o’clock, etc.

The time is passing.

You’re tuned to ABC Radio.

We’ll be bringing you that programme shortly. 

It’s five o’clock in Adelaide

and Maggie May has found her way

to a massage parlour in Gouger Street.

The Red Light Zone (as we don’t call it)

extends from the West Park Lands to Light Square

(named for the Colonel, not the Zone).

The Colonel’s in two minds about it;

his fine Eurasian face is troubled. 

The Colonel’s an anomaly.

There are plenty of those in Adelaide.

Meanwhile, back in Van Diemen’s Land,

a butcher bird sings coloratura

in the courtyard of the Richmond Gaol

as tourists file through with their cameras,

wondering how to photograph

a Dark Cell for solitary

from the inside, with the door shut.

Look, they had them for women too! 

It’s half past eight in Adelaide

and 4 a.m. in Liverpool.

Maggie May wants to ring Lime Street.

You mean they don’t have STD?

But I thought this was the New World. 

They don’t have GMT either;

or BST, as they call it now,

whenever now is.

                             It is now

half past ten in Adelaide,

and in the Park Lands a nasty man

is cutting up a teenage boy

and cramming him into a plastic bag. 

In Gouger Street another man,

equally nasty but less wicked,

has taken his wife to a performance

of Wagner at the Opera Theatre

and is strolling with her to their car

past the massage parlour

where something like five hours ago

Maggie May gave him a hand-job. 

The Colonel’s brooding over his notebooks,

and lying under his stone, and standing

on his plinth on Montefiore Hill. 

Maggie May is still on the phone,

arguing with the operator,

trying to get through to Lime Street.

It’s the future she wants,

or the past back. Some of it. 

You’re listening to ABC FM:

12.30 Eastern Standard Time –

twelve midnight in Adelaide.

And now, to take us through the night,

Music to Keep the Days Apart.

May: autumn. In more or less recognisable

weather, more or less recognisable birds

are greeting the dawn. On 5CL the newsreader

has been allotted (after the lead story

on whether the Treasurer might or still might not

cancel the promised tax-cuts) two minutes

to tell us about whatever it is today –

chemical weapons, radioactive rain,

one of those messy bits of northern gloom

from the places where gloom’s made (not here, not here!).

He tells us; then the baby-talking presenter

(curious how some Australian women

never get to sound older than fifteen)

contrives a soothing link: ‘Grim news indeed,’

she ad-libs cosily. ‘Much worse, of course,

if you live in Europe’ – writing off a hemisphere.

Come, literature, and salve our wounds:

bring dressings, antibiotics, morphine; 

bring syringes, oxygen, plasma.

(Saline solution we have already.) 

We’re injured, but we mustn’t say so;

it hurts, but we mustn’t tell you where. 

Clear-eyed literature, diagnostician,

be our nurse and our paramedic. 

Hold your stethoscope to our hearts

and tell us what you hear us murmuring. 

Scan us; but do it quietly, like

the quiet seep of our secret bleeding. 

When we lie awake in the night

cold and shaking, clenching our teeth, 

be the steady hand on our pulse,

the skilful presence checking our symptoms. 

You know what we’re afraid of saying

in case they hear us. Say it for us.

It would be rude to look out of the car windows

at the colourful peasants authentically pursuing

their traditional activities in the timeless landscape

while the editor is talking to us.

He is telling us about the new initiatives

his magazine has adopted as a result

of the Leader’s inspiring speech at the last Party Congress.

He is speaking very slowly (as does the Leader,

whom we have seen on our hotel television),

and my eyes are politely fixed on his little moustache:

as long as it keeps moving they will have to stay there;

but when he pauses for the interpreter’s turn

my duty is remitted, and I can look out of the windows.

I am not ignoring the interpreter’s translation

but she has become our friend: I do not feel compelled

by courtesy to keep my eyes on her lipstick.

What’s more, the editor has been reciting his speech

at so measured a pace and with such clarity

that I can understand it in his own language;

and in any case, I have heard it before.

This on-off pattern of switching concentration

between the editor’s moustache and the sights we are passing

gives me a patchy impression of the local agriculture.

Hordes of head-scarved and dark-capped figures

move through fields of this and that, carrying implements,

or bending and stretching, or loading things on to carts.

I missed most of a village, during the bit about the print-run,

but the translation granted me a roadful of quaint sheep.

Now the peasants are bent over what looks like bare earth

with occasional clusters of dry vegetation.

It is a potato field; they are grubbing for potatoes.

There are dozens of them – of peasants, that is:

the potatoes themselves are not actually visible.

As a spectacle, this is not notably picturesque,

but I should like to examine it for a little longer.

The sky has turned black; it is beginning to rain.

The editor has thought of something else he wishes to tell us

about the magazine’s history.

Once again, eyes back to his official moustache

(under which is unofficial mouth looks vulnerable).

The editor is a kind man.

He is taking us on an interesting excursion,

in an expensive taxi, during his busy working day.

It has all been carefully planned for our pleasure

Quite possibly he wants to shield us from the fact

that this rain is weeks or months too late;

that the harvest is variously scorched, parched and withered;

that the potatoes for which the peasants are fossicking

have the size and the consistency of bullets 

Suddenly it’s gone public; it rushed out

into the light like a train out of a tunnel.

People I’ve met are faces in the government,

shouting on television, looking older. 

The country sizzles with freedom. The air-waves

tingle. The telephone lines are all jammed.

I can't get through to my friends. Are they safe? They’re safe,

but I need to hear it from them. Instead 

I’ll play the secret tape I made in the orchard

two years ago, at Ciorogîla.

We’re talking in two languages, mine and theirs,

laughing, interrupting each other; 

the geese in the peasants’ yard next door

are barking like dogs; the children are squawking,

chasing each other, picking fruit;

the little boy brings me a flower and a carrot. 

We’re drinking must – blood-pink, frothy –

and a drop of unofficial
tuica
:

‘What do the peasants drink in your country? –

Oh, I forgot, you don’t have peasants.’ 

It’s dusk. The crickets have started up:

Zing-zing, zing-zing, like telephones

over the static. Did it really happen?

Is it possible? ‘Da, da!’ say the geese.

Fiona’s parents need her today –

they’re old; one’s ill, and slipping away –

but Fiona won’t be by the bed:

                               she’s dead.

She went for a working holiday

years ago, on a farm that lay

just down the coast from St Bee’s Head

in Cumbria, next to – need I say?

                               A name to dread.

She was always very fond of the farm

with its rough, authentic rural charm,

and the fields she tramped, and the lambs she fed

                               with youthful pride.

Her family saw no cause for alarm –

how could it do her any harm

working there in the countryside?

It would help to build her up, they said.

But it secretly broke her down instead,

                               until she died.

There was a leak, if you recall,

at Windscale in the fifties. No?

Well, it was thirty years ago;

                               but these things are slow.

And no matter what the authorities said

about there being no risk at all

from the installations at Calder Hall,

buckets of radiation spread,

                               and people are dead.

That farm became a hazardous place –

though to look at it you wouldn’t know;

but cancers can take years to grow

(or leukaemia, in Fiona’s case),

and as often as not they win the race,

                               however slow.

Before long most of us will know

people who’ve died in a similar way.

We’re not aware of it today,

                               and nor are they,

but another twenty years or so

will sort out who are the ones to go.

We’ll be able to mark them on a chart,

a retrospective map to show

where the source of their destruction lay.

                               That’s the easy part.

But where’s the next lot going to start?

At Windscale, Hinkley Point, Dounreay,

Dungeness, Sizewell, Druridge Bay?

                               Who can say?