The Soldier

From my stool at the window I notice a marble statue

newly erected, of a fellow from the Lighthorse

resting on his rifle butt, feathered hat doffed

as if to offer his brylcreemed scalp to the wind

bayonet to the citadels built at the heart of the earth.

Near the statue, a toddler chases the midday pigeons

a boy with long red hair and mercurial orders

firing to his upstart vocal chords, to his new arms and legs

then he stops and surveys the world that, rightly, he owns

he’s a pyramid bobbing on its point and he owns every bird

I see them flutter through the treasure-filled secret rooms

of his booby-trapped aleph – I can’t see

his mum or dad but know for sure they’re good. I know

the only thing he knows is all things end behind his eyes

which open wide as rivers when he topples on the grass

And gives everything he has to dandelion gazing.

     Meanwhile

          I see a flurry of

               iridescent feathers on

                     locks of my hair.

·       

It’s the music of jacked-up gas jets and onions dicing

that makes this woebegone pizza shop sound like rain

It’s the music they play here that keeps me returning hungry

and the beautiful waitress with blackheads under her lip –

indoor rain and small talk that perfumes the unwashed floor

Because the basil is shrivelled brown on my margherita

and the skirting boards flake and are painted amateurishly

and the flames on the wood in the ovens are trapped and vicious

and the basil bunches arrive in waxed cardboard and plastic

and the corners of that brand new plinth are crumbling away –

Because polystyrene keeps the Italian tomatoes from bruising

silicone paper the cheap roasting trays from charcoal

chemical bleach the water pipe roaches from sallies

straddling both sides the snakes in my heart from sallies –

and I’m rubbing my temples with fingers covered in garlic oil

Thinking that all the revolutions, all the turns around

of this inexhaustible rotary engine of ours

that roars in the helpless faces of physics and love

have become a single soldier now, an enemy we must kill.

But I, whose generation grew up in the Great Decay

Have also decayed, and so I sit and listen to the quasi-rain

and eat my rubbery pizza and wonder: has he ever tasted basil?

If I can break its limbs into shards like a shattered moon

then maybe he, with standby LED hair and paper legs

can cast the last stone. Then I leave, adfrift but, mercifully, full-bellied.

in front of, behind

To take flight then is to strike against the flint of genius

an iceberg hard and coarse enough to start a fire

to write in sugar-soaked chalk a last letter to her

on a blackboard buried in layers of touch and smell

and sight –  since it’s you who are gone already

and the world who lags, who will later catch you up.

When the pages of your new books no longer bend

and the objects you take for modern are sold at curio auctions

and the oceans are too acidic to swim in, perhaps to live in

and one of your lungs was conceived in a white room somewhere

and we've sat on or lived in or burned all the lungs of the earth 

and the perfumes that drive you to madness are worn by old women

and old men mad with aloneness and pity so bitter, so wretched

for all the good they thought they could do in the world, but couldn’t

because the world was always behind them, because being is past

and now even the past has passed them, then you’ll see it

for the first and final time – two cacti in a desert standing off, shadowed 

figures wilting at opposite points of the waterless, numb horizon.

But you’re young, warm-blooded, one of the cohort of leaves

prodigiously keeping a bag on the pavement from sight

the cold wind blows around, uplifting that greenish polymer

the cold wind blows around, uplifting those leaves that give chase

the cold wind blows around, uplifting that jumbo jet

the cold wind blusters through that jumbo jet’s firing propellers.

this old town

weeks whiled away in the naming of cloud formations

downcast requests for the eyes of the fish on ice

grouped in the cardboard dinner catch basket like capers

capering as your bike, with its clownishly warped front wheel

seems to double back in erasure as it wobbles home –

you’ve taken to wearing a name tag that says JONAH

and the fish eyes and clouds are one in way you can’t say

look down your nose – the white plastic is cheap and rain-warped

look down like the cross-eyed people inhaling posies

up on the hill where the weeds are miniature sunflowers – 

where the sky is so near it's absurd to stretch longingly skyward

absurd as stretching for a fingernail –

an acetate dome of caramelised ash

below which, somewhere, you are, you are also ash

and below you she waits like a jewel to be disinterred

from a world so hardscrabble and not-this, and alluvial

                     a catfish with half its whiskers cut to jags

but, immaterial, you can only drape her in your pall

she falls to the ground and scrambles like a solider

from the gas cloud and shrapnel of a sworn enemy’s love.

Incident 67; continued

Under ‘Type of Injury’ in the Incident 67 spreadsheet, Oliver wrote down ‘broken hand’. The hospital chart more or less reflected this. It did, however, enter into more detail by specifying that the victim had sustained severe and in some cases irreparable fractures to every bone in the left hand except the trapezium, which may have been miraculously spared because of its position under the thumb. The sole duty of the mechanical rolling pin was to flatten all that passed beneath it.  For his part the victim was unsure how the accident had actually occurred: pain and hysteria and morphine had settled like a cataract over his memory. Oliver couldn’t recall seeing or hearing anything unusual either. A malfunction of the safety shutoff on the guard was probably to blame, but the maintenance log showed that the dough break had been fully serviced just six weeks prior to Incident 67. If not a guard malfunction, then a human error: under ‘Cause of Injury’ in the spreadsheet, ‘guard malfunction/human error’ was what Oliver wrote down.   

The rolling hills of the Yarra Valley reminded Max of his native Bergischesland and certain parts of Bavaria. Thus, like the bakery, the preceding businesses were located in the outer northeastern suburbs of Melbourne, where Max and the mother of five-year-old Maren had settled nearly a decade before Oliver was born. For a pittance they’d bought a rotting wooden cottage in a Kangaroo Ground gully, which was set at the top of more than four sloping acres of dead grape vines, matted rabbit shit, and weeds. Within a year they had dug out the vineyard altogether. They planted citrus, olive and almond saplings, and excavated for a swimming pool that, on the shoulder of the slope, commanded a view the young couple considered a gift from God. They sealed the fence line and bought a few sheep and cattle. They answered an ad in the trading post, adopting a young female Border Collie who was low and lissome and fast as the wind when she ran. They replaced the rotted boards in the cottage and landscaped the long, rambling driveway, bordering it with rocks Max stole in batches at night from a nearby quarry. The woman Oliver knew only as ‘Maren’s Mother’ would sometimes find Max rubbing his hands up and down the face of one rock or another as tenderly as one would a human face, or a polished gold ingot, and inhaling the elemental scent. Meanwhile, despite his limited English, Thomas Murray Institute had taken Max on as a butchery teacher.

·       

The period immediately following Incident 67 was hard for Oliver. With Ulrich incapacitated, he was forced to work on the days he normally went to university. Moreover, the other baker, Richard, an irascible man of sixty who had been feuding with Max over pay for some time, directed those grievances towards Max’s son in the form of a contempt so subtle it was hardly there, which in turn made it everywhere. Oliver imputed this contempt into tosses of flour he deemed excessively vigorous, degrees of temperature the oven was out by, overly long openings of the proofer door; in short, every minor discourtesy that a baker of Richard’s experience should have known to avoid so as to keep the peace. He imputed it into the backwards swear words that someone had fingered into the production area window. Meanwhile, it appeared that Ulrich had lodged an official complaint with Worksafe; the bakery had received notice that an inspector was due at any moment.

It wasn’t long before his heavily accented phrasing, untranslatable jokes, massive frame and starry-eyed countenance endeared Max to students, teachers and administrators alike. He obtained permission to use the department’s facilities outside of class times to produce artisan smallgoods, which he then sold to a list of delis and providores that expanded rapidly as a result of culinary Melbourne’s newfound – and short-lived – obsession with German cuisine. He used the profits from the first few quarters to purchase machinery, and converted a rusty tin shed at the bottom of his acreage into the small factory that would eventually pay for Max’s, the Healesville butchery which cemented its eponymous owner’s position as an authority on continental meats in Victoria, as well as a personality of rare and intoxicating bearing, almost a tourist attraction of himself. It was also the business that precipitated Max’s move away from butchery, and the moving of Maren’s Mother back to Germany with her daughter. All of it long before Oliver came into the world.

·       

With the inspection looming, a number of gnomic changes could be observed in Oliver’s behaviour, although the quality of his work was unaffected. He had, for instance, begun wearing a name badge. The badge, which he found wedged between two loose wooden planks on a café table opposite the bakery, said JONAS.

a pessimist ponders the present state of things

Trains crisscross space like rope or sewing needles

silly string of the fabric we know exists but can’t name

or name fractal or quincunx or schizoid hallucination

when space already overdoes it by a long stretch

and the hail a homeless man portended

between his pleas for an answer

to a blunt, simple, insoluble question

what the fuck is going on, doesn’t come –

he asked you but wasn’t making sane eye contact –

and so he goes into Hungry Jack’s, née Burger King. Forever?

Too high as always, the Melbourne clouds, those charlatans.

Once, Burger King begot Hungry Jacks like Gondwanaland

the littler continents, but then Hungry Jacks climbed back

into its mother for a time, before Burger King begot Hungry Jacks again

and the Lucite signs and the old-growth French Fries packets

and the millions of plastic-coated Coca Cola cups

inviting you to Have it Your Way, and the puzzler placemats

and the logos on the bins inured to the idea that recycling is slathered in cum

the idea that recycling as an idea is slathered in not-quite-hard-set cum

and everything else that was yellow, blue, red, white and in a hamburger bun –

where did it all go? Back to the Fatherland? Motherland? Holy Land?

And Woolworths begot Safeway, who’s only just climbed back in recent times

although some of its double helix still hangs around country towns

markets unprepared, you presume, for such a colossal change

the name of the store it buys its food in can’t just go and change!

And yet those same markets would just as soon froth to say Woolies

and for that reason you’d like to write to the market researchers

whose daughters might have given you blowjobs at some point

whose sons you have might double-faulted against on match point

KFC may be Kayferz, but Safeway isn’t Saferz, so what the fuck is going on?

And the Backstreet Boys begot NSYNC begot Five begot Human Nature

trying to be NSYNC and Five begot a loathing of boy bands

begot begot begot begot…

And Itunes 1.0 begot Itunes 1.1 begot Itunes 1.1.1 begot Itunes 1.1.2

begot begot begot begot…

And TV begot Rear Projection, Plasma, LCD, LED, Stable Tables™

fruit desserts that someone, possibly Satan, decided to sell

in those vacuum-sealed dinners that someone, possibly God, let us enjoy.

And fuel efficient engines begot fuel efficient engines begot engines more efficient than ever before

begot the making of the bands on the commercials, and new Shale Oil fields

begot SUV drivers doing their bit for the environment.

And condoms begot Lifestyles begot Flavoured begot Naked

If you’re wearing naked, you think, then you’re on trend –

condoms begot aging, worthless populations

and yet billions of human beings still begot billions of human beings

and parts per million of carbon still begot parts per million of carbon.

And a brand of apricot facial scrub begot triple their quarterly sales

by inking BOLD NEW LOOK! at the top of a bottle that hadn’t changed

and was made from the same petrochemicals as the rest of the NEW LOOK range –

And wolves of the most treacherous steppes begot Pomeranians

begot shit inside ten-thousand dollar Prada handbags.

And hippies begot smoking factories for Birkenstocks and fisherman’s pants.

And writers begot witticisms begot slogans begot small talk begot profits

begot protests begot placards begot plastics and butcher paper begot death –

And kindling begot birds’ nests begot hatchlings begot fledglings begot birds.

And Spice Girls begot All Saints begot...

…Itunes 11.0.3.

…One Direction.

…B*Witched. C’est La Vie, remember?

They threaten and they threaten, the Melbourne clouds, but, you know.

You know and you think that if fatigue were a kind of virus

yours could be said to have made the city sick

because there isn’t a pebble on the road that doesn’t look tired

because you’re walking with your eyes closed when practical

sometimes when not – in a direction that’s virtually circular

but not quite – you can’t feel the ID in your back pocket

but you can feel your features grimacing at random

grunts of effort escaping from your lips at random.

You think that if fatigue were a kind of human

yours could be said to have undergone a process

of lionisation – as the spirit, the inexhaustible spirit

of a people more washed-out and exhausted than ever before

the spirit of a head of magnificent hair that’s receding

tied back so tightly the skin around it looks blanched

bloodless – the bottom point of a desperate baying star

baying to its deaf or just quiescent moon. You know

you don’t know anything and you’ll never know anything –

maybe instead of whining there’s a figurehead to find –

may b sum body noze how 2 use evry I-phone app??

Complications see you home far later than expected

you go to bed without showering, without scruples

but of course the laws of being don’t allow you sleep –

your feet are squished against the foot of the bed

so hard you can trace the lathwork with your toes

soon your fingers trace it and the blankets are off and it’s cold

then your tongue traces it, then you take the wood between your teeth

chew it as you did your bunk bed rails when you were a little boy.

rose cleaning

filthy bike chains have been strung around

rosebushes in the garden of the old Frenchman next door

who hangs his clothes to dry on the low front fence

thumbs gently at the air as though it were a woman’s face

as though it were a bead of longing on a woman’s face –

leaves the grass unmown around a fresco table

strewn with books, some warped, some funked by the marshalling clouds –

with desperate care you tend to every flower

degrease using the cuff of the old jacket you have on

the smell a compound of WD40 and animals

petals the colour of your eyelids when you shut them to trespass

the colour of the scarf your mother wore but never left the house in

green twigs underfoot leaking white liquid –

then you realise the pressure of oafish fingers over hours

will only wreck the roses, who can't object or even cower –

and in a cataract-like puddle, you string the chain around

your right hand, quivering for no good reason

present the accursed offering to the dreadlocked men in the shed

of the local bike share – its uselessness belied

by the bead of the end of the good in the world on your face

that's thumbed off by their gentle thanks and the Biblical shower.

the other holograph

through the violet smoke the fireworks leave behind

after they have capered and made shapes beneath the clouds

there appears the haunting holograph of a man

and silence and uproar partitions another crowd –

why the gas meters in every Melbourne garden

intone the urgent whining of a stove jacked up too high

why the feral possums in every Melbourne tree

seem to be holding a conclave on the powerlines

why someone has painted the post box green as a forest

widened the slot for bulky items to a yawning gape

why the indigenous name of the parkland the people skirt

feels physical now, made of rubber or powdered latex

leaps free of the sign like the man from midnight’s ether –

moustache white as icing and low glasses small and round

moustache growing wilder as the smoke diffuses

all true – the hundred aliases with which he’s endowed –  

and cavorts in the loaded air, there is no because - 

no more than a mist fanned out across the leaden black rise

first footfall soft on the wet grass, scarcely heard

firework shells left scattered, the other holograph subsides.