intemperance hotels, and one music venue after another,
and all of them Spelunken and grotto-dark,
and the endearing bars with their windows wound down,
and the customers staring out at the continuous paseo
of the young, the buxom, the drapey, the stringy:
the pre-owned and the pre-loved, the much-travelled
and the want-away, the ripped and the buff
and the sweatered and coated, the baby-dolled and the muscle-shirted
and the skirts pulled over trousers and leggings,
and the flipflops and biker boots, and tote bags and shoulder bags
strapped across the bosom. (And it was all one style,
and the name of that style was called Alternative, or maybe,
Consensual Alternative at the World’s End.) The Judy.
The little nest – suite – of three or four subdivided rooms
– that plasterboard and aluminium arrangement
so relatively permanent in its provisionality –
the red daubed walls and purple foam sitcom furniture.
My office – hardly ever used in anger – though I did stuff
a thousand pages of Alone in Berlin into a cake box for collection once,
and then surfed home down ten blocks of Brunswick Street,
out of the green sky of the short northern dusk.
(Brisbane)
Cricket
Another one of those Pyrrhic experiences. Call it
an expyrrhience. A day at Lords, mostly rain,
one of those long-drawn-out draws so perplexing to Americans.
Nothing riding on the game, two mid-table counties
at the end of a disappointing season, no local rivalry or anything like that,
very few people there, the game itself going nowhere slowly
on its last morning. The deadest of dead rubbers.
Papa had his beer, but you two must have wondered what you’d done wrong.
Did I say it was raining, and the forecast was for more rain?
Riveting. A way, at best, for the English
to read their newspapers out of doors, and get vaguely shirty
or hot under the collar about something. The paper, maybe, or the rain.
Occasionally lifting their eyes to watch the groundsmen at their antics –
not just hope over experience but hope over certain knowledge.
It was like staying to watch your horse lose.
And yet there was some residual sense of good fortune to be there,
perhaps it was the fresh air or being safely out of range of conversation
or the infinitesimal prospect of infinitesimal entertainment.
One groundsman – the picador – mounted on a tractor,
others on foot, like an army of clowns, with buckets and besoms.
The tractor was towing a rope across the outfield to dry it –
we saw the water spray up, almost in slow motion –
as from newly cut hair. The old rope was so endearingly vieux jeu.
It approached a pile of sawdust – two failing styles of drying –
and one of the groundsmen put out his foot to casually flick it over,
as sporting a gesture as we expected to see all day
in terms of finesse, economy of movement, timing.
He missed, and instead the rope sliced right through the sawdust pile,
and flattened it. A malicious laugh, widely dispersed and yet unexpectedly hearty,
went up on all sides of the ground. Soft knocks that school a lifetime – no?
Letter from Australia
to Ralph Savarese
The early worm gets the bird –
it’s morning in Australia.
It’s strange to be so bilious
so far away.
Little to do with Australia,
which so far as I can see
seems mostly delightful:
airy pastel buildings and trees I can’t name.
There is some peculation
among the local pols,
mainly relegated to the business section:
a few million hectares rightly or wrongly grazed or mined.
The shilly-shallying of Costello (who has a book to sell-o),
the ill-mannered couple at the Iguana,
the chair-sniffer unluckily caught in the act,
a victim of his own special brand of gallantry.
Then there was the recent South Sea shindig
all in matching shirts and kilts,
except for poor Fiji, which
was sent to Coventry.
The local parliament yammers all day –
you can get used to the phantom
pinpricks of short ‘i’s in words
like beach, bush or bake –
and then the Beeb burbles all night
dreaming to itself in Queen.
And when we wake up,
the world is still spoiled
by the comical malfeasance
of its whilom last best hope,
the familiar American galère
fourteen hours abaft of us:
Cheney the sinisterly skewed orang-utan,
the worn charmlessness of Bush,
the clumping one-armed snowman McCain,
looking either to club or hug.
And now – the commentariat agog
at the promised mélange of snowsports and watersports –
Sarah P., the driller killer,
the uterine shooterine.
The ‘real’ routinely trumping ‘politics’
– as if politics weren’t real.
There are no more anchovies,
but there is still fishing and (apparently) Anchorage.
If you can have little Englanders,
can’t you have little Americans,
half-awash with Washington’s hormones,
half in rebellion against them.
The imprisoned balloons
in the false ceiling of the ‘Palindome’,
hang above the fat freed faces.
Cyclothymia in the USA.
My friend in the bonsai liberal exclave
in your biodiesel flyover state,
I can still register my first
Zolaesque frisson of horror
at the fried turnip smell of the cars
that ate not Paris, but whatever you called it –
I Oughta Went Around it.
There is no going around it.
Old Mexico
They can’t get enough of the indecent
toy skeletons in copulo every which way,
the perpetual action heroes, the cast-off clothes
with writing on them, the mufla
and vulcanizadora shops, the girls in bathtub jeans
from no label they ever heard of,
no film without Schwarzenegger or Willis,
wrought iron and tin mirrors, sad tenor crooners
over brass, caja de ahorros (chamber of horrors),
joyerias (brothels), the prettier the place
the uglier the music, the men growing more and more
like themselves, the women more and more like the men,
an orange balancing on an orange
balancing on an orange, no dry stick poking
out of the ground without a flower, and those
flagrant skeletons – like there’s no tomorrow.
Recuerdos de Bundaberg
for Chris Wallace-Crabbe
No, I don’t remember Guildford
ROBYN HITCHCOCK
Did I fly there? I may have flown there.
Maybe in something with the specifications of a crop-duster.
The Sugar Coast. Everything comes with a name. A name and a nickname.
The Soaked Coast. Bundy. Blue rustle of cane. Home to Rum City Wrecking.
[Farewell,] Bundaberg, Home of Bricks. Big Daddy’s Pies. Hair Force One
.
And the nature. Grass trees, wedding bushes, acid frogs, termite nests.
Beaded or bearded dragons. Together or separately, I don’t remember.
I saw one, though, it was huge, in some undergrowth.
Harmless, probably, but ferociously ugly.
I left the workshop in the Rotary Club. I took the Bra Challenge,
or did not take the Bra Challenge. I headed down Bourbong Street.
Towards the Bennett or the Burnett (the sources are unclear).
One of those short catastrophic Australian rivers. The old bones of sugar refineries.
The pocked mud glistening with thousands of alert little mud-crabs.
The farmers came in to buy dry goods and do their banking and get soaked.
The mercantile brick paving, awnings, shade and a gentle breeze.
Horace would have appreciated it. Amoenus, I can hear him saying.
The twentieth century, the Wild East.
I occupied an array of public benches. Hours went by.
Chinese tourists mooched disconsolately down the pavements. Sol or sombra, to taste.
The Mediterranean social life of lorikeets. The inverted magpies.
The Golden Basket, the Golden Casket, the Golden Gasket.
Three for the price of four.
Bundaberg. Somewhere I’d no reason to be.
Anywheresville, as in miles from.
No dot on a marconigraph, semicolon, on no radar a single ping.
Or if there was, then just a ping singing to itself.
see something say something
every transparent man his own bar-
code his own passwords account
activity iris scan fingerprints
tribal/ maiden name payment
history gold/ silver/ platinum/
lead cards ID (non-drivers incl.)
mobile number(s) email
addresses medical records
organ donor card insurance
allergies next of kin pets
police record age next birth-
day employer’s letter tax
number implants joint re-
placements cranial plate
pacemaker social network
aliases chatrooms mother’s
birthday and middle initial
welcome on board unusual
activity prior religious affili-
ation GSOH soul patch smell
Before she met me
after Ovid
There was the narcoleptic giant,
the absentee clothes horse,
the petrified virgin and the flaky sadist.
Then she met me.
Cavafy: Subrosa
Both of us disposable/so disposed/at each other’s disposal,
so put me away, have me ejaculate against your hip
as part of some exhaustive totalising method,
leave the children with someone
(‘make the necessary arrangements’),
park around the corner at some ungodly hour twenty years ago,
give the barest touch on the doorbell, hush, and tiptoe down
to the blue daybed with your hair electric from the cold.
Hudson Ride
ich weiss nicht, was soll es bedeuten
HEINRICH HEINE
Red and yellow bittersweet; Poughkeepsie;
the ice jags are silver, rush spikes gold
in the blue December. A big old eagle,
white head, white feet, perches on a tree
like a postage stamp or a glorified house cat.
Socks in excelsis. – God, what is it with separation?
A soft freeze. The woods are rusty stone, henna fuzz ravines,
snow slicks. Ice blinds and dries. Dazzles and steams.
Swans outside Croton. I sit in the train,
at the very back of the last car,
rueing every mile. Some sort of folly and exhilaration.
A caffeinated feeling of being all heart.
‘Shouldn’t I ask to hold to you forever’. I rather think I did ask.
They thought it was the New Rhine, here, or wanted to.
Rhinebeck. Germantown. Dutchess County.
My girl, someone’s girl, her own girl. Perhaps
the only other time in my life I’ve opposed the machinery
and scale of the world. My personal insurrection.
Auflehnung. A leaning up against – say, and by preference,
you in your kitchenette and sweater among the hi-hats
and bolt-cutters and beheaded pin sculptures.
Now here come the hard options: the cracked old Nabisco plant,
West Point, Indian Point, Ossining, Rockland Psych.,
Drachenfels. Bacharach. Loreley. Loreley. Loreley.
Baselitz & his Generation
for Hai-Dang Phan
I have no doubt where they will go. They walk the one life offered from the many chosen.
ROBERT LOWELL
They are all also, it should be remembered, West German artists, with the partial exception of Penck, and are all male.
JOHN-PAUL STONARD
He was born in the countryside / the provinces / the blameless sticks
in (false) Waltersdorf (recte) Dresden
in what is now Czechoslovakia / the Czech Republic (laughs) / Czechia,
what’s it to you.
Stripped of his East German citizenship, he fled
on foot with a handful of pop music cassettes
in a pantechnicon mit Kind und Kegel
in pandemonium
nach vorne
cool as you like, in an S-Bahn from the Russian Sector, in the clothes he stood up in.
Germany (thus Goethe’s friend Mme de Staël) is the land of poets and thinkers
der Dichter und Denker
or of judges and executioners
der Richter und Henker
or of Richter and Penck.
He drew innocent geometrical shapes
boxed shirts / boxer shorts / boxy suits
men without women
hairy heroes of the Thirty Years’ War / lansquenets / strangely fibrous figures a bit like those New Yorker caveman cartoons
empty Renaissance helmets / mostly US fighter jets
the suicides of Stammheim.
He took the name of an American boxing promoter
a German Ice Age geologist
the village of his birth
the one he was given.
His first work to really catch on / be banned / get him in trouble / cause widespread revulsion was Onkel Rudi
Die grosse Nacht im Eimer
Höhere Wesen befahlen: rechte obere Ecke schwarz malen! / oyez, oyez,
oyez, Politburo decree: upper right hand corner in ebony!
ohne Titel
a mural in the cafeteria of the Hygiene
Museum, since painted over.
He wound up in Düsseldorf
Berlin, doh!
la bella Italia
tax-exempt Ireland of Böll- and Beuys-full memory, where the earth-apples bloom.
His paintings were fuzzy geometry
like the country, ripped across the middle
upside down (especially effective: the trees)
shovelled out of the window
later withdrawn.
His favoured technique involved stick figures
Polke-dots
out of focus grisaille photographs
scribbling on his pictures
woodcuts à la Dürer.
The numerals on his graphics represent a recent shopping bill
an attempt to disconcert the onlooker/Ostranenie
amortisation
barcode
some other code
Durchnummerierung.
He studied with Joseph Beuys
the least doctrinaire painter he could find
for the best part of ten years, in East an
d
West, so that everything cancelled itself out
what’s it to you
he didn’t.
Fontane
for Jan Wagner
Acacias. Acacias and rain make May here, the way
lindens and rain make July. Layers of complication and sorrow,
which precipitate as opinion. Brusque. Off-kilter. Uncalled-for.
A long and hopelessly trammelled backstory. Midnight.
The biggest brick church in the whole of Brandenburg.
Two burly men head off into the park with their impossibly tiny dog.
Sankt Georg
Sankt Georg, what was it, questionable, doubtful, shady, twilit,
a something area, something Jan said, and he was born in Hamburg,
and went to school here, so he would know.
A little isthmus between the Alster with its freshwater sailors
and the railway station, always a reliable drag on things anywhere in Europe
(the transients, the drugs, the pre-set collisions between the foolish young
and the unscrupulous old), though this one piped classical music – not any more –
to the forecourt, where taxi drivers got out
and walked their Mercs around in neutral
because they were hours without a fare and were saving diesel,
(which was all very well in summer),
and the immediate, somehow always slightly grubby or compromised view