Unmanned Part 6

Bob Orr I called down the unending roadsteads to Motutapu & Rakino Islands, back behind the wave screen at Okahu Bay to Freemans and St Marys Bay. And as I called into the Schooner Tavern & sought the drear interior of the Wynyard Tavern & the sailors talk told me you had fitted and trimmed your craft against every dire prediction to set sail on that other sea, Bob, the one that has no name & no horizon & is drowning you.

Dave Spencer

lived his life like barbed-wire is what an old girlfriend said, man of the river. But then, life finished you off bit-by-bit though couldnt pluck out your dingo-bright eyes. Lets face it, you were pretty much an a.r.s.e-hole to those who knew you. Most of us just bash the trees without seeing the kangaroos.

You saw living mostly for what it is, a part-time job with b.u.g.g.e.r all security; the occasional softness of a woman, maybe, and of course grog by the bucketful.

What was it you saw at the last, Dave, when pa.s.sing through the ripped canvas of a thunderstorm, lightning flas.h.i.+ng down the Hawkesbury, a good belt of rain after?

You Dont Remember Dying

least, thats what the Old Londoner told me who didnt learn to relax till well past fifty, seated alongside his two mates: a Norwegian: Youre not the same person now as you were ten years ago.

And the Irishman: I like the music its the noise I cant stand. Each one, orphaned & aphoristic, deep into his sixties.

NZ born and much younger, I offered: Youre not the same person tomorrow as you were today. And then, To your arrival in Melbourne, they singly toasted.

(Great-grandfather, MacCormack, arrived here in 1851 & 26 years later, in 1877, set sail for Dunedin aboard the Ringarooma).

So our tale of the two cities unfolded: Sydney is get what you can. Melbourne, what have you got to offer & are we really interested. The afternoon floated by as did the trams with dry, asthmatic rush in this mellow town of bungalows & bra.s.s.

Graham Clifford

After THE DUKE HOTELs demolition, (opp. Perretts Corner) one last joke: one DB beer bottle ringed by ten green cabbages

as roseate or wreath for an empty lot. Close by, the mad bucketing fountain of Cuba Mall played on. Meanwhile, at his Manners street

studio above the music shop, Graham Clifford, renowned for his Figaro, ululated profoundly through the scales. A window framed

trolley-bus poles that, tacking, flared bluely along the wire. The maestros voice floated over harbour & city, capital & far-flung country,

far from Covent Garden. A 1930s London partied on amongst black & white photographs plastered to the wall above a battered Steinway.

On Brooklyn hills toi toi waved war plumes to the southerly gusts with unceasing applause.

Through a hundred, sunblown wintry afternoons

he coached opera singers, actors, newsreaders, plucked notes off the yellow stained keys: he guided, rolled golden vowels, before them.

Bruno Lawrence

Bruno, do you remember the Me and Gus stories, way before Barry Crump got keen, when a cow c.o.c.ky was a b.a.s.t.a.r.d you met on gravelly roads? Recall the nights playing community halls, and days making a few records, only to break a few more? Ricky Mays Jazz Combo, Max Merritt & The Meteors,

Quincy Conserve, plus, the all-stars-road-show Blerta1, travelling Aotearoa, through khaki paddocks, down thistle blown highways in that diesel bus t seasonal rhythms you doubtless gathered, drummer extraordinaire, on your final journeying off Cape Reinga, the spirit freed to ride the rain you backed

the loner to the last, death the bottom line to stave off cancer. Bruno, you did that thing. R & B, jazzman, film star (didnt Jack Nicholson say get on over to Hollywood?) but you preferred back blocks, sought small towns, river s.h.i.+ngle, the hollows of the land, and a home around Waimarama in the Hawkes Bay.

A s.h.i.+fting romantic, hoon & hangman, a real joker you played yourself sans bulls.h.i.+t in a heap of movies; The Wild Man, Ute, you leapt from life to art without a hitch; A Bridge To Nowhere, The Quiet Earth, how you loved women, warmth by the bus load, produced that cla.s.sic my 12 inch, record of the blues.

1 Bruno Lawrences Electric Revelation and Travelling Apparition.

II

The Still Watches

I

Autumn tinsel floats gold on July leaves and up goes the memory flare. The carbon rod of winter burns low and the dark is a mammoth locked within ice. Watch the simultaneous reels of the seasons spinning before your eyes. A plane pa.s.ses, and upsets the late sun to a shadow-print upon the wall. With barely a movement we come from the bleaker months to where the picture pans briefly, dissolves upon the softer ores of spring. Ah, but the Captains of Industry are wheeling! A building boom amongst the trees after the first few casual blossoms had fallen along suburban driveways. Observe the birds investing in the green shares of September.

This side of the doc.u.mentary we view in armchair safety, Our Planet: a well heeled cloud pads across the moons surface, under the vast drift-net of the night tuna boats swing light probes about the arresting waters another country claims.

David Attenborough journeys through deserts to break the ancient limestone tablets, and proclaim that fossils are the visual memory of stone.

We observe in awe the Environmental Mysteries and ask, is the suns bald glare through the Glory Hole truly the pointing finger of G.o.d? Laurence Olivier puts on his final mask, looking deathly, Tell my friends that I miss them, and then fades from the ramparts. I name two from the camp of Good Att.i.tude, builders of the beauty of this planet the givers, not takers who direct our gaze upward from the burning footlights of the closing century, toward the language of our Common Future.

II

The seeing wears away the seer: twelve years further on Voyager 2 putts out through the pinball solar system, past Neptune and beyond the reach of time. Another day in the round and the cliche of uneventful incident has not yet arrived.

The balloon that is so majestic on the plump air tumbles as heavy as a plumb-bob onto the countryside, trailing its fifty seconds of life huddled to impact. The cattle scattered, the sky did not change but released names into the wispy afternoon. Then all is as it was before the tragic flight, except the calm that betokens fear.

And clouds rich as coalmines gathered from the chutes of mountainsides, over the belts of grainfield to boost the corporate climates, and to market each end of the world gyrally.

A blotting paper sky, the soft tear of thunder, then lightning. Who would demand of the wise a word to steer by? Nostradamus throws his hands in the air after the event: Mark well my words, I told you so.

Backward we look upon his bag of tricks, and with each new calamity a surreal rabbit lifts before your eyes.

Ribbed streets! Pneumatic heartbeat!

Prophecy is the Art of Boredom for one who cannot stand his own company from one moment to the next.

He pulls the hat trick, feigns the future, argues the task of his breath wearily on its way. Some ravel dreams to cats cradles in whose uninhabited solitude, slowly as a yawn, wish to pull forth the superstrings.

Call it a living, this s.p.a.ce between meetings. Those encirclements that bind us together temporally.

The distant applause of rain and the weekend screaming of a girl.

The screech of a trains brake as if a fire were being extinguished.

The exiles brain is a frozen, grey sea-storm; from wave to wave he stares down the barrel of the moon.

It is morning and the sun spreads over Nicaragua slow as the slitting of a throat. Consider Ernesto Cardinal as he rises from his bed, how he stacks his images practical as planks.

Ay, the roses blood dark as diesel!

VI