Unmanned.

by Stephen Oliver.

Poets have wrongd poor storms: such days are best; They purge the air without, within the breast.

George Herbert

Cultural Misappropriation

is that what I hear you cry, citizen?

If a delph-glazed moon with its O so delicate pattern pans over Holland, flat as a tack, it also comes by way of the Antarctic circle right to your doorstep in equal measure. If the sun clamps its golden torque on mosque or synagogue, pa, cathedral or sacred site, does this endorse any one people over another? Is it your wish to head off the cultural bandits at the historical impa.s.se, citizen, by placing a patent on your mana? Beware the polemicists who define and so divide, who aggregate authority unto self where before lay none.

Symbol becomes the circ.u.mference of time & custom. It is not the thing itself, but the beautiful echo of a peoples harmonic which cannot be bounded nor weakened.

Here lies the camouflage that protects the ancient matrix, the silent memory of our bloods journey & sound leads you to it.

Word Maps

1. Down By The River

Of the brain, mushroom shaped as bomb blast, we project the image to fact; up river from the torrent, amongst the calmness of boulders, the angler shadow-casts looping the steady surface for the archetypal fish whose leapt arch antic.i.p.ates t but the headwaters are held greyly back by a concrete-net on this dappled and uncaptured urban afternoon.

He deftly flicks & spools back and forth from channel to channel.

2. National Park Holiday

If you go into the woods today you will be part of a task force moving in line-formation.

You will allow that the plastic yellow tape which cordons off select areas does not imply a Sacred Grove.

If you go into the woods today, disinterment, not picnics, is the order of inquiry. The Vegetable Kingdom remains thoroughly doc.u.mented and every species is accounted for; some of whom are human, or parts thereof.

3. False Idols

It was always wood, wood along the way, and exits went from grove to sacred grove till deeper wood lay beyond the Roman shield and sword; that, though, belongs to another picture book. The lyre-bird mimics the chainsaw and Birds of Paradise spit chips. Along the Hume Hwy. east of Eden, a concrete Mountain Ash dubbed Yggdrasil boasts a wide-screen computer enhanced vista: an arrow-straight monorail running from Uluru clean through the Olgas.

4. Surveyors Party

These twin obelisks which guard the southern entrance to the Great Sandy desert, though partnered to a sun fiercer than anything Egypt had to offer, preside over a millennia of flat emptiness, and attest to the prowess, not of indigent cultures, but the engineering whim of the LAND BARONS who pray that one day, these too, will invoke an air-conditioned resort for the rich to dwell in, amongst hydro- mythological fountains, playing endlessly over sacred-site motifs.

5. Got Ourselves A Convoy!

Hi Ho! Hi Ho! But theyve been laid off. Round Oberon, the town spirit flat as a plank; then fury knots in pubs. The big rigs aim chrome cowlings at Canberra, Convoy! through the ring roads to circle Parliament House wagon-style. Hey, you cant knock it: logging by generations for generations have trod them down. Count the rings of the rigs revving. Each logger raw-red, necks blood-throttled.

Say what, anger? You can put a ring around that, champ. Hi Ho! Hi Ho!

6. Cultural Desert

The earth is dismembered & what remains gives evidence; clues: history by blocks displaced as in the Aswan Dam & the Temple of Philae. Osiris rolls in the winding sheet of the Nile (O moisture of the World!) and vainly cry the well-wishers. Richard Burton tracked the source back to Lake Victoria, and back again to the Royal Geographical Society; no gushing waters from the cleft rock, only lameness, fever under the rays of the Sun G.o.d, Ra.

7. Down By The Station

Indecision. Doubt. A bungled liftoff, the b.u.mpy landing. Of course, the forest dwellers who continuously run at you from tangled undergrowth onto the stubbled airstrip, dreamlike, dont make it: LAST CANNIBAL WORLD: lithe tribal girl hand jobs hero through bamboo cage. The spiked wooden ball swishes from tree canopy to impale support cast. Sunday matinee in country town. Farm boys lope under dirty clouds to crop-dusted paddocks, and water slips by the BP Service Station, somewhere.

8. Continental Shelf Co.

I officially declare the millennial Poets Symposium on the Age of Inner s.p.a.ce now open: Welcome to OCEANISM.

Poets are required to be proficient in submarine mythology of an exploratory and Cousteauesque manner, able to identify myriad life-forms luminescent yet undiscovered (except, perhaps, for the Vampire Squid) at depths unsounded, in sea trenches unknown, free, hopefully of maritime wrecks & missiles from any epoch; whose task it is to float lines at once filigreed as plankton, filtered as sunlight.

9. Three Cheers The Militia!

What plays us back - death? That this worlds a stage and we upon it act to revolve the scenery with our yearning: and while the syrinx play, panic rebounds to the dead cry: ET IN ARCADIA EGO from the walled garden and far wilderness.

O desert! O armour-plated sun!

Under a scornful wind the madmen bellow and tribes cower amongst the rubble, caught in the sound bites & grabs of war: Tibet, Chechnya, Kurdistan, Iraq, Burundi, plus the boys in the hills back of Montana.

10. Video Conference

Like a hurried geology that arose out off gla.s.shouses came the skysc.r.a.pers; meanwhile, History cut a swathe through the Natural World and architecture strove to regain it.

Lost to the familiar, Age moved us out of living memory, unlike those tribes, the autochthons who saw the earths infancy still. Let us go, you & I, to re-invent the damage and call it discovery, to uniformly lift up our cry in schadenfreude, meek before Great Cities that bend as fenders to the glare.

11. Crow Country

A field of wheat, a paddock of stubble, the chafed dust-cloud staggers the pick-up at distance, the Rock of Ages rises over Plainville: pop: dead serious. No hermits, only the bowing pumps facing west for oil.

Family photos hang easy next to the semiautomatic in each clapboard.

The Long Horn Saloon boasts the one rule: NO SPITTING. NO STRANGERS.

The hard hats pa.s.sed round every Sunday and the big fists knuckle under prayer & flag real righteous like.

12. Hills Of Home

Greywacke mostly, & fat pale clay where I troubled the hills about Wellington (Brooklyn-west) that you dug through to reach China as a kid out-the-back of our place.

The gorse gully and yellow flowers, black seed-pods bursting in the summer heat. Down you went past broken bottled gla.s.s to the untouched cool clay hoping any moment to pot hole up into a paddy field through the earths centre. Every failed dig stayed a secret from adults, forever.

13. Eco-Tourism

Welcome to Smeltback Inc.

copper, zinc, lead, uranium, iron, O mineral gardens of the Inland Sea!

A company satellite tremulous as a divining-rod maps onto flow charts corporate terrain; prospectus for all the kingdoms of the earth.