Robert Gray Australië

 

 

Flames and Dangling Wire

 

 

On a highway over the marshland.

Off to one side, the smoke of different fires in a row,

like ringers spread and dragged to smudge.

It is the always-burning dump.

 

Behind us, the city

Driven like stakes into the earth.

A waterbird lifts above this swamp

as a turtle moves on the Galapagos shore.

 

We turn off down a gravel road, approaching the dump. All the air wobbles

in some cheap mirror.

There is a fog over the hot sun.

 

Now the distant buildings are stencilled in the smoke.

And we come to a landscape of tin cans,

of cars like skulls,

that is rolling in its sand dune shapes.

 

Amongst these vast grey plastic sheets of heat,

shadowy figures

who seem engaged in identifying the dead -

they are the attendants, in overalls and goggles.

 

forking over rubbish on the dampened fires.

A sour smoke

is hauled out everywhere,

thin, like rope. And there are others moving - scavengers.

 

 As in hell the devils

 might poke about through our souls, after scraps

 of appetite

 with which to stimulate themselves,

 

so these figures

seem to be wandering despondently with an eternity

where they could find

some peculiar sensation.

 

Wet gee out and move about also.

The smell is huge,

blasting the mouth dry:

the tons of rotten newspaper, and great cuds of cloth....

 

And standing where I see the mirage of the city

I realize I am in the future.

This is how it shall be after men have gone.

It will be made of things that worked.

 

A labourer hoists an unidentifiable mulch

on his fork, throws it in the flame:

something flaps

like the rag held up in 'The Raft of the Medusa'.

 

We approach another, through the smoke,

and for a moment he seems that demon with the long barge pole.

It is a man, wiping his eyes.

Someone who worked here would have to weep,

 

 

and so we speak. The rims beneath his eyes are wet

as an oyster, and red.

Knowing all that he does about us.

how can he avoid a hatred of men?

 

Going on, I notice an old radio, that spills

its dangling wire-

and I realize that somewhere the voices it received

are still travelling,

 

skidding away, riddled, around the arc of the universe;

and with them, the horse-laughs, and the Chopin

which was the sound of the curtains lifting,

one time, to a coast of light.