Peacock Poem from Australia, 1998

On Visiting the Campus

of the University of Western Australia,

Nedlands, July 1998

In hesitating moments, when the sky

recoils its clouded canopy, when shrieks

of twenty-eights burst out of foliage,

when magisterial peacocks block the road,

then, finally, without despair, the dry

hot winds descend, the rivers bellow, seek

old languages of rock and bush, so rage

returns to ravage, spume to ecstasy, and load

to Leviathan, who creeps across the continent,

inconstant, reflexive and, like me, intent

on occupying  paragraphs of history:

they topple all dissent, reduce the rains

to pleasant glowing mists, and—

                                                            God, my brains

have lost all sense of purpose, proportion, whatever. 

                    Out go niceties and caution.

I spin about, surrounded and overwhelmed

by chattering creatures, and worse by memories,

and long to hide within the theatres of the bards.

                    I am surrounded and en-Chelmed

                    by ignoramuses and fleas,

                    a great Sanhedron of the birds.

I hesitate again, and hear the honking parrots,

green blurring moments between the trees, spots

of timelessness, uncreating paths

I long to follow—geniuses, polymaths...

                                                                      But when

they finally sweep their plumes along the earth,

under the shadows of distinguished towers,

all softness curdles, and silence reeks for hours

with the hot pomposity of academic jargon.

(Whoever imagined such a brainless bargain?)

She scuttles tropes, he bangs away at discourses,

and pairs with bouncing necks dance Derrida’s curse.

Then senile sisters infuriate the flock,

shuffling ancient parchments--Here’s my rock

inscribed with deity’s delights; here’s the text

of something I inscribed to found a sect.--

A bellower from wild Potomack shores

exhales the names of all his antecedents;

another, tumbling like a dryer’s swirl, presents

the words ad infinitum of a banal thought

and seeks approval with a silly grin.  “I brought

the lightning’s power to the darkened slums,”

he cries, “and now I bang a triumph on my drums.”

She hesitates, leans over, asking how

pronounce the mystic languages, the sow

of servitude, the weed of ignorance,

the empty vessel of absurd design:

“The Dovecot and the Craveness,” I say,

reluctant to ask for reasons.

                                                  Just so the day

reclines in peace and silence. But the wise

enchanter lays the scandal at my feet

and writes, “Tomorrow, for the Nobel Prize,

you’ll write a letter, please.  My poems are sweet.”

Then one with mawkish fumes still belching, “Verse

is good, and I’m the one alone in all these tellers

who reads his poems”--and brushes me aside: I nurse

my wounded ego, and wait to lock him in the cellars

of his own crude vanity.

                                                  “Excuse me,” he whispers,

having spilled more wine across the table, “my purse

was left behind. You don’t mind paying, do you?”

pronouncing those last words to sound like “Jew”.

Now if he had the wit to sing for supper

we might have sympathisized, or had he snarled

to signal hatred, honestly, but that sick vapour

turned my soul to vomit.  My fingers, gnarled

and painful, itched to throttle him. “Put salt

on it to ease the stain.” I would assault

and batter, rain mayhem on his groin, let fall

the old chestnut of Phutatorius—

That, at last, would be something glorious!

and run him through, and all of them, with pounds

of ink that run out after Zounds!———————

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