Stephen OLIVER

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from ANTIPHONAL

Herman the German


Nationalism is a map of ancient migratory routes
and circuitry of the Goth's tribal brain.

A dream that is little more than watermark,
sound of a boat's prow hitting gravel.

A superman with his skiagraphic vision sighting
the mile high future—an eagle circling at its height.

As the sun sets down its pyre—
the colour of copper is almost.

The moon throws down its pile of bones.

AD 9;

metal with flesh felled flesh, skittled bone
through the Teutoburgen Wald, the primeaval

forests of the Rhine—three Roman legions
and six auxiliary regiments under Varus's command

march from summer quarters on the River Weser
to winter out on the Rhine—into the tribal heartland

in the thickening forests thinned to single file,

ambushed by Cheruscan spearman under
Arminius, Prince of the Cherusci,
caught between forest and swamp—

20,000 Romans died or more, tribunes,
centurions, slaughtered on wooden
altars to the tree gods, others hacked and nailed

to trees as trophies.

Only a remnant including
Varus escaped the three day massacre to a

Roman camp on the Rhine where Varus,
shamed, fell upon his sword.

Great forests of the Rhine!

the Hercynian reaching across the Danube to
the Elbe, and from west-to-east a man might travel

for sixty days and not see its edge.

Birth of the German warrior spirit—
history's canopy casting its blackening shadow

on a phalanx of death's heads and insignia,

from a spear cast by Arminius,
'father of the Nation'

who homaged his deity, Tuisto, he who issued
from the soil, became Nazi motto:
'Blut und Boden'—blood and soil.

What memories of the Roman dead in
the Teutoberg Forest, 'bones heaped up like little
backward curving waves'

where they had stood their ground, or scattered,
caught and cut down where they had fled.

A carnage found six years later by Germanicus
who with controlled rage

ventured deep into Wesphalia, scouted
(a soldier in wolf's clothing)
the Teutoburgen Wald
laid causeways over swamps,

destroyed sacred groves, sought them in trees
by felling them, and so in a clearing
made, felled in turn the Cherusci

though Arminus had by his deeds long since
escaped into the future—pure man of the soil.

Echoed in Knut Hamsun: special
bedtime reading for Adolf.

The warrior image duly distorted,
regimented in the death's head and insignia

through the deforested wastelands of Europe.





Discus Thrower


Sky's caravanserai
world's cosmologies.

Smallness of the mind reaching to big things
(not quite) we stand on tip-toe

or slouch toward other quadrants of doom—

that old home of thunder, passed round from
mouth to gun barrel.

Deck of the world sways heavily
under the mind's bombardment—a constant

against unconstants.

That bark, Van Gogh yellow you painted, sailing
toward the full moon's open portal

on a Prussian blue sky—

'in celebration of a pregnancy' you told me.

Who would allow for such lyric mysticism
this or any other day?

The small, factory sound that is
suburban rail follows its crescent round,

out beyond terra cotta roofs.
A plane lowering to Botany bay /
Kingsford airport

makes the sound of time reversing
metal plate / sliding / metal plate
—pitched at the scream's decibel.

The hour winds its rope off the clockface bollard.

Arc is an horizonal sweep, shoulder signals to
the arm's swing in long contours,
the muscling hills his coastline.

A discus describes the sky's dome, falls seaward.




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