Truck

The Presidential Dreams

The presidential dreams are mixed.

Some nights it is a landscape only,

mountain scree and icy passes,

poppy fields in bloom.

More often it’s his antecedents,

the golden Macedonian

who left a name in Kandahar,

won some battles thereabouts

and died in seven years elsewhere,

his satraps murdered later.

All night, and restless in his sheets,

the president in Washington

rehearses all that shove-and-push

the warlords and the village big-men,

the parricidal khans.

He’s seen, too, Lady Butler’s painting

of Elphinstone’s Retreat,

one man left of 16,000,

his hair stark white and straight on end;

then the Russians, in their turn,

their private Vietnam,

a steady, ten-year bleed

with, afterwards, their man castrated,

drying on a post.

At times the dreams improve a little:

asphalt roads and cheerful plumbing,

happy shrieks of girls at recess

running in a yard;

an honest clerk or two in Kabul

waving back a note

though images like these will soon

slip back to something else:

a government of sons-and-uncles

winnowing supplies;

transports at the airport

lifting off with cash;

warlords in the tent for now

but looking for their chance,

young girls sold at menstruation;

an army never fully trained,

whose loyalties may prove complex,

whose smiles may prove sincere.

‘Friendly fire’ is not good either;

cowboys in a gunship —

or ‘genuine’ mistakes.

The Taliban, of course, are worse:

the memories of firing squads

circling the squares,

acid splashed in schoolgirls’ faces,

an eight-year-old who’s hanged for ‘spying’;

then, finally, as dawn arrives,

the caskets from C-17s

sliding down the ramps,

the fallen in their standard shades,

Old Glory wrapped around them,

the ones who wished to climb a little

but only got so far.

Sometimes, too, the scene is larger,

two countries with a caliph and

an A-bomb in his vest.

And so each morning in the shower

the presidential dreams

dissolve into the day ahead

but do not wash away.

                                                                  Geoff Page

                                                                 

Geoff Page is a Canberra-based poet who has published eighteen collections of poetry as well as two novels, four verse novels and several other works including anthologies, translations and a biography of the jazz musician, Bernie McGann. He has also read his work and talked on Australian poetry throughout Europe as well as in India, Singapore, China, Korea, the United States and New Zealand.

Among his more recent works are: Agnostic Skies (Five Islands Press 2006); Lawrie & Shirley:The Final Cadenza (Pandanus Books 2007); 60 Classic Australian Poems (UNSW Press 2009); Coda for Shirley (Interactive Press 2011); A Sudden Sentence in the Air: Jazz Poems (Extempore 2011) as well as the CD Coffee with Miles (River Road Press 2009)