Ports

Ports

Ports

I

I want you to imagine, in your late capitalist’s mind’s eye,
a stagnant fly-blown lake under an African sun,
the smell of the sea just beyond (this at least should come easy
being the universal saltwater of all your childhoods).
Armies of ants on parade in the poor weeds and grey sludge
of the ages, dismantling the scene in their own time-lapse movie,
skeletal cats picking over spoil, boneyard mongrels
marking their range by the water’s edge before moving on.
I want you to imagine all this, because once I was Carthage
and still am in name, though like some poisoned inland sea
my horizons have shrunk to a port that handles zero tonnage,
an import and export that evens the scales up at nil,
not counting the old rope and plastic bottles that come knocking
with the tides, not counting the rusted tins that drift in,
not counting the ants shifting clay forms and Carrera marble
from my ruins, or the guide who conducts his own private dig
for unscrupulous tourists who think nothing of removing
a coin from its context (if money ever has such set contexts),
of taking a Roman penny with an obverse of Augustus
out of the country, to reach the cold northern latitudes
in the holds of Lufthansa or Aeroflot, in a fraction
of the time it once took under oar and Ursa Major.
I was Carthage, but nothing much comes or goes in this afterwards;
all that’s left of a thousand years of dockyards and shipsheds
are a few shapes the soft earth has found indigestible,
for the tourist to squint at, consider, weigh up, reconstruct
imaginatively, as I am asking you, listener.
From this silted salt lake I once pulled the strings of the known world.
Lovers looked out from my sea walls into powerful distance
that bound them knowing that I was a true centre.
They pulled tight their merchant purses. They drank from clay pitchers –
under glass now in nearby museums. A museum will go some way
to help in your excavations, but what stories lead on from
the razors and combs and amphora and ostrich egg masks
are the details of millions who passed through, then into the ground.
Standing over a scale model in its sea of flat glass
acts out a dominion of your time over mine, looking down on
my circular dockyard apotheosis; looking down
as from a great height, in a way I can never have known.
A map might be easier in helping you build on my wasteland:
my trade routes once lit up the coastlines in thousands of oil lamps,
a Phoenician outline of Africa in the antique night,
spreading westward and hugging the shore, a luminous tracing
that brought in and foundered sea creatures, signalling for their mates.
I can still taste the distant metals like blood in my harbour mouth,
the tin and the iron and the copper which don’t come here now
but leech down the well-furrowed sea lanes, my phantom nerve endings.
Carthaginian and Roman and Vandal are blinks in my brine eye,
In each of their eternities: to me they rise and fall
as sea swell. Credit me, listener, with such a long memory,
as more than the sum of my parts, more than archaeology
and soft sump, more than ground fought over. Aeneas stood here once
with a mind to call it quits and cut loose, so the story goes,
my port in his storm to his girl in every port.
The jets tilt and bank heading north for their carrier hubs
in Frankfurt and Moscow, without so much as a second thought
for me in my modern darkness, their starboard wing lights
blinking in an element I knew nothing about.
Some things have endured: the peaks of Cap Bon across the bay
form a backdrop to nothing much doing these days; the stars rise
to guide nobody from my mouth and on course for the Pillars
of Hercules – but these things give me a sense of myself,
as the winds do, strong at the turns in the year, which remind me
of cargoes and freights in their seasons, gross tonnes that passed through
as sand through an hour glass, until history,
like the idea of magnetic north so long in the discovering,
moved slowly away from here, like a great ship embarking
out onto the future’s broad main, and this is the fate
of all ports, even yours, listener. Listen to me. I was Carthage.

II

They left by the back door, caught the first train
for Euston, they watched the city pull away
and open country take its place; they left
by bus and charabanc, by motorway
that began anonymously then rose on pillars
to meet my boundary; they left in droves
or dribs and drabs, and if they hadn’t shown
as planned, their so-called friends went on without them;
they left by any means, stowing away
in First Class toilets or under tarpaulin
on big artics; they left without paying the bill
and did a runner for the rest of their lives;
they left like silent cinema, in twos
by moonlit rail, see-sawing up and down;
they left like Beatlemania and pulled their hair;
they left in such a hurry kettles stood warm
on stoves: they left behind such textbook clues;
they left on jet planes and they didn’t know
when they’d be back again, like in the song;
they left like in the Book of Exodus
or were just going outside, and may be some time;
they left me looking like the Marie Celeste;
they left by side entrance, they left scraping
the manhole covers back above their heads
or pulling up a rope of sheets; they left
without so much as a goodbye or a kiss my arse;
they left on eggshells, closed doors quietly
behind them, or they threw the kinds of parties
where washbasins get ripped off walls; they left
behind important legacies, their names,
or nothing but a nasty smell; they left
in flood of tears or couldn’t wait to see
the back of me; they left the day the word
‘city’ became standard instead of ‘port’;
they left in the clothes they were standing up in;
they left, but it was alright, they’d be back;
they left knowing there was no going back
even though ‘the door is always open’; they left
because the engine of the world was running
outside; they left to serve apprenticeships
or marry badly; they left to serve some time
and, liking what they saw, they left again;
they left, and mighty wind blew in their wakes,
or a litter devil span along a street;
they left, and it was called a haemorrhage
by a spokesman for the Office of National Statistics;
they left, and what am I, some kind of mug
who’s tattooed with a giant exit sign?;
they left and spat, or left so effortlessly
they didn’t know they were leaving, and wouldn’t see
the likes of me again; they left early
and said: ‘we’re leaving early’; they left to feed
the brain drain and the casual labour market;
they left, and didn’t have a decent word
to say about me in their new worlds
with big skies and four clearly defined seasons;
they left because Australia needed them
and they were overqualified; they left
because they might as well, just for the hell of it,
because everybody else was doing it;
they left without a hope, full of high hopes;
they left and then regretted it with anyone
they met, they left and sung about leaving
in bars across the world; they left big buildings
looking stupid in the gorgeous light
they’d left; they left thousands of square feet
of empty warehouse space for rats and mice
to occupy in the dark years; they left
under a cloud; they left and earned the keys
to the city of were given pauper’s funerals;
they left and the whole street came out, or no-one
cared; they left under their own steam,
and I’ll tell you this for nothing: they left, but none
of them who did the leaving left by sea.

III

Rotterdam calling. City of light.
North Sea traffic. Candlepower.
No time to reflect. I work all night.
Straight to the point. Container port.
Almighty hub. Words fail me, so
I speak in code: the radar blip
And flag flown do the biz. Can’t stop.
There’s barges in and barges out
around the clock. Containers are
your building blocks, my skyline, our
Boxopolis that tessellates
and hardly makes the same shape twice.
City of light. What’s in the box?
I knew you’d ask. Just look around
the room you’re in, listening to this:
half of it’s been through Rotterdam.
Shirt on your back, shoes on your feet,
dinner in your oven, oven in your kitchen,
the plugs in your ear, the air freshener
barnacled to your dash, the petrol
in your tank, the watch you wind
or lift to your eyes’ horizon line,
the lead in your pencil, the sizzle in your sausage,
and, of course, this radio you’ve tuned in.
At some point back along the line
I’ve said hello and goodbye to them all
and will see them again, in another form.
I contain the dreaming western world
Remaking and remodelling itself.
Look at the building blocks themselves:
a sea container falls into place
with a hollow sound like nothing else,
and they rise in abstract avenues
eight deep in places, labyrinthine
enough to require A-Z.
strange greens and reds: the marine palette
you’ll find is the exact opposite
of domestic space, but fashion sense
is far from my mind. These are the colours
of banknotes, of making yourself understood.
Words give no clues to what’s inside:
Genstar, UBC, Seaco,
And Dream Box (which is a favourite of mine)
given how the leaden light of day
never inundates, so the light of the mind
can be given play, though idle souls
in fluorescent jerkins and overalls
are rare in docks busy as a hive
in spring. The words will give no clues
though some shipments advertise themselves
to the nose: wandering a terminal
can be like walking through a Javanese wood
turned geometric under a Dutch sky;
the pepper notes float out of place
the ghost of somewhere far away.
This is as nostalgic as it gets.
(OK. I will allow one display
case of knots in the Maritime Hotel.)
We have no old rope. We have no bananas.
We have no classical tropes. Or if
we do, they are all safely boxed up,
all the same to the mighty grabbing device,
to the quarter kilometre barge.
City of light. On the captain’s face
sat before the radar binnacle,
a greenish glow. On the civic bridge
a blade of halogen. On the trucks
festooned in it that come and go.
And will I dim? Experts predict
only a general brightening,
and so the decadent poets wait
off in the future, or watch the boats
for now, while it’s all still happening,
and wonder why they love their names,
and build things in their dark bow wakes
that go like this: Marlene Green,
Atlantic Trader, Flinterstar,
Antilles Janet, Heading Home,
Iver Expert, Galaxy,
Innuendo, Arklow Sally,
Sayonara, C’est la vie . . .

IV

Ports rise and fall. The stars climb from the eastern sea.
The balance sheets all even out. The sand wipes clean.
Nobody comes here now except to dig deep down.
The nights are still and dark. There is no sound
Beyond the constant waves’ profit and loss sheets.
I was Carthage, tall and handsome as any city,
but the world has passed me by. The maps have been redrawn
and you can see how it might have been for Dido,
left standing while her life shipped out, moved on for home;
which sailors know lies off ahead and elsewhere.
The earth seems scorching to their feet. This will last forever,
Or as long as there are seas and men to sail them.
But I was Carthage, tall and handsome. Remember my name.