Nothing is whiter,
like clouds with the sun inside them.
Nothing is smoother,
like clouds and the moon beside them.
But they aren’t pure either.
There is lily-green underside them.
This is the start of an ASIO poem.
Borges said living under dictators
made him expert at metaphors.
But lyricism is direct, adores
the physical, the real. When young,
one knew to recognise a worker
for an intelligence agency because
they knew thorough Marxist-Leninism,
either in favour, or in Encounter,
analysing it at length as if it were
a present threat or promise. No one
else cared about it too much, even
Ho Chi Minh. All our revolutions
were agrarian, unorthodox: Nimbin
or Saigon. So being under fire
from new Marxist-Leninists again,
I naturally think: ASIO. However,
I like much post-colonial anger,
although it dates with colonial power.
Nothing is whiter
than post-colonial angers,
like clouds with the sun inside them.
Nothing is smoother,
like clouds and the moon beside them.
The anti-lyricism of the Leninists
and their Amish dislike of fiction
seem more like that of the occupation
of Prague than of Wall Street later.
I laugh: they’re Diego without Frida,
but that assumes the ASIO position
is not as it always was: too solemn.
And what stories do I know
talking to you of ASIO?
There is lily-green underside them.
When I tutored at uni, the lecturer
asked a guest to speak on poetry, a man
I’d not heard of much, but the explanation
was that he directed ASIO. He came
to talk on his verse, which was pure
no-experiment representation. She wanted him,
being journo, on account of his other function.
I wished her luck, let it go. Another
spy was a young man courting a writer
at an early literary festival, so certain
to be ASIO that a dinner party giver
asked him politely, ‘And you work for
ASIO, do you?’ He blushed to murmur,
‘Yes’, no doubt had prepared a lecture
on the need for Marxist-Leninism
in bookish, demure Melbourne. White cyclamen
are like clouds and the moon beside them,
and seem to survive forever. Here
is the last of an ASIO poem.