by Les Murray
The Myriads
A Study of the Nude
Iguassu
Pietà Once Attributed to Cosme Tura
The Knockdown Question
The Insiders
The Onset
The Dog’s Bad Name
Pop Music
The Body in Physics
Fruit Bat Colony by Day
Cool History
The Machine-Gunning of Charm
The Climax of Factory Farming
Massacre’s All-Party Fuel
Fusee
D.C.
Outside of the Iron Mask
The Poisons of Right and Left
The Top Alcohol Contender
Apsley Falls
To One Outside the Culture
Portrait of a Felspar-Coloured Cat
Mars at Perigee
More Pictographs
Reflection in a Military Cap Badge
Explaining a Cheese
National Dress
A Shrine House
At University
The Young Fox
Experience
The Barcaldine Suite
The Meaning of Existence
The Aboriginal Cricketer
The Gymnast Valeria Vatkina
The Aztec Revival
Brief, That Place in the Year
The Averted
At the Widening of a War
The Muddy Trench
from BIPLANE HOUSES, 2006
The Hanging Gardens
Leaf Brim
Airscapes
The Statistics of Good
Twelve Poems
Too Often Round the Galleries
Travelling the British Roads
The Test
The Kitchen Grammars
Winter Winds
The Tune On Your Mind
A Dialect History of Australia
For an Eightieth Birthday
On the Central Coast Line
Melbourne Pavement Coffee
Photographing Aspiration
Black Belt in Marital Arts
The Welter
A Leviation of Land
Through the Lattice Door
On the North Coast Line
The Nostril Songs
For a Convert in Boston
The Newcastle Rounds
The House Left in English
Yregami
Upright Clear Across
Ghost Story
The Shining Slopes and Planes
The Succession
A Stampede of the Sacrifice
The Offshore Island
As Night-Dwelling Winter Approaches
The Hoaxist
Barker Unchained
Lifestyle
Death from Exposure
Me and Je Reviens
Pressure
Church
Pastoral Sketches
The Blueprint
Blueprint II
Norfolk Island
Birthplace
The Sick-Bags
Lateral Dimensions
Bright Lights on Earth
Panic Attack
Recognising the Derision as Fear
Gentrifical Force
The Physical Diaspora of William Wallace
Sunday on a Country River
Ripe in the Arbours of the Nose
Jet Propulsion Stereo
Industrial Relations
from TALLER WHEN PRONE, 2010
from a Tourist Journal
Bluelookout Mountain
The Sharman Drum
The Toppled Head
Definitions
The Conversations
The Double Diamond
As Country Was Slow
The Death of Isaac Nathan, 1864
The Filo Soles
Midi
Observing the Mute Cat
Buttress on a High Cutting
Ovoids
Nursing Home
Fame
Cattle-hoof Hardpan
Phone Canvass
King Lear Had Alzheimer’s
Science Fiction
Atlantic Pavements
Refusing Saul’s Armour
Our Dip in the Rift Valley
Brown Suits
Southern Hemisphere Garden
The Suspect Corpse
Eucalypts in Exile
Cherries from Young
Lunar Eclipse
Croc
High-Speed Bird
The Cowladder Stanzas
The Farm Terraces
Visiting Geneva
The Bronze Bull
Port Jackson Greaseproof Rose
The Springfields
Rugby Wheels
A Frequent Flyer Proposes A Name
Hesiod On Bushfire
The Blame
Singing Tour in Vietnam
Midwinter Kangaroo Nests
The Mirrorball
Infinite Anthology
Wrecked Birds
At the Opera
The Cartoonist
Manuscript Roundel
Natal Grass
The Fallen Golfer
The Man in the White Bay Hotel
Winding Up at the Bootmaker’s
from WAITING FOR THE PAST, 2015
The Black Beaches
Inspecting the Rivermouth
The Canonisation
High Rise
Nuclear Family Bees
When Two Percent Were Students
I Wrote a Little Haiku
Dynamic Rest
West Coast Township
Money and the Flying Horses
Sun Taiko
Persistence of the Reformation
Child Logic
Floodtime Night Shelter
Powder of Light
The Backroad Collections
Tap Dogs Music
English as a Second Language
High Speed Trap Space
Diabetica
The Privacy of Typewriters
All of Half Way
Big Rabbit at the Verandah
Being Spared the Inquests
Time Twins
The Plaster Eater
The Glory and Decline of Bread
Eating from the Dictionary
O.K. Primavera Lips
Order of Perception: West Kimberley
The Mussel Bowl
Growth
A Denizen
Radiant Pleats, Mulgoa
Bird Signatures
Last World Before the Stars
1960 Brought the Electric
Vertigo
Holland’s Nadir
Dog Skills
Raising an Only Child
Clan-Sized Night Chanting
Bread Again
Bench Seats
Grooming With Nail Clippers
The Thirties
Bollywood Video
Savoury
Up to the Greek Club
Beasts of the City
Whale Sounding
The Genghis Firmament
The Care
High Foliage
Jesus Was a Healer
The Flute
The Murders of Women
Under the Lube Oil
Winter Garden
Goths in Leipzig
Maryanne Bugg
INDEX OF FIRST LINES
INDEX OF TITLES
THE BURNING TRUCK
FOR MRS MARGARET WELTON
It began at dawn with fighter planes:
they came in off the sea and didn’t rise,
they leaped the sandbar one and one and one
coming so fast the crockery they shook down
off my kitchen shelves was spinning in the air
when they were gone.
They came in off the sea and drew a wave
of lagging cannon-shells across our roofs.
Windows spat glass, a truck took sudden fire,
out leaped the driver, but the truck ran on,
growing enormous, shambling by our street-doors,
coming and coming …
By every right in town, by every average
we knew of in the world, it had to stop,
fetch up against a building, fall to rubble
from pure force of burning, for its whole
body and substance were consumed with heat
but it would not stop.
And all of us who knew our place and prayers
clutched our verandah-rails and window-sills,
begging that truck between our teeth to halt,
keep going, vanish, strike … but set us free.
And then we saw the wild boys of the street
go running after it.
And as they followed, cheering, on it crept,
windshield melting now, canopy-frame a cage
torn by gorillas of flame, and it kept on
over the tramlines, past the church, on past
the last lit windows, and then out of the world
with its disciples.
TABLEAU IN JANUARY
January, noon. The idle length of a street …
There is more light than world, and what few outlines
Persist forget their meaning in the heat.
The metal sea’s too bright to walk upon.
Thoughts pass, and figment shops, and random glimmers
From crystals in the concrete, and oiled swimmers.
The sky does not exist when it’s outshone.
On the dazed white sand, umbrellas stiffly lean
To pose and impose their shade upon the shifting
Languor of bodies and glare, and all the sifting
Motes of dim music mingled with the scene
Fade into summer, January, drifting …
Things drift apart, significances fade.
The returning street, once blue, is taut with azure
Tension between persistence and erasure.
In the cool of doorways, shirts drink lemonade.
January, noon. The unreal, idle street.
There is more light than world. The poet, smiling,
Takes his soft lines and bends them till they meet.
THE TRAINEE, 1914
Ah, I was as soiled as money, old as rag,
I was building a humpy beside a gully of woes,
Till the bump of your drum, the fit of your turned-up hat
Drew me to eat your stew, salute your flag
And carry your rifle far away to your wars:
Is war very big? As big as New South Wales?
THE WIDOWER IN THE COUNTRY
I’ll get up soon, and leave my bed unmade.
I’ll go outside and split off kindling wood
from the yellow-box log that lies beside the gate,
and the sun will be high, for I get up late now.
I’ll drive my axe in the log and come back in
with my armful of wood, and pause to look across
the Christmas paddocks aching in the heat,
the windless trees, the nettles in the yard …
and then I’ll go in, boil water and make tea.
This afternoon, I’ll stand out on the hill
and watch my house away below, and how
the roof reflects the sun and makes my eyes
water and close on bright webbed visions smeared
on the dark of my thoughts to dance and fade away.
Then the sun will move on, and I will simply watch,
or work, or sleep. And evening will come on.
Getting near dark, I’ll go home, light the lamp
and eat my corned-beef supper, sitting there
at the head of the table. Then I’ll go to bed.
Last night I thought I dreamed – but when I woke
the screaming was only a possum ski-ing down
the iron roof on little moonlit claws.
NOONDAY AXEMAN
Axe-fall, echo and silence. Noonday silence.
Two miles from here, it is the twentieth century:
cars on the bitumen, powerlines vaulting the farms.
Here, with my axe, I am chopping into the stillness.
Axe-fall, echo and silence. I pause, roll tobacco,
twist a cigarette, lick it. All is still.
I lean on my axe. A cloud of fragrant leaves
hangs over me moveless, pierced everywhere by sky.
Here, I remember all of a hundred years:
candleflame, still night, frost and cattle bells,
the draywheels’ silence final in our ears,
and the first red cattle spreading through the hills
and my great-great-grandfather here with his first sons,
who would grow old, still speaking with his Scots accent,
having never seen those highlands that they sang of.
A hundred years. I stand and smoke in the silence.
A hundred years of clearing, splitting, sawing,
a hundred years of timbermen, ringbarkers, fencers
and women in kitchens, stoking loud iron stoves
year in, year out, and singing old songs to their children
have made this silence human and familiar
no farther than where the farms rise into foothills,
and, in that time, how many have sought their graves
or fled to the cities, maddened by this stillness?
Things are so wordless. These two opposing scarves
I have cut in my red-gum squeeze out jewels of sap
and stare. And soon, with a few more axe-strokes,
the tree will grow troubled, tremble, shift its crown
and, leaning slowly, gather speed and colossally
crash down and lie between the standing trunks.
And then, I know, of the knowledge that led my forebears
to drink and black rage and wordlessness, there will be silence.
After the tree falls, there will reign the same silence
as stuns and spurs us, enraptures and defeats us,
as seems to some a challenge, and seems to others
to be waiting here for something beyond imagining.
Axe-fall, echo and silence. Unhuman silence.
A stone cracks in the heat. Through the still twigs, radiance
stings at my eyes. I rub a damp brow with a handkerchief
and chop on into the stillness. Axe-fall and echo.
The great mast murmurs now. The scarves in its trunk
crackle and squeak now, crack and increase as the hushing
weight of high branches heels outward, and commences
tearing and falling, and the collapse is tremendous.
Twigs fly, leaves puff and subside. The severed trunk
slips off its stump and drops along its shadow.
And then there is no more. The stillness is there
as ever. And I fall to lopping branches.
Axe-fall, echo and silence. It will be centuries
before many men are truly at home in this country,
and yet, there have always been some, in each generation,
there have always been some who could live in the presence of silence.
And some, I have known them, men with gentle broad hands,
who would die if removed from these unpeopled places,
some again I have seen, bemused and shy in the cities
you have built against silence, dumbly trudging through noise
past the railway stations, looking up through the traffic
at the smoky halls, dreaming of journeys, of stepping
down from the train at some upland stop to recover
the crush of dry grass underfoot, the silence of trees.
Axe-fall, echo and silence. Dreaming silence.
Though I myself run to the cities, I will forever
be coming back here to walk, knee-deep in ferns,
up and away from this metropolitan century,
to remember my anc
estors, axemen, dairymen, horse-breakers,
now coffined in silence, down with their beards and dreams,
who, unwilling or rapt, despairing or very patient,
made what amounts to a human breach in the silence,
made of their lives the rough foundation of legends –
men must have legends, else they will die of strangeness –
then died in their turn, each, after his own fashion,
resigned or agonized, from silence into great silence.
Axe-fall, echo and axe-fall. Noonday silence.
Though I go to the cities, turning my back on these hills,
for the talk and dazzle of cities, for the sake of belonging
for months and years at a time to the twentieth century,
the city will never quite hold me. I will be always
coming back here on the up-train, peering, leaning
out of the window to see, on far-off ridges,
the sky between the trees, and over the racket
of the rails to hear the echo and the silence.
I shoulder my axe and set off home through the stillness.
THE AWAY-BOUND TRAIN
FOR CON KIRILOFF
I stand in a house of trees, and it is evening:
at the foot of the stairs, a creek runs grey with sand.
A rocking, unending dim sound,
a racket as if of a train,
wears through my sleep, and I wake
to find it late afternoon
at which I sit up, rub my eyes –
beneath us, the carriage-wheels moan
on their winter-wet, wind-polished rails,
but the train hurries on, hurries on.
The loco horn beams out its admonition
at a weatherboard village standing on the fields.
The near hills rise steeply and fall,
the hills farther off settle down:
I light up a cigarette, wipe
my breath from the cold window-pane.
The upland farms are all bare,
except where dark, storm-matted fern
has found its way down from the heights,
or landslides have brought down raw stone
for, outside, it’s silent July,
when wet rocks stare from the hills
and thistles grow, and the rain
walks with the wind through the fields –
and this is my country, passing by me forever:
beyond these hills and paddocks lies the world.
Outside, it is timeless July,
when horses’ hoofs puncture the chill
green ground, mud dogging their steps,
and summer’s plough sleeps in the barn,
when rabbits camp up in the mouths
of flooded burrows, and dogs
under creekbanks wince at the thump
of a gun fired close to the earth.
The cold time, the season of clouds
beyond the end of the year,
when boxwood chunks glare in the stove –
