by Les Murray
but that is the past. I am here.
I look across the clear, receding landscape:
from a distant ridge, a horseman eyes the train.
The train never slackens its speed:
and iron bridge echoes, is gone,
on the far bank, twilit and tall,
the green timber gathers us in.
And we dash through the forest, my face,
reflected, wanders and sways
on the glass of the windowpane, and
I press my nose to my nose …
the loco horn sounds far across the uplands:
a man with no past has all too many futures.
I take out a book, read a phrase
five times – and put the book down.
The window-sash chatters. My mind
trails far in the wake of the train
where, away in the left-behind hills,
through paddock and cattlecamp I
go drifting down valleys towards
the peopled country of sleep …
I wait in the house. It is raining in the forest.
If I move or speak, the house will not be there.
SPRING HAIL
This is for spring and hail, that you may remember:
for a boy long ago, and a pony that could fly.
We had huddled together a long time in the shed
in the scent of vanished corn and wild bush birds,
and then the hammering faltered, and the torn
cobwebs ceased their quivering and hung still
from the nested rafters. We became uneasy
at the silence that grew about us, and came out.
The beaded violence had ceased. Fresh-minted hills
smoked, and the heavens swirled and blew away.
The paddocks were endless again, and all around
leaves lay beneath their trees, and cakes of moss.
Sheep trotted and propped, and shook out ice from their wool.
The hard blue highway that had carried us there
fumed as we crossed it, and the hail I scooped
from underfoot still bore the taste of sky
and hurt my teeth, and crackled as we walked.
This is for spring and hail, that you may remember
a boy long ago, and a pony that could fly.
With the creak and stop of a gate, we started to trespass:
my pony bent his head and drank up grass
while I ate ice, and wandered, and ate ice.
There was a peach tree growing wild by a bank
and under it and round, sweet dented fruit
weeping pale juice amongst hail-shotten leaves,
and this I picked up and ate till I was filled.
I sat on a log then, listening with my skin
to the secret feast of the sun, to the long wet worms
at work in the earth, and, deeper down, the stones
beneath the earth, uneasy that their sleep
should be troubled by dreams of water soaking down,
and I heard with my ears the creek on its bed of mould
moving and passing with a mothering sound.
This is for spring and hail, that you may remember
a boy long ago on a pony that could fly.
My pony came up then and stood by me,
waiting to be gone. The sky was now
spotless from dome to earth, and balanced there
on the cutting-edge of mountains. It was time
to leap to the saddle and go, a thunderbolt whirling
sheep and saplings behind, and the rearing fence
that we took at a bound, and the old, abandoned shed
forgotten behind, and the paddock forgotten behind.
Time to shatter peace and lean into spring
as into a battering wind, and be rapidly gone.
It was time, high time, the highest and only time
to stand in the stirrups and shout out, blind with wind
for the height and clatter of ridges to be topped
and the racing downward after through the lands
of floating green and bridges and flickering trees.
It was time, as never again it was time
to pull the bridle up, so the racketing hooves
fell silent as we ascended from the hill
above the farms, far up to where the hail
formed and hung weightless in the upper air,
charting the birdless winds with silver roads
for us to follow and be utterly gone.
This is for spring and hail, that you may remember
a boy and a pony long ago who could fly.
DRIVING THROUGH SAWMILL TOWNS
1
In the high cool country,
having come from the clouds,
down a tilting road
into a distant valley,
you drive without haste. Your windscreen parts the forest,
swaying and glancing, and jammed midday brilliance
crouches in clearings …
then you come across them,
the sawmill towns, bare hamlets built of boards
with perhaps a store,
perhaps a bridge beyond
and a little sidelong creek alive with pebbles.
2
The mills are roofed with iron, have no walls:
you look straight in as you pass, see lithe men working,
the swerve of a winch,
dim dazzling blades advancing
through a trolley-borne trunk
till it sags apart
in a manifold sprawl of weatherboards and battens.
The men watch you pass:
when you stop your car and ask them for directions,
tall youths look away –
it is the older men who
come out in blue singlets and talk softly to you.
Beside each mill, smoke trickles out of mounds
of ash and sawdust.
3
You glide on through town,
your mudguards damp with cloud.
The houses there wear verandahs out of shyness,
all day in calendared kitchens, women listen
for cars on the road,
lost children in the bush,
a cry from the mill, a footstep –
nothing happens.
The half-heard radio sings
its song of sidewalks.
Sometimes a woman, sweeping her front step,
or a plain young wife at a tankstand fetching water
in a metal bucket will turn round and gaze
at the mountains in wonderment,
looking for a city.
4
Evenings are very quiet. All around
the forest is there.
As night comes down, the houses watch each other:
a light going out in a window here has meaning.
You speed away through the upland,
glare through towns
and are gone in the forest, glowing on far hills.
On summer nights
ground-crickets sing and pause.
In the dark of winter, tin roofs sough with rain,
downpipes chafe in the wind, agog with water.
Men sit after tea
by the stove while their wives talk, rolling a dead match
between their fingers,
thinking of the future.
EVENING ALONE AT BUNYAH
1
My father, widowed, fifty-six years old,
sits washing his feet.
The innocent sly charm
is back in his eye of late years, and tonight
he’s going dancing.
I wouldn’t go tonight, he says to me
by way of apology. You sure you won’t come?
What for? I ask. You know I only dance
on bits of paper. He nods and says, Well, if
any ghosts come calling, don’t let ’em eat my
cake.
I bring him a towel and study his feet afresh:
they make my own feel coarse. They are so small,
so delicate he can scarcely bear to walk
barefoot to his room to find his dancing shoes
and yet all day he works in hobnailed boots
out in the forest, clearing New South Wales.
No ghosts will come, Dad. I know you dote on cake.
I know how some women who bake it dote on you.
It gets them nowhere.
You are married still.
2
Home again from the cities of the world.
Cool night, and the valley relaxes after heat,
the earth contracts, the planks of the old house creak,
making one more adjustment, joist to nail,
nail to roof, roof to the touch of dew.
Smoke stains, rafters, whitewash rubbed off planks …
yet this is one house that Jerry built to last:
when windstorms came, and other houses lost
roofs and verandahs, this gave just enough
and went unscathed, for all the little rain
that sifted through cracks, the lamps puffed out by wind
sucked over the wallplate, and the occasional bat
silly with fear at having misplaced the dark.
When I was a child, my father was ashamed
of this shabby house. It signified for him
hard work and unjust poverty. There would come
a day when he’d tear it down and build afresh.
The day never came. But that’s another poem.
No shame I felt in those days was my own.
It can be enough to read books and camp in a house.
Enough, at fourteen, to watch your father sit
at the breakfast table nursing his twelve-gauge
shotgun, awaiting the doubtful reappearance
of a snake’s head at a crack in the cement
of the skillion fireplace floor.
The blood’s been sluiced
away, and the long wrecked body of the snake
dug out and gone to ash these thirteen years,
but the crack’s still there,
and the scores the buckshot ripped beside the stove.
3
There is a glow in the kitchen window now
that was not there in the old days. They have set
three streetlights up along the Gloucester road
for cows to stray by, and night birds to shun,
for the road itself’s not paved, and there’s no town
in the valley yet at all.
It is hoped there will be.
Today, out walking, I considered stones.
It used to be said that I must know each one
on the road by its first name, I was such a dawdler,
such a head-down starer.
I picked up
a chunk of milk-seamed quartz, thumbed off the clay,
let the dry light pervade it and collect,
eliciting shifting gleams, revealing how
the specific strength of a stone fits utterly
into its form and yet reflects the grain
and tendency of the mother-lode, the mass
of a vanished rock-sill tipping one small stone
slightly askew as it weighs upon your palm,
and then I threw it back towards the sun
to thump down on a knoll
where it may move a foot in a thousand years.
Today, having come back, summer was all mirror
tormenting me. I fled down cattle tracks
chest-deep in the earth, and pushed in under twigs
to sit by cool water speeding over rims
of blackened basalt, the tall light reaching me.
Since those moth-grimed streetlamps came,
my dark is threatened.
4
I stand, and turn, and wander through the house,
avoiding those floorboards that I know would creak,
to the other verandah. Here is where I slept,
and here is where, one staring day, I felt
a presence at my back, and whirled in fright
to face my father’s suit, hung out to air.
This country is my mind. I lift my face
and count my hills, and linger over one:
Deer’s, steep, bare-topped, where eagles nest below
the summit in scrub oaks, and where I take
my city friends to tempt them with my past.
Across the creek and the paddocks of the moon
four perfect firs stand dark beside a field
lost long ago, which holds a map of rooms.
This was the plot from which we transplants sprang.
The trees grew straight. We burgeoned and spread far.
I think of doors and rooms beneath the ground,
deep rabbit rooms, thin candlelight of days …
and, turning quickly, walk back through the house.
5
Night, and I watch the moonrise through the door.
Sitting alone’s a habit of mind with me …
for which I’ll pay in full. That has begun.
But meanwhile I will sit and watch the moon.
My father will be there now, at a hall
in the dark of the country, shining at the waltz,
spry and stately, twirling at formal speeds
on a roaring waxed-plank floor.
The petrol lamps
sizzle and glare now the clapping has died down.
They announce some modern dance. He steps outside
to where cigarettes glow sparsely in the dark,
joins some old friends and yarns about his son.
Beneath this moon, an ancient radiance comes
back from far hillsides where the tall pale trunks
of ringbarked trees haphazardly define
the edge of dark country I could not afford
to walk in at night alone
lest I should hear
the barking of dogs from a clearing where no house
has ever stood, and, walking down a road
in the wilderness, meet a man who waited there
beside a creek to tell me what I sought.
Father, come home soon.
Come home alive.
THE PRINCES’ LAND
FOR VALERIE, ON HER BIRTHDAY
Leaves from the ancient forest gleam
in the meadow brook, and dip, and pass.
Six maidens dance on the level green,
a seventh toys with an hourglass,
letting fine hours sink away,
turning to sift them back again.
An idle prince, with a cembalo,
sings to the golden afternoon.
Two silver knights, met in a wood,
tilt at each other, clash and bow.
Upon a field semé of birds
Tom Bread-and-Cheese sleeps by his plough.
But now a deadly stillness comes
upon the brook, upon the green,
upon the seven dancing maids,
the dented knights are dulled to stone.
The hours in the hourglass
are stilled to fine fear, and the wood
to empty burning. Tom the hind
walks in his sleep in pools of blood.
The page we’ve reached is grey with pain.
Some will not hear, some run away,
some go to write books of their own,
some few, as the tale grows cruel, sing Hey
but we who have no other book
spell out the gloomy, blazing text,
page by slow page, wild year by year,
our hope refined to what comes next,
and yet attentive to each child
who says he’s looked ahead and seen
how the tale will go, or spied
a silver page two pages on,
for, as the th
emes knit and unfold,
somewhere far on, where all is changed,
beyond all twists of grief and fear,
we look to glimpse that land again:
the brook descends in music through
the meadows of that figured land,
nine maidens from the ageless wood
move in their circles, hand in hand.
Two noble figures, counterchanged,
fence with swift passion, pause and bow.
All in a field impaled with sun
the Prince of Cheese snores by his plough.
Watching bright hours file away,
turning to sift them back again,
the Prince of Bread, with a cembalo
hums to the golden afternoon.
ILL MUSIC
My cousin loved the violin
and played it gracefully in tune
except when, touching certain chords,
he fell down, shrieked and bit at boards
till blood and froth stood on his chin.
Some talked of Providence, or sin,
or feared the rot had now got in
to a family tree once pruned with swords –
but these are words.
And Jim said little when his kin
found a place to place him in,
nor did he ever tell his guards
how notes may run, and catch, and veer towards
that pitch where shrieks and suns begin –
for these are words.
TROOP TRAIN RETURNING
Beyond the Divide
the days become immense,
beyond our war
in the level lands of wheat,
the things that we defended are still here,
the willow-trees pruned neatly cattle-high,
the summer roads where far-back bullock drays
foundered in earth and mouldered into yarns.
From a ringbarked tree, as we go cheering by
a tower and a whirlwind of white birds,
as we speed by
with a whistle for the plains.
On kitbags in the aisle, old terrors doze,
clumsy as rifles in a peacetime train.
Stopped at a siding
under miles of sun,
I watched a friend I mightn’t see again
shyly shake hands, becoming a civilian,
and an old Ford truck
receding to the sky.
I walk about. The silo, tall as Time,
casts on bright straws its coldly southward shade.
All things are spaced out here
each in its value.
The pepper-trees beside the crossroads pub
are dim with peace,
pumpkins are stones
in fields so loosely green.
In a little while, I’ll be afraid to look
out for my house and the people that I love,
