by Les Murray
as that evening’s light
permitted us to see.
SENRYU
Just two hours after
Eternal Life pills came out
someone took thirty.
THE BALLAD TRAP
In the hanging gorges
the daring compact wears thin,
picking meat from small skeletons,
counting damp notes in a tin,
the rifle birds ringing at noon
in the steep woods,
hard-riding boys dazed at the brink
of their attitudes,
the youngest wheedling for songs,
his back to the night,
dark mountains the very English
for souring delight:
Remember the Escort? Remember
lamps long ago
and manhood filched from the horse police
and a name from Cobb and Co.
Their metre hobbled, the horses
hump their dark life,
longing for marriage, the tall man
sharpens his knife –
Yes, let us sing! cries the Captain
while we have breath.
Better, God knows, than this thinking.
The ballad ends with their death.
HAYFORK POINT
Dazzling blue eyes
of winter stare from the box-trees
the shadows of barns are thin with frosted straw.
All over the country
the dented light of milk cans.
Cold proteins cling
to the wet-lipped cane-knife blocking
swedes by the sty for a tumult of fat squealers.
For the mouths of following cattle, boys on tractors
bayonet green stacks and hoy them down the sky
green spinning in air.
The bull, looking up,
is drenched in flying meadow.
Pinched hours pass
and farmers lug dull cans
but magpies, dismissing weight, lift over stones now
alighting on wires ever farther off
to balance at behests
of song, and spring
for something has turned
and from the heavens, gently
invisibly, gently
grass goes on falling.
THE FIRE AUTUMN
The walls of the country this year, the forest escarpments,
the seacoast stump-mountains are fired with amber and buff
like autumn in the Jura, October legends of fall,
some hilltops are sailing the storm-rains with almost bare poles
and the logs that still smoulder in gullies are not far from mist.
Up the steep timber roads, though, in under the heights
you are too close for charm. The fire-killed leaves stick unmoved
like the scales of monsters that lived at too blinding a pitch
to stay in existence. The ruins of bullock-bell trails
are bared to midsummer. The froth of rain rots on black bark.
We have heard that the smoke from this coast was seen far out over
the curve of the earth, on the open Pacific, on islands.
We know certain colours and cooling nuances are gone,
much birdsong, too, some millions of wealth, a few persons
baked in sheet iron. The word sylvan cracks in the sun.
But this is order. This is the fire autumn
in the ancient of rocks, the paradise of lost eons.
We have been to see autumn in Europe. It is beautiful but
humanized to despair in those poor remnant woods
with tourist paths leading to every clump of Waldeinsamkeit.
The great year of man has entered a burning season:
the chainsaw, junked beercans, newsprint, the torrents of birth
are one fire with that great autumn the North world conducts
through her nation-states, through the unuttered minds of officials
with every fuel from oil to musicians to fields.
In the year of the moon-shot, the column of Trajan at Rome,
kept prisoner by the Italian government, as Greece
holds the Parthenon (they are not of our world, these monuments)
murmured to us, Your masters are burning the earth
to keep it in flight round not even the Sun any more
but that sheer point that even the Daystar (mostly) obeys
at the heart of their gravities. The point is smaller than Man
and they’re desperate with joy. They have overcome dignity.
The spiralling captives continued their motionless climb.
Since mankind went critical, time is a fiery screen
on which all the scenes we may call the world play at once,
housewives in the sky, jets over bullock-carts, music,
the updraft of real things drawn spinning into the act
rattles our brains. Reentering calm, some burn up.
Murder forms out of nothing in streets unspeakably adult.
The clatter of fallout scares soldiers from under your clothes.
Of the wealthy, so many are living now in the future
that wombs become wardrobes. Only the poor need be born.
And yet, in clothes that come boxed from that whirlwind
we have walked out among the great aircraft that bend the horizon,
growing ever more beautiful for ever more prodigious flight.
We have handled the taut, racked machine-guns that shot war to shreds
and, circling their complex near-absolute fitness of form
over the mass mud-graves, some have felt themselves leap
clean over the apple-bough wheels of the great star factory.
The cesspools of maturity are heaving with those who leap short.
Some are citing as Europe’s last knowledge (Oh burning Israel)
that nothing not founded upon the irrational can stand,
but some land in good country at a venture of kindness
and such is the humour, the grace of the Infinite Man,
that in towns grown at ease with their landscapes, strolling, they find
old cars, weatherboards, dumb oildrums standing in grass
have come into truth as firmly almost as mountains.
Things lacking this radiance not wholly of light, this silence
of momentous containment, the Unrevealed Torah of objects,
spin with the world. They are deadly. On girls bored to sleep
they beget fibro children who wither youth into days.
But some who come to our country as being the farthest
out on earth towards the country they sought
are waiting to hear, where they lie in their deckchairs and graves,
that, with distance, the serious laws of the universe change,
and more, growing native, still find the limitless country
too near for speech. The dignity growing on trees
in the drystick forests, the mines in the waste land, the stones,
is not solar, nor deeply mortal. In dour shirtsleeve joy
they answer the Sun of a universe where it is clear
that this earth is continuous with nothing but the unknown.
Like a distant coast beyond shimmer, too still for cloud,
the trees of my forests and breakaway mountains are feathering
with gold of emergence, with claret, cerise, liquid green,
faint blues fat with powder, new leaves clustered thick down the length
of charcoal-stiff bark. Brush water is licking stones clean.
The tracks of birds glitter. Blunt mountains steer towards noon
and all down December, black thaw will be riding the streams.
For this also is order. This is a farther season
in the ancient of rocks, the paradise of far eons,
and I am asking the dead to wait, with forgiveness,
&n
bsp; the innocent planets are grinding their keepers to gold.
THE CANBERRA REMNANT
Eavesdropping rain
a quiet car
a sense of mountains
in the air,
dark houses sleeping
beneath the freez-
ing drip of Europ-
ean trees,
lost paddock and stone
under the lake
and only a few
souls still awake
to polish a bead,
to turn a page,
to label a fly
or a golden age
in a thousand redeeming
projects they
keep safe from the Government
of the Day.
TOWARD THE IMMINENT DAYS
FOR GEOFF AND SALLY LEHMANN
1
Midmorning, September, and red tractors climb
on a landscape wide as all forgiveness. Clouds
in the west horizon, parrots twinkling down
on Leary’s oats, on Stewarts’ upturned field –
good friends are blood relations that you choose.
The phrase discovers me in the heart of farmland
harpstringing fences, coming back into my life.
A thick coin flips out of my mouth, I leap over thistles
and I think of your wedding, I make it shine among trees
in a vast evening cattlecamp lit by jewelled pendants, by plates,
by brass lamps suspended on trace chains at great height.
The beams of carlights conjure our bustling assembly.
Now the minister comes, with rapid changes of car,
and all of us, painters, centurions in mufti, horses,
lawyers discoursing on sheepback, all drink up quickly,
the hush of Queensland falling on sculptress and ghost.
As the words begin, your pledges rising, whole branches
of blossom appear on the tree your lives have reached,
from out of sight of land, an incredibly high
hymeneal piping makes my wineglass sing –
or so I choose to remember it in the country
and from that glass I’ll drink your health always,
recalling your abundant house, the dancing,
your shovelled cake rich as the history of Calabria.
2
Topping ridges, considering some poor late gift
(my gifts this year are so very nearly ineffable)
I think of a day too great for the calendar numbers
that, faintest in winter, grows like a buried moon,
a radiant season swelling through the horizons
beyond September, mortality crumbling down
till on summer mornings, a farm boy can see through the hills
the roots of pumpkin-vines knotting clean under New England.
With Advent so near beneath a man’s pitchfork,
the wild and paddocks rising into each other
in the whole green crescent of the tented air,
to keep the dead at peace, wise farmers talk drought,
Hanrahan’s comfort – but wheat is crowding through cities.
Cabinet ministers pace in the light of Canowindra
as cattle cross on the stockroutes, a commonwealth walking,
young men leap rivers and, lounging in grasses that threaten
the smaller brick towns, they long for a splendid alert.
Only marriage will save them. The hills are so riddled with fun
that timber dance-halls hide out in the ruins of whisky
and Holdens surging from under barns at midday
are buffed by almost uncontainable winds
for the woman of seed who is the landscape is seizing
all things in her gift. Verandahs sail home on the hills
till the imminent day is burned remote by the sun.
3
Singing, All living are wild in the imminent days,
I walk into furrows end-on and they rise through my flesh
burying worlds of me. It is the clumsiest dancing,
this walking skewways over worm-ocean that heaps
between skid and crumble with lumped stones in ambush for feet
but it marches with seed and steadiness, knowing the land.
As the dogs set out from the house, minute, black, running,
I am striding on over the fact that it is the earth
that holds our mark longest, that soil dug never returns
to primal coherence. Dead men in the fathoms of fields
sustain without effort millennial dark columns
and to their suspension, the crystal centuries come –
But now I am deep in butter-thick native broom
wading, sky-happy, a cotton-bright drover of bees.
As I break out of flowers, the dogs who have only
chaos for language, and territory dense in their fur,
mob me, leaping, and I am too merry with farms
not to run with them, to trample my shadow on sticks:
outpacing dignity, I collide with sheer landscapes
dancing with dogs in the rain of information.
4
In my aunt’s house, the milk jug’s beaded crochet cover
tickles the ear. We’ve eaten boiled things with butter.
Pie spiced like islands, dissolving in cream, is now
dissolving in us. We’ve reached the teapot of calm.
The table we sit at is fashioned of three immense
beech boards out of England. The minute widths of the years
have been refined in the wood by daughters’ daughters.
In the year of Nelson, I notice, the winter was mild.
But our talk is cattle and cricket. My quiet uncle
has spent the whole forenoon sailing a stump-ridden field
of blady-grass and Pleistocene clay never ploughed
since the world’s beginning. The Georgic furrow lengthens
in ever more intimate country. But we’re talking bails,
stray cattle, brands. In the village of Merchandise Creek
there’s a post in a ruined blacksmith shop that bears
a charred-in black-letter script of iron characters,
hooks, bars, conjoined letters, a weird bush syllabary.
It is the language of property seared into skin
but descends beyond speech into the muscles of cattle,
the world of feed as it shimmers in cattle minds.
My uncle, nodding, identifies the owners
(I gather M-bar was mourned by thousands of head).
It has its roots in meadows deeper than Gaelic,
my uncle’s knowledge. Farmers longest in Heaven
share slyly with him in my aunt’s grave mischievous smile
that shines out of every object in my sight
in these loved timber rooms at the threshold of grass.
The depth in this marriage will heal the twentieth century.
5
Broad afternoon. The hired boy and I
stack saccaline in the hammer-mill by the sheds
till the air is coarse with silage. Clouds of fowls
and black, shape-shifting turkeys frisk our output
but we are watching how my cousins flare
around the cowbails, yarding up fresh milkers,
knee-gripping buckets (strophe, antistrophe);
no primitive bush pumpkin eaters here,
these are prosperous, well-mannered children,
gentle with cows. Even the youngest’s a dairyman
concerned with his poddy-calves. No one here will be
a visitor gnawed by lifelong celebration.
We look at them. Even the hired boy knows,
at his age, that freedom is memory. He sees hope
in asking me about cities. How can I tell him
the cities are debris driven by explosions
whose regul
ation takes a merciless cunning?
I love my cities too well not to start at least there.
I turn his question away, out into the hills
where the bold rabbit-shooter may learn his life from a pool
or consider the turkeys (their splendour coherent with filth)
if they mistake your toes for corn, look out!
my grandfather vomited once and our fowls got blind drunk –
I rack my past for a health the boy can use.
6
In the land of cows-to-milk
there was once a wobbly calf
and he grew to be a bull
scraping up armorial dirt
with a pedigree to bellow
in the bullness of his season
and we used to chase him home –
whoa back bull!
through our neighbours’ flagrant fences
till my father linked a chain
round his horns to catch and lead:
You will save your herd-improvements
for our own herd, mister bull!
He was docile for a time
till he found he was the strong one
and began to trot – whoa bull!
Whoa bull – and the running started
as depicted in the friezes.
Loop his chain around a sapling
(wrench of splinters) try a tree!
Block him, yard him, bloody bull,
I’ll sell you for dogmeat, screamed
my short-legged father, clinging, swinging
on the chain and prancing faster
than the sons of man can run
skipping on the ringbarked hills
stumbling, leaping on the mountains.
Jersey farmer, Jersey bull
raging under the horizons
until, sometime after dark,
soaked with tropic and Antarctic
spray and dust of Innamincka
in murderous mutual respect
man and bull would stagger home
linked, supporting one another
wheezing Corn, moaning Supper
shedding forests from their chain.
When you see him, ask my father.
7
Dog roses, wild clematis, indigo
crossing the creek on my mind’s feet, though,
I walk on home where the stars are thinnest, glancing
back at the village with one human house
that is my uncle’s farm. Nightjars glide through me,
snipping winged ants. Into the brimming hills
cattle graze beyond the human marriages,
and the one-globe kitchen windows, miles apart,
approach the quiet of boats far out on the year
whose wake is all that will persist of them.
