Collected Poems

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.