by Les Murray
I choose for my rising to be a son of that place
where rifle and sword are stars of our evolution,
steel of our own sphere. You have to be almost a person
to use either rightly according to its nature
and ever to use a rifle as less than it is,
as truncheon, quarterstaff, musket, symbol, display,
belongs to tyranny. There’s a scale closer to peace
on my rear sight than any tout’s elevation.
January, heat. In the circle of live and dead farms
I stack the wholly obedient person of death
up high in the house out of child-reach
and go to eat fish with my remaining compatriots.
VINDALOO IN MERTHYR TYDFIL
The first night of my second voyage to Wales,
tired as rag from ascending the left cheek of Earth,
I nevertheless went to Merthyr in good company
and warm in neckclothing and speech in the Butcher’s Arms
till Time struck us pintless, and Eddie Rees steamed in brick lanes
and under the dark of the White Tip we repaired shouting
to I think the Bengal. I called for curry, the hottest,
vain of my nation, proud of my hard mouth from childhood,
the kindly brown waiter wringing the hands of dissuasion
O vindaloo, sir! You sure you want vindaloo, sir?
But I cried Yes please, being too far in to go back,
the bright bells of Rhymney moreover sang in my brains.
Fair play, it was frightful. I spooned the chicken of Hell
in a sauce of rich yellow brimstone. The valley boys with me
tasting it, croaked to white Jesus. And only pride drove me,
forkful by forkful, observed by hot mangosteen eyes,
by all the carnivorous castes and gurus from Cardiff
my brilliant tears washing the unbelief of the Welsh.
Oh it was a ride on Watneys plunging red barrel
through all the burning ghats of most carnal ambition
and never again will I want such illumination
for three days on end concerning my own mortal coil
but I signed my plate in the end with a licked knife and fork
and green-and-gold spotted, I sang for my pains like the free
before I passed out among all the stars of Cilfynydd.
INCORRIGIBLE GRACE
Saint Vincent de Paul, old friend,
my sometime tailor,
I daresay by now you are feeding
the rich in Heaven.
WALKING TO THE CATTLE PLACE
A MEDITATION
At once I came into a world wherein I recovered my full being.
– Tagore
1. Sanskrit
Upasara, the heifer after first mating,
adyaśvīnā, the cow about to calve, strīvatsā
the cow who has borne a heifer calf (atrināda
the calf newly born). I will smuggle this sūtra.
Around the sleeping house, dark cattle rubbing
off on stiff corner joists their innocent felt
and the house is nudged by a most ancient flow.
I will wake up in a world that hooves have led to.
To be of Europe also is a horn-dance,
cattle-knowledge. Even here, where Europa,
dumped rusty in her disgrace, gathered childhood afresh
by the draywheels’ mercy, on creeks of the far selections.
Before the moon, away out, a rogue heifer dings
her bell on strained wire. A wrangling dry tintinnation
tells me she’s through, and struggling on to her hooves.
She will never pierce the greater grid she has conjured.
But, a vulgar fruit of the Disruption, to talk
as if salvation were the soul’s one food.
Today for no sin much, neither killing a brahmin
nor directly a cow, I will follow cattle.
2. Birds in Their Title Work Freeholds of Straw
At the hour I slept
kitchen lamps were sending out barefoot children
muzzy with stars and milk thistles
stoning up cows.
They will never forget their quick-fade cow-piss slippers
nor chasing such warmth over white frost, saffron to steam.
It will make them sad bankers.
It may subtly ruin them for clerks
this deeply involved unpickable knot of feeling
for the furred, smeared flesh of creation, the hate, the concern.
Viciously, out of sight, they pelt cows with stove-lengths
and hit them with pipes,
and older brothers sometimes, in more frenzied guilt,
have rancid, cracked eyes.
The city man’s joke doesn’t stretch to small minotaur bones.
But strange to think, as the dairy universe
reels from a Wall Street tremor, a London red-shift
on the flesh-eating graphs
and no longer only the bright and surplus children
get out of these hills,
how ghostly cows must be crowding the factory floors now
and licking black turbines
for the spectral salt
till the circuit-breaker’s stunning greenhide crack
sears all but wages.
o
In the marginal dialect of this valley
(Agen my son grows up, tourists won’t hear it)
udders are elders.
It was very bad news for the Kirk:
old men of the hard grey cloth, their freckled faces
distended, squeezing grace through the Four Last Things
in a Sabbath bucket.
I can tell you sparetime childhoods force-fed this
make solid cheese, but often strangely veined.
I’m thinking of aunts who had telescopes to spot
pregnancies, inside wedlock or out
(there is no life more global than a village)
and my father’s uncles, monsters of hospitality.
Perhaps we should forget the seven-day-week tinned bucket
and the little children dead beat at their desks –
Caesar got up and Milked then he Got his soldiers –
but birds in their title work freeholds of straw
and the eagle his of sky.
Dripstone for Caesar.
3. The Names of the Humble
Fence beyond fence from breakfast
I climb through into my thought
and watch the slowing of herds into natural measures.
Nose down for hours, ingesting grass, they breathe grass,
trefoil, particles, out of the soft-focus earth
dampened by nose-damp. They have breathed great plateaux to dust.
But a cow’s mouth circling on feed, the steady radius
shifting (dry sun) as she shifts,
subsumes, say, two-thirds of mankind. Our cities, our circles.
They concede me a wide berth at first. I go on being harmless
and some graze closer, gradually. It is like watching
an emergence. Persons.
Where cattletracks mount
boustrophedon to the hills
I want to discern the names of all the humble.
o
A meaningful lack in the mother-tongue of factories:
how do you say one cattle? Cow, bull, steer
but nothing like bos. Cattle is chattel, is owned
by man the castrator,
body and innocence, cud and death-bellow and beef.
Bush people say beast, and mean no more fabulous creature
and indeed, from the moon to the alphabet, there aren’t many.
Surely the most precious Phoenician cargo
was that trussed rough-breathing ox turned dawnward to lead
all Europe’s journey.
o
Far back as I can glimpse with descendant sight,
beyond roads or the stave-plough, there is a boy on cold upland,
gentle tapper of veins, a blood-porridge eater,
his ringlets new-dressed with dung, a spear in his fist,
it is thousands of moons to the cattle-raid of Cooley
but we could still find common knowledge, verb-roots
and noun-bark enough for an evening fire of sharing
cattle-wisdom,
though it is a great year yet
till Prithu will milk from the goddess (O rich in cheer, come!)
and down through his fingers into the rimmed vessel earth
grain and food-gardens.
We are entirely before
the seed-eater towns.
o
A sherry-eyed Jersey looks at me. Fragments of thoughts
that will not ripple together worry her head
it is sophistication trying to happen
there’s been betrayal enough, and eons enough.
Or no more than focus, then,
trying to come up as far as her pupils.
Her calm gifts all central,
her forehead a spiked shield to wolves
she bobs in her hull-down affinities.
The knotted sway pole along which her big organs hang
(it will offer them ruthlessly downward when knob joints cave in)
rests unafraid in enzyme courtesies, though,
steadier than cognitions speckling brains.
Since I’ve sunk my presence into the law
that every beast shall be apportioned space
according to display, I unfurl a hand.
She dribbles, informing
her own weighted antique success,
and stays to pump the simpler, infinite herbage.
o
Her Normandy bones
the nap of her Charolais colour
the ticks on her elder are such
muscatels of good blood.
If I envy her one thing
it is her ease with this epoch.
A wagtail switching left-right, left-right on her rump.
Where cattletracks climb
rice-terrace-wise to the hills
I want to speak the names of all the humble.
4. The Artery
It is patience and stalks in the wide house of cattle
the zenith warming to unswallow stowage
and quietly chew. It is uttermost custom,
the day of these beings who licked the glimmering ice
from the north returning world, from the still man-figures.
But mouths stop suddenly. Heads turn. A roan bullock sound –
thin leather sniping them, the driven beef mob, oncoming,
is filling the road, dog-harried, fence-deflected
up shallow cuttings, down them, their elegant squeeze-shaped
hoofs swirl up a sky bath stockmen, wheeling, don’t venerate
and, indecisive, the cows run, stopping. A freshet
that will not carry these with it is going down-country
to the slowing saleyard pools, the bare holding lakes
and then in great spurts to the ocean without limits.
Come back, mother cows. Plates flower for these children.
They are going to the plains of cash and the captive bolt,
to the clotted panic, the eunuch mounting in crushes, écoutez
mugir ces atroces abats: see, brains, where man’s hunger
whirrs in the firmament. They are taken up flying
stately in the feathers of the knives, they are shown dominion
before, to the last lymph tear, they are chilled from dripping
and marbled in their fat they are pillars of the city
till out of cool rooms they crowd into our veins
through the sawdust gate. Soutine was mad three days
painting a bull suspended in loud strange honour,
till the police smashed in, and the huge meat gagged down landings.
It is near the bone, it is black as the Angus studbook
the thought of this comedy feeding our muscles. The dead
upright are buffoons, they nudge their own tragedy. Meet
it probably isn’t, to prod a dance from hung haunches
in metres invented for reasons of bouphonia,
but I wouldn’t chop prose for it, facing it. My stature.
More than cattle are pent in the long crush of the roads
but a whistling butcher may slice through the tears in things
and a poor man savour them. It was this horror,
beyond the great ice, that launched us. Luscious bone-fruit.
What silk will tie this artery of knowledge?
5. Death Words
Beasts, cattle, have words, neither minor nor many.
The most frightening comes with a sudden stilt jump: the blood-moan
straight out of earth’s marrow, that clameur, huge-mouthed,
raised when they nose death at one of their own
and only then. The whole milking herd at that cry
will come galloping, curveting, fish-leaping in furious play-steps
on the thunderstruck paddock, horning one another. A hock dance.
A puddle of blood will trigger it, even afterbirth.
They make the shield-wall over it, the foreheads jam down
on where death has stuck, as if to horn to death Death
(dumb rising numerous straw-trace). They pour out strength
enormously on the place, heap lungs’ heat on the dead one.
It is one word they enact in the horn-gate there
and the neighbour herds all running to join in it
hit the near fences, creaking. We’ve unpicked many million
variants from our own like wake. This is a sample.
Roughly all at once, though, from the last-comers inward
the bunched rite breaks up. They grow aimless, calm down
in straggling completion. You might say Eat, missa est.
It is uttered just once for each charnel. They will feed
a tongue’s nub away from then on. Their word of power
is formal, terrible, but, for an age now, stops there.
At best, ours ramify still. Perhaps God is inevitable.
He will not necessarily come, though, again, in our species.
6. The Commonwealth of Manu
AFTER A DISCUSSION WITH WALTER DAVIS
Just for a moment
it seemed true of our country equally:
Brahmin, Kshatriya,
Vaishya, Shudra,
the four castes in our country, too, plus such as myself
and the genuine black men.
Brahmins? Yes, certainly.
Warriors, too, faintly honoured. (In April, their feast.)
Then merchants and drudges. A vast majority drudges
to tighten one bolt all day, and remember equality.
Vaishya, though, merchant, lowest of the twice-born,
consider his dominance:
the whole nation turning on him,
his the government, his the laws, his the profits,
his systems the System.
All his, the glory of goods
to make silent the rivers, to level the untidy hills,
a dispensation not found in the laws of Manu.
Who, in the old country, stands as god to those merchants?
Ganesha mainly, isn’t it, the elephant-headed,
he whose steed is a rat, Ganesha the greedy one,
overcomer of obstacles?
Consider the elephant,
thick-skinned, intelligent vast,
the beast of long affection, long revenge,
capable of absorbing a whole pond.
Unable to jump. And very private at love.
Ganesha the god, provider of unearned good luck,
has a lovable tusk, and a
cobra for a belt.
His other face is failure,
insanity, death.
Men dream they are swimming the wind.
Under this aspect, called Ganapati, he can
sometimes be appeased by a sacrifice of morals.
Just for a moment, it seemed so patently true,
considered without charity,
that this thread of Krishna I am spinning faltered,
this thread, these cattle.
7. Stockman Songs
Going to Rubuntja, the cattle-train. Banging two trailers.
Going empty to Urubuntja. Whipping like a duelling spear, but noisy.
o
The artesian bore, that iron waterhole, that flowering water-bush;
thirsty calves come around. It dances on, stamping up steam.
o
Cattle trailing to Rubuntja. Dotted on the sand-plain, tjaanaa
o
My wife’s uncle Blue-tongue Lizard. He tastes of spinifex.
I chased him under the flat rocks there near Anakota.
o
The clumsy bull, see! He’s written a cheque on that cow’s flank,
in the dust of her flank, on the fur, a long water cheque.
o
My sad big horse. Men noticed his testicles. Horse.
o
Look out, kangaroos! Jimmy Kulnma is casting lead fingers
in the sand, for his brown gun. Look out, kangaroos!
o
The iron waterhole, the iron gnamma-hole,
like a fat pigeon fluffing up, preening all day long.
o
How they howl, burning, how they fly, the cone-haired initiands;
falling, they are grass-trees on Tnorula, they are palms in Pmolangkinja.
o
Cattle walking to Rubuntja, roan among the leopardwood trees.
8. The Bush
‘The boss at home, Missus?’ A man couldn’t tell suitors from buyers –
I could. They were shyer – Then you put your saddles in store –
And you kissed me once and started naming the sires
you’d give the boys home from agistment at Grammar and Shore –
The moon dipper, poured, is rising out of late rain,
the wind also rising confirms the bed of the house.
Old fencers sleep straight. The feeding dams ripple and blur.
The white bull of Wagga goes into the mountains again.
– And that was your father. The second time I dared call
he frogmarched me into the library, gnawed his moustache:
