by Les Murray
See you were wounded. He poured out two Haigs. I hope
you’re still in a state to show our young filly the bush?
Fifty years’ blue ribbons dimming the hall
– And are we weary of showing each other the bush?
9. Poley Bullock Couplets
Old Poley, pin bullock. The round one has left me slack here.
It is a kind of rest, this waiting, at pasture.
o
The first stones that Wheel broke, setting out, were my sex –
to think before me he was no more than a paradox.
o
Horses? Weak-boned screamers, all farting and zest.
When I followed war, it was the long stay: conquest.
o
I was most kin to humans when we trudged bedraggled,
one hide to the common rain, neither leading nor led.
o
The keenest whip-hands were those with stripes to pass on
but their yarn was right: a bull’s breath will kill oxen.
o
I feed with man’s foster mother. Dim company for her,
I wait for my one child, the wheel, to roll free of power.
10. The Boeotian Count
Maudie
Maisie
Shit-in-the bail
Quince
Blossom Daisy
shy Abigail
Primavera
Strawberry Doris
one with a twostroke udd-
ah Marrabel Arabelle
Horace huge Onnanolia
dear
Kayleen little
Glory flies
Calico please
Chloreen spare Anatolia
Ambidextra
IRON for creatures who Portia
slobber at extra Persia
teats
on the sly swish!
in my eye
full of KNOTS bastard!
if the milk’s ropy incontinent Sadie
stone an old lady
(quiet, you filth
how come you crossed water?)
Oh be kind, then, to Rose
Gopi
and Rose’s daughter
lame
Utopie
slavename
earnotch ring
brandname
the far crows
are
Bottla boys who knew horsewords
all died for the King sleepy
Corka
Nugget
Biddy
Sheila Jerusalem
Boxy
Janet
Hafod Joanie Walker
boys who scorn cowtalk
gladden the bayonet
Hendre Silkie
PetuniaPecuniaRegynaMahalia
Godsend li
Lily Meg
li
sundry Bulleero
(lay glossolalia)
Brindle-
-down-from-the-moon
Hool ’em up, Nipper
more milkers than Brown
more points than the warriors
this infinite muster
the Cape Ungundhlovu
the royal kraal of Ulster
nurses of Camembert
King of Franks
and that staunch spreidh of
cantons,
I give you thanks
Moocher
and Dopey old Cornucopie
and Honeycomb rainbeaded
and warm
I pray that Hughie
will send you
safe home
where ploughing is playing
where Karma is Līlā.
11. Novilladas Democráticas
The fancy rider sent his Texan boots
to the showground fence to warn off polished wood.
Hearing talk of a princely purse, the bullock
was riddling trucks with his sad Mongol bow.
Filtering through the chrome and rust horizon
came boys and bark and shirts of landless red.
When the rider nocked the quarrel of his skill
the first leap slipped the dust of all his driving
moons travelled beneath him. His sex hit mountains and threads.
The bullock tried to explode in burgundy spittle
the state borders looping over him flourished their wheels
the sun in a frenzy was rhythmically tearing its clothes
his rapid brim cooled Brunette Downs. A moleskin pigeon
was trying to fly five ways from the roof of the sea
and the watchers strangled gnarled and woollen beasts
yelling Huge! The monster was jumping a jack-knife
and a number of hands into the wall of the country.
Burlesque sounds out of horses, men running like grass.
For a while, one human burned to be extinct
as longhorns. But a clown persuaded him.
The Skuthorpe rider, next up, picked his words
with a match. Beauty! Give him the wild cow’s milk!
A derelict spirit begged to drink from swords
but was dismissed to futures of glazed paper.
12. Hall’s Cattle
Returning in chagrin from that defeat, Sir Frederick (Pottinger) consoled
himself by ordering his men to burn down Sandy Creek homestead and to
shut Hall’s and McGuire’s cattle in the mustering paddock to starve …
Hall went back to the smoking ruins of his home and the stinking corpses
of his cattle: ‘There’s no evidence to try you on, my man, but in the
meantime this will teach you a lesson.’
– J. S. Manifold, Who Wrote the Ballads
Upwind on Sandy Creek, cooking
not meat in a three-legged pot,
the future’s oldest vessel,
sit McGuire and Hall.
Rails mortised in ironbark,
no special engine,
summoned this ruin within scent of water.
Rails regular as caste
in a tidy mind.
The homestead of course ash.
If he lacked hide before
he has a huge start now, Hall, home from acquittal.
For little enough, for a phrase of Kerry grammar
those English bailiff’s bastards triced up Father
and learnt him how to sing his hundred lines
of the Hanover anthem …
So they did mine
but he was Devon.
Flies, humming, trinket blue and poison green –
I know little of Ireland.
Yes, police-baronet Pottinger
the drafting paddock poles
knock, splinter and rebound.
Poor starving heads.
They’ll sentence me next time.
They have sentenced our sort
and all I know is this life.
I know nothing of America.
The water trough chamois’d smooth
with the last saliva, flies’ foretaste.
When the dingoes hit
there is gargling for tongues.
Bushrangering isn’t my work
but work is in prison
and the volunteer warders
have disgraced all reason.
When crows scatter down,
black fence sitters, meaning to stay,
they hack the bulbed eyes out first –
a day comes a man stops saying luck.
I’m thinking of a caper
to get them laughed out of the world,
a little war without deaths –
they are not worth lives.
Upwind of Cubbin Bin, slamming
the lid back on steam
in a three-legged vessel, Ben Hall
sits by his farm
and, rising, shakes mountains and watches
blue sergeants rage in their chains
the straight man’s out on the moonlight side
&n
bsp; and holidays shake from his reins.
It is a day for the poor,
their own saddle on a blood horse,
as the bush flies breed
to feed on noble brains.
13. Boöpis
Coming out of reflections
I find myself in the earth.
My cow going on
into the creek from this paspalum-thatched tunnel-track
divides her hoofs among the water’s impediments,
clastic and ungulate stones.
She is just deep
enough to be suckling the stream when she drinks from it.
Wetted hooves, like hers,
incised in the alluvium
this grave’s-width ramp up through the shoulder of the bank
but cattle paunches with their tongue-mapped girths also
brushed in glazes,
easements and ample places
at the far side of things from subtractive plating of spades
or the vertical silvers a coffin will score, sinking.
North, the heaped districts, and south
there’d be at least a Pharaoh’s destruction of water
suspended above me in this chthonic section.
Seeds fall in here from the poise
of ploughland, grass land.
I could be easily
foreclosed to a motionless size in the ruins of gloss.
The old dead, though, are absorbed, becoming strata.
The crystals, too, of glaze or matt, who have
not much say in a slump
seem coolly balanced toward me.
At this depth among roots
I thank God’s own sacrifice
that I am not here with seeds and a weighty request
from the upper fields,
my own words constrained with a cord.
Not being that way, if I met the lady of summer,
the beautiful cow-eyed one, I would be saying:
Madam, the children of the overworld
cannot lay down their instruments at will.
Babel in orbit maps the hasty parks,
missile and daisy scorn the steady husbands
and my countrymen mix green with foreign fruit.
14. The Pure Food Act
Night, as I go into the place of cattle.
Night over the dairy
the strainers sleeping in their fractions,
vats
and the mixing plunger, that dwarf ski-stock, hung.
On the creekstone cement
water driven hard through the Pure Food Act
dries slowest round tree-segment stools,
each buffed
to a still bum-shine,
sides calcified with froth.
Country disc-jocks
have the idea. Their listeners aren’t all human.
Cows like, or let their milk for, a firm beat
nothing too plangent (diesel bass is good).
Sinatra, though, could calm a yardful of horns
and the Water Music
has never yet corrupted honest milkers
in their pure food act.
The quiet dismissal switching it off, though,
and carrying the last bucket, saline-sickly
still undrinkable raw milk to pour in high
for its herringbone and cooling pipe-grid
fall
to the muscle-building cans.
His wedding, or a war,
might excuse a man from milking
but milk-steeped hands are good for a violin
and a cow in rain time is
a stout wall of tears.
But I’m britching back.
I let myself out through the bail gate.
Night, as I say.
Night, as I go out to the place of cattle.
15. Gōlōka
Their speech is a sense of place
night makes remote
lucerne fields in the dark hills are renamed
Moorea, Euboea.
That bull invoking Mundubbera, Karuah
and Speewah, now, Speewah
is trying his sultanate out on infinite space.
Sleepy, lingually liquescent.
It is a delectation, the matter of rock-salt,
a drawn, sparkling mouth
squaremouth, though, for the mother
mourning at the five-bar
gate for her tongue-sculpted, milky one
manhandled to the mad chute, steel-barred,
gone above gears.
No. Calling back the lost ones
is long, but not weak.
Older than crying, and less for yourself.
When heifers processing
the planet’s uncountable crop
butt, or show horns, glower, jump fur-marred aside
and afterwards lick
they are establishing
the order of precedence of the Sun King’s court
a needed concern
the risen will have cast off.
Effacing the cave-clay hand
from the shoulders of cattle, and the pet cattle-names
from the souls of slaves,
will be night work for us before that wide enablement.
What I know, says the man
who has come out of his house,
is nothing recent. An old song and an ancient one.
The ancient tune is faint (fainter still, the kings in her)
but it keeps me farming
rather than raping, or embalming, the land.
The other’s the New World. We won’t be peasants again.
Children are leaping
and wives are setting out cakes on trestle tables
(cuisine is class, but cookery is cake)
Camerons with Schultzes Breens married Crowhursts Joy
turned Catholic
the meaning of lists a weave we are cruellest maintaining it
a tissue wider than countries it carries all blood
it must only change slowly. Disorder is drawn to the gaps
the more we expect it we would love to be honest
but we know when to be.
This is community. Courage had better be real.
A black woman murmurs:
The Son of God, he said all hidden things would come out
he wasn’t nervous.
A cornbag quilt and an aeroplane to sow clover
suit my breed of jokes
says the strong man facing the moon.
We’ll suffer culture for some of our devilry yet
as Athens comes for our hide, or sends Arcadia.
Consequences hurt worse, but they impoverish less
being Nature.
I stand to one side of this night work
wishing it ease
for the minuscule stitch of baptismal clothes to tip through it
and five-course breakfasts eaten with great knives.
Through fences mended
with bedsprings, for intransigence,
and out between tussocks come all the tame and wild cattle
with their boat-prow briskets and brow-whorls and
prehuman gifts:
rank loyalty ritual
curiosity, frenzy, affection, remembrance of ambush
and their farther own: ear-focus, digestion of hard sugar,
a nose for oestrus.
The moon rides herd on a tide of fertile crescents.
Right among the tables people are touching the cattle
not mastering. Meeting.
They mingle and they take steps
humans laugh cattle nuzzle fur shifts over joints and no voice
pretends a transaction.
Humped decorum, cows pee. Charlie’s Wain in the sky full of grass
sprinkles the creatures
all here are flesh of heaven as roughly as stones.
When Cloven Hoof and Wheel made war on a chair
the Hoof was burned to hide
the holes in his back
that was indeed war
good people resigned from dancing and lived in the air
much wearing of black
then madness was easy. That day crumbles here. More future
in a little girl feeding the clean beasts rainbow cake.
o
Scattered, at the nub of things,
over that blood-and-dung mirror-floor, the leaf-giving
earth, men and bulls,
they of Murcia, they of Nîmes, the Nandi bull, the white bull
of Washpool, and he of the Cassidys, and they of the
drinkers of bikavér
they are single beyond counting; the people and the horned
people stand
in the sad forbearance
of those inescapably armed.
I am looking at the place where the names well out of field stone,
at the feared successor of plenty, the place like curved water.
In the fullness of work, it is health to see this,
the cattle-sphere fitting the green
and hard yellow worlds.
I am looking at equality where it seeks no victories.
o
The delivered stampede
continuing around me in feasting, the herds graze among us
in planetary dispersions. A Xhosa herdkeeper
salutes me, with his spoon:
Xho, eater from tins!
Xhe! I wholly agree,
sitting on cram-full bags.
There’s also drinking from a jar. The depôt pleasures.
What better in Carthage or Rome
when they became cover?
The king of justice (human)
would not enter Paradise without the lost, or his dog
– living and work are one thing, or the rivers die,
my neighbour’s wife’s saying,
a blackfellow told me tonight, and I knew. I knew.
Dozens of us clasp hands with her, for courage.
Laughter, away down the creek
gradually less competitive:
the literal disports.
Nearer sit poncho-wrapped figures
sipping through silver tubes. Antique, polite,
they would insult you first.
They are sizing up ringers (whose weapons would be improvised)
and the ringers themselves are praising this inside country.
Yes. Nice patch of storm.
Hard men, talking places
on a night-watch track:
Camooweal. Caaguazú.
Rectangular grind of cattle jaws all around them.
The houses of humans walking home in dew-dark
are hillsides apart.
As I enter my own, the moon is coming weather
and the sun dry honey
in every cell of the wood.
I have travelled one day.
