by Les Murray
JÓZSEF
M.J.K. 1882–1974 IN PIAM MEMORIAM
You ride on the world-horse once
no matter how brave your seat
or polished your boots, it may gallop you
into undreamed-of fields
but this field’s outlandish: Australia!
To end in this burnt-smelling, blue-hearted
metropolis of sore feet and trains
(though the laughing bird’s a good fellow).
Outlandish not to have died
in king-and-kaiserly service,
dismounted, beneath the smashed guns
or later, with barons and credit
after cognac, a clean pistol death.
Alas, a small target, this heart.
Both holes were in front, though, entry
and exit. I learned to relish that.
Strange not to have died with the Kingdom
when Horthy’s fleet sank, and the betting
grew feverish, on black and on red,
to have outlived even my Friday club
and our joke: senilis senili
gaudet. I bring home coffee now.
Dear God, not one café in this place,
no Andrássy-street, no Margaret’s Island …
no law worth the name: they are British
and hangmen and precedent-quibblers
make rough jurisprudence at best.
Fairness, of course; that was their word.
I don’t think Nature speaks English.
I used to believe I knew enough
with gentleman, whisky, handicap
and perhaps tweed. French lacked all those.
I learned the fine detail at seventy
out here. Ghosts in many casinos
must have smiled as I hawked playing cards
to shady clubs up long stairways
and was naturalized by a Lord Mayor
and many bookmakers, becoming a
New Australian. My son claims he always
was one. We had baptized him Gino
in Hungary. His children are natives
remote as next century. My eyes
are losing all faces, all letters,
the colours go, red, white, now green
into Hungary, Hungary of the poplar trees
and the wide summers where I am young
in uniform, riding with Nelly,
the horseshoes’ noise cupping our speeches.
I, Mórelli József Károly,
once attorney, twice gunshot, thrice rich,
my cigarettes, monogrammed, from Kyriazi,
once married (dear girl!) to a Jew
(gaining little from that but good memories
though my son’s uniforms fitted her son
until it was next year in Cape Town)
am no longer easy to soften.
I will eat stuffed peppers and birds’ milk,
avoid nuns, who are monstrous bad luck,
write letters from memory, smoke Winstons
and flex my right elbow at death
and, more gently, at living.
FOLKLORE
What are the sights of our town?
Well, there is that skeleton they hang
some nights in the bar of the Rest
and everyone laughing in whispers
the barmaid broke down one time, laughing.
The cord goes up through the ceiling
to the undersprings of the big
white bed in the Honeymoon Suite
and when those bones even jiggle
there’s cheers (and a donnybrook once)
and when they joggle, there’s whooping
and folk stalking out in emotions
and when they dance – hoo, when they dance!
he knows every tune on the honeymoon
flute, does the hollow-hipped fellow.
There are a few, mind, who drink on
straight through it all. Steady drinkers.
Up over the pub there’s the sky
full of stars, as I have reflected
outside, while guiding the course of my
thoughts. Some say there’s a larger
cord goes up there, but I doubt it
I mean
but then I’m no dancer.
Besides that, there’s meatworks and mines.
THE POLICE: SEVEN VOICES
1. The Knuckle Garden
In the city of Cargo
at the very centre of it
is the Knuckle Garden
Alibis melt off like grease
names, causes, soak into the tiles
in the Knuckle Garden
This garden is kept by blue serge
men with thick pocketknife nails
and impatient fellows
Their opinions are petrol, and steel,
blurred elastic, and knowing the time,
they are wholly practical
With strong lights to shine through hard men
and hoses – men have died fighting those,
Laocoöns, distending
Men have died of falling downstairs
have ruptured their spleen eating pies
have confessed to God’s death
And women have bled from soul-searching
but let us, however altered
the shape of our smiles, be content
For factory whistles would choke
and the flag catch afire from its stars
without these ministers
Nor would the great Cargo come
or keep on its shelves, without
the Knuckle Garden.
2. Plainclothes Park
Thinking my old thought in the eye-stinging dark:
the Motive Revealer. People are so undeclared.
A button, now, on a unit in your pocket –
I was wiring that airy device in the mid-city park.
There’d be luminous face colours. Visible only to you.
Green for lying, yellow when you had them scared.
Violence? Red. When a man reached intense pink, you’d hit him
first. Or change tack. I’ve had various meanings for blue …
The man sitting next to me thought his kink out loud:
The body – you know? There are design flaws God left
hanging. Too many non-overridable programmes.
Why shouldn’t we will new teeth, new hair, new organs?
Will-overrides, friend. We need to start working on these,
and shielding. Good God! All that soft rippable belly
without a bone casque. And non-retractable genitals!
My trouble, I muttered, is with doubt, not knees.
His face was no colour that betokens guilt
but I questioned him (and I think he questioned me).
No result. He left the park shortly after
and vanished from sight in the city we had built.
3. Discontent, Reading Conan Doyle
CI: the detectives. After the age of belief
we’re what happened to mystery. Our model explainaway trade
brings complex relief.
Not quite your suave Sherlocks, we know
fences, sperm, payoffs, the squalor of minds, and where
the husbands go.
The gentlemen Sherlocks
trail their gentlemen quarry, one case at a time.
Let us touch our forelocks.
From cars, under glass
we watch the citizens: Touchables and Not
is our theory of class.
The uniform branch have their mystery, the Peace:
shall meaning be slow, at home, at the factory, at church
or loose in the streets?
We still defend logic –
try bringing a fat man down off a love-death pact
and you learn about magic –
but our mystery’s the Score
that is, knowing it. Which is the Upper Hand.
&n
bsp; That’s to say, the Law.
Not of course for some.
Say the Law’s a regent till the King comes back
if he does come.
Reading modern stuff at times
you’d think all crime was protest, or illusion –
we should charge the victims.
Doubts, then, and changes:
don’t ever book on them. The old sleuths dealt, like us,
only with strangers
so if we’re sent
to interview you, in especially the poorer suburbs,
don’t run. Don’t quote the law. If you’re a man
be in employment.
4. Rostered Duty
This is the hour the Crucified Bludger is fed
a tin dish held to his mouth and his night’s stain hosed down
before he is driven slow-slow through the fibro-tile streets
and the message gets through to moaners, to oversleepers,
to migrants who dream dark police, to blokes thinking Sickie.
This is the hour the hurrying frowners at railway
stations don’t look but all read his placard: WORK-SHY.
Soon, outside factory and depot, flies supping his wounds,
he will be ignored by staff, by management, by unions,
all too mature to look. Very few people focus,
not the realists, nor the long planners, not the fellows
with trades in demand, nor the ones proud they can shovel
as much as God’s truck can dump; self-provers and winners
never see him at all, and talk about him constantly.
But everyone knows the form: on a quiet day
passing Hey Folks PLANETWIDE Pow! Discounts / Trade Ins!
I’ve been known to say to the salesfolk there not looking
Gooday, how’s the carrot? Yes, I’ve had my turn,
served my tour with the Bludger. Every policeman does one.
I’ve picked airgun slugs out of him, tuned his trannie on race days,
heard him howl in the truck bay, echoing the oil drums.
I’ve supervised him and his wife on a visiting day –
No madam we can’t let him down – and had her scream
into my face ME! crucify ME, God damn you!
At least it’s intense. Jail is drearier employment.
When he’d get randy we’d turn him face to the van.
I think of him often, spread-Andrewed on four bolts
parked facing the sea for a treat of a summer evening
(when he bit my hand to the bone he saw more sunsets).
I remember him watching the big ships loading bales
and unloading bales, as the radio quacked Production.
This is a shop, boys, not a nation, a man said,
making a gesture. A poet growled Misemployment
but poets are kids. A thousand fellows in ties
picking flyspecks from pepper with fine Government needles
or that’s what it looked like said No time to be choosy.
Unless he’s got a job, smiled the chief clerk, he can’t have one.
It was interesting duty, travelling with the Bludger,
more to the point than backing up wives and collectors
and once you’ve done it, you’re never, like they say, off duty.
5. The Lips Move During Anointing
FOR FR EDMUND CAMPION
Stopped
tilted
watching a ditch
digger’s family eat, in a window,
miles on –
blue metal gums my draining reasons
wait
there’ll be time for doubling my tongue
back, in,
and the bucket and the raincoat
I’m trying to say
on-the-spot dignity Walther speed
docked
my imaginary body
streaming hurt at the sky like headlights
I’m trying to SAY
that shame, rolling, boot-walloping
into the sniggers of gambling men tankwater
drinkers pill burners
I’ll be with long gone
horse police in their own steel, made dance
or wire stretched between trees,
that story
I was the scorer you didn’t call sport
to blunt men up against the numbers
poor is still
Christ
and not money-poor now
I was a copper, not ever a policeman
a john served right on a lorry’s tray
I was the joker who made numbers win
I’m learning pity
rougher than shear
watching those ones
my glazing angle.
I would feed them from my own plate
set aside even fact, with good losing, not
doing my job with a score for a vision
which makes a cop of any fellow
unfix me, but, then
from my slewed skidding. I
will, bare-eyed, see them
anyway, a long time
happy with lamp pickles worn faces, no one
stacking on the realities
chipped star of black tea
I was a toddler under sad calendars
there, before winning
walk, don’t spill
this, in my chinstrap cup under the oilskins, this
decency, shape
there’ll be no columns
in justice.
No setup.
6. The Breach
I am a policeman
it is easier to make me seem an oaf
than to handle the truth
I came from a coaldust town
when I was seventeen, because there was nothing
for a young fellow there
the Force drew me because of a sense I had
and have grown out of
I said to Ware once, Harry, you’re the best
cop of the lot: you only arrest falls
he was amused
I seem to be making an inventory of my life
but in that house opposite, first floor
there is a breach
and me, in this body I am careful with,
I’m going to have to enter that house soon
and stop that breach
it is a bad one people could fall through
we know that three have
and he’s got a child poised
I have struck men in back rooms late at night
with faces you could fall a thousand feet down
and I’ve seen things in bowls
the trick is not to be a breach yourself
and to stop your side from being one
I suppose
the sniper Spiteri, when I was just out of cadets –
some far-west cockies’ boys straight off the sheep train
came up with their .303s and offered to help
they were sixteen years old
we chased them away, not doubting for a minute
they could do what they said
bury your silver the day we let that start
now I’ve said my ideals
Snowy cut, snow he cut …
A razor-gang hood my uncle claims he met
is running through my mind
in Woolloomooloo, wet streets, the nineteen twenties
dear kind Snowy Cutmore
Snowy cuts no more
he was a real breach
also, on our town, I
remember the old hand bowsers, that gentle apop-
lexy of benzine in the big glass heads
twenty years since I saw them
There’s a moment with every man who has started a stir
when he tires of it, wants to put it aside
and be back, unguilty, that morning, pouring the milk
that is the time to separate him from it
if I
am very good I’ll judge that time
just about right
the ideal is to keep the man and stop
the breach
that’s the high standard
but the breach must close
if later goes all right
I am going to paint the roof of our house
on my day off.
7. Sergeant Forby Lectures the Cadets
Old Warwick, the husband, scratched his head:
they’d run off together, was all he knew.
He didn’t know where.
Most would have said where.
He had no theories about the horse.
We stood round it,
the trackers drowsing.
Our witnesses reckon they told the boarder
you knew, and would shoot him.
He had no views on that.
They went off together. I told them Get,
her and him.
Then some fool poked the horse with a stick.
It bowled us, gagging, clean off the hill.
Country people aren’t keen on decay
too many midsummer funerals, I guess,
of beasts, and men. Too many feeds
of ptomaine mutton in the heat
sweets from the handy home botulin kit.
No market for jugged hare or ripe cheese
among that sort.
We had some sort of case:
opportunity, motive, shot horse
but Warwick’s counsel made mince of it.
Without bodies, the onus was on us
(I hope the Onus comes on him
some dark night)
but he was right.
And Warwick got off.
He was ten minutes gone
when the answer hit me like a brick:
country people aren’t keen on decay
of course!
And we dug under the horse.
The secret of our profession, this:
we dig under the horse.
Dismiss.
AQUALUNG SHINTO
FOR CHRIS KOCH
All day above the Japanese fleet,
the zenith sun between the islands
unmoving. We were after the flagship
and kept diving, finding tackle
jettisoned in her agony. My
shadow over the sand floor curved
on chain, on wavering metal forms,
Don saying Be careful of any ammo,
it could still give us the instant bends.
We were following the logic
of a dying ship among islands: here
he would have considered beaching her, here
the sub may have come for the admiral. We dived
in lucid water, tracing down
the death-hours of an Imperial captain
