by Les Murray
thirty years wiser than we were
in settling steel, in shouting men
in – reached after final avalanche cruising –
a peaceful Sun, that shapelessness.
We would come up from the dreamlight plane
and eat meals aboard the boat
Where we want her to lie, I guess,
is a place neither dry nor drowned
where we could drift in Dante-style
and observe grotesques of courage
performed by knights of bushido in
tight black jackets. Quintessence movies.
I finished my can. I would go up
to Yamada and address him: Captain
I was born in ’thirty-eight
please give me what you own of me.
Those days, below in the sharks’ kingdom,
I kept remembering the iron ore ports
the black ships feeding at all times
and ore dust the colour of dried blood
on every object. Baseball Maru,
have you jettisoned anything
but the sword-wearers? That direct style?
(OVERACHIEVERS ARE JAPANESE
I wrote in pentel ink on the bulkhead.)
The water was layered like a pearl
clear-opaque-clear as I swam down
thinking of Marines twenty years in hiding
in dugouts, eating tadpole mush,
waiting to fight, treasuring a mortar
young men approaching fifty still
begging pardon, not having flown winged bombs
NIHON, the ultimate taut ship …
It shamed our carefully dazzle-painted
sanity. Don below me bubbled.
We were close to the flagship now
by the debris. Her presence was
longing for form. Her own. Again.
Aloud in my head I told myself
she would rise if I clapped my hands:
towering superstructure, respectable
maritime-power lines – all just
askew by a fraction from machine history
in the copyist’s deadness which betrays
cherishment of carp flags and tea brushes
design like poems in a culture-language.
At night, weighing the heart of it:
We are as easy to recruit
as ever, Don said,
but harder to command.
We are almost free of the State
almost clear, again, of armies.
It is time to oppress the State.
I think that is the history
of the rest of this century: cavaliers.
Were you romantic about cavaliers?
In the end it may be safer.
Defaming the high words – honour, courage –
has not stopped us. It has made us mad
we are maddened by a dumb spirit.
I lay there also musing. Waves.
Mishima died. Screams from Lod airport …
In the one entirely native
and wisest Japanese faith, I said,
a mirror hangs before sanctuaries.
Oh Zen makes colonials of a few
but each people has its proper Shinto
distinctive as verandah beams
hard to join as a stranger’s childhood.
What withers us is that Australia
is a land of shamefaced shrines.
Perhaps, I went on, the history coming
is just more peoples passing for white,
fronting for themselves in English
and preserving their life in a closing fraction
from which leap unbelievably savage
flames. Which was your major point.
Imminent below us those nights, big
as an undersea ridge between the islands
a battleship of the Kongo class
was sending out her crew like waves:
Your fathers killed us, their minds aloof
from us in war as in any peace
and we were bringing pine-needle cakes, fox stories.
THE CANBERRA SUBURBS’ INFINITE EXTENSION
Citizens live in peace and honour
in Pearce and Higgins and O’Connor,
Campbellites drive Mercedes-Benzes,
lobbyists shall multiply in Menzies –
but why not name suburbs for ideas
which equally have shaped our years?
I shall play a set of tennis
in the gardens of Red Menace
Shall I scorn to plant a dahlia
in the soil of White Australia?
Who will call down Lewis Mumford
on the streets of Frugal Comfort?
Oh live in Fadden and be content:
everywhere’s Environment.
THINKING ABOUT ABORIGINAL LAND RIGHTS, I VISIT THE FARM I WILL NOT INHERIT
Watching from the barn the seedlight and nearly-all-down
Currents of a spring day, I see the only lines bearing
consistent strain are the straight ones: fence, house corner,
outermost furrows. The drifts of grass coming and canes
are whorled and sod-bunching, are issuant, with dusts.
The wind-lap outlines of lagoons are pollen-concurred
and the light rising out of them stretches in figments and wings.
The ambient day-tides contain every mouldering and oil
that the bush would need to come back right this day,
not suddenly, but all down the farm slopes, the polished shell barks
flaking, leaves noon-thin, with shale stones and orchids at foot
and the creek a hung gallery again, and the bee trees unrobbed.
By sundown it is dense dusk, all the tracks closing in.
I go into the earth near the feed shed for thousands of years.
THEIR CITIES, THEIR UNIVERSITIES
The men of my family danced a reel with sugar
for two generations.
Robbie Burns was involved, that barley spirit
and history, and their fathers’ voyage out
but that is a novel.
The past explains us and it gets our flesh.
You find most older Murray houses
girt in some glitter
of bottle-glass in the paddocks, rum necks and whisky ghosts,
Wolfe’s dark Aromatic Schnapps mostly grassroots-under now
and insulin, insulin
as if to help the earth digest such crystals,
the thousand year jag, the gullies of downtrodden light.
It was in these spirits
that Veitch rode the frisky stick horse: Go in, Mrs Maurer!
he’s shying at ye!
and Sam towed Reggie-Boy shrieking behind his big Dodge
in the splintering sulky.
It was through these that Hughie tumbled off his mare
on the heirloom fiddle
and uncle Jock Clark danced Whee! in the shopping-day street
prick burst from his trousers
asperging the people, a boneless arm limber as Jock
and Burns got misquoted.
o
From the photograph, they look at me. Intelligent book-shy faces.
The scrolls of their fiddles curl at me, the pipe smoke goes up
fuzzy as the toddler who moved, or the man who shook his head
at a fly
and smeared his last chance at history. The day is a bright one,
the golden wedding of Bella and John Allan,
old Bunyah Johnnie, seated here past the end
of his fabulous hospitality: small table at Murrays
today. Only twenty-six, not counting family –
That homestead is long gone – man should hae led trumps –
and the times are flattening down. The ringbarked Twenties.
My great-grandfather John
is remembering what it is to conquer country:
&n
bsp; brush soil upturned,
thin-legged black people who would show you fruit,
a house set fair to a track to capture company.
Isabella, shrunken in silks, is holding minds with him
(they are first cousins)
Gey strange it is, my hands free all day long now
of flour, milk, feathers. We never had to stint.
Thank God for that, John.
John Murray of Bunyah, born in a Biscay storm,
my offshore Basque
and thriftless as Montrose.
o
The drinking Murrays. They were rarely brutal.
It wasn’t Murrays who rode the policeman with spurs
or gelded the half-witted youth to spare him problems
but trotting through town
whips coiled and pipes alight, drawing revellers to them
and holding forth on music and seeds and the wurrld
in their fathers’ accent
and going home after three nights, cooeeing abstemious
settlers from bed to hooting strathspey contests
and holding Saturday dances from Thursday night on
with their children milking a hundred cows in jig time
and schottische time, as the fiddlers raised the sun,
that was the notion.
After the heights
Grandfather, crossed, would upend the breakfast table
and then his breakfast:
Father’s sick. Walk quiet. He’ll draw the whip on you.
He has been out of Sense and Worth in timber rooms
where men make bets and spittle beads, whooping their Lallans,
and night-sugar world where Burns is an evil spirit
and self a form of anger.
o
Aunts with a nose for sin, young chaps with haircuts
combed like an open ginger book, pretty girls like a leafed one
relax from their poses, stroll off into marriages, deaths.
Here at the focus
the sun goes under the paddocks, though, and pipers
are bulging the house with their summoned howling tune
and the drinkers, the brothers, candles in their hands,
are kneeling on the floor to judge the tramping beat
and the style of it:
The big bloke’s stepping fine!
And Veitch is confiding the hard drink to get into
a man is the second one. He means, for subversion.
Veitch’s shield against
inspectors, collectors, police is a happy day
that leaves them sitting about, hiccuping and ashamed
or lurching from their cars miles off, ashamed, hiccuping.
Wives and sisters are forbidden the shamanism of glass;
they go busy, or proud
or brandish the Word, that soured woman’s weapon
cold-hammered by Knox, fresh-honed by the Wee Free Kirk,
hard splinter of that Faith
which overcame religion,
but the patriarchs are keeping their own time
like a door in the farm-dull days, and separate as logic.
Boys nodding in cars outside
the pubs work promised ground they will not inherit.
It distils too sweet. Though it is all their wages.
They hear their lives going wheedle-and-away
on the four strained wires of a fiddle, in a spent tradition
Good on ye, Allan! and singing with no terms.
Scotland is a place Dad goes when he drinks rum
but their feet are tapping.
They wasted their lands for that (and for all that)
the redhaired Murrays.
The reasons are a novel, incomplete as cultures
now everywhere become. It is almost overt now:
we are going to the cause
not coming from it.
KISS OF THE WHIP
In Cardiff, off Saint Mary’s Street,
there in the porn shops you could get
a magazine called Kiss of the Whip.
I used to pretend I’d had poems in it.
Kiss of the Whip. I never saw it.
I might have encountered familiar skills
having been raised in a stockwhip culture.
Grandfather could dock a black snake’s head,
Stanley would crack the snake for preference
leap from his horse grab whirl and jolt!
the popped head hummed from his one-shot slingshot.
The whips themselves were black, fine-braided,
arm-coiling beasts that could suddenly flourish
and cut a cannibal strip from a bull
(millisecond returns) or idly behead an
ant on the track. My father did that.
A knot in the lash would kill a rabbit.
There were decencies: good dogs and children
were flogged with the same lash doubled back.
A horsehair plait on the tip for a cracker
sharpened the note. For ten or twelve thousand
years this was the sonic barrier’s
one human fracture. Whip-cracking is that:
thonged lightning making the leanest thunder.
When black snakes go to Hell they are
affixed by their fangs to carved whip-handles
and fed on nothing but noonday heat,
sweat and flowing rumps and language.
They writhe up dust-storms for revenge
and send them roaring where creature comfort’s
got with a touch of the lash. And that
is a temple yard that will bear more cleansing
before, through droughts and barracks, those
lax, quiet-speaking, sudden fellows
emerge where skill unbraids from death
and mastering, in Saint Mary’s Street.
ON THE WRECKAGE OF A HIJACKED AIRLINER
How did the Oriental
curse go, again? May you live
in literary times?
ESCAPING OUT THERE
With clutch-slip and tappet-noise
we rotate the Shell station
a Royal Mail Reo
bus gathering speed through the last
sleeve-pluck of motels.
I was right to turn inland from here.
Dressed by two clotheslines
by noon I’ll be famous throughout
the birthday-call networks.
Police bikes will leap headlands for me
and feel under paddocks
but I will be away out.
The people around me
restore me like colours. Their heads
are full of quiet electrified porridge and blood
I almost can’t bear how delicate the webbings
of their lives are in there, the cattle and front yards and psalms.
The men wear the old war haircuts of this century
and the women’s waves are no longer the newest idea.
The driver is practising grips
for his wrestle with ranges
we are leaving the parts where Please and Excuse Me are said
the man up front of me
hands his wife to one side as gently as crockery
getting down their bags.
The hills are coming around us like calves
to a rattled milk bucket
the plovers and waves step away at the crossings we reach.
The offsider can hit drum letterboxes and dogs
with papers and the mail.
He discusses his family, using racehorse names:
Prince Rajah’s his eldest, I think. Dickie’s Pride is his wife.
The windscreen is filled half the time with nothing but sky
we are getting well out.
Farm people step down
at Howards and Scobies and Where the Old School Got Burnt.
At All the Bloodwoods
and at the Flying-Fox
Cooking-Place
timber people step down.
There are no people now at Praising White Moth Larvae
and no one gets off Where the Big Red Bull Went Over.
I wouldn’t either.
But crossing that crest, the second sight comes upon us:
You would never again, the rabbiter’s wife says to me,
you’ve grew out of it.
They should be thumped, but in hot blood, says the fencer,
none of this ten-years-cold-steel stuff
you young bastard.
I am over the crest
and going on where unadmitted grandmothers
make farms easy-going
and cornbag quilts cover more than kids of a three-dog
winter’s night.
I will go on from there to where the west wind rises
further east, the gorge is so far back
and take a job out there with a lazy man.
When strangers come, I’ll slope steeply down and grow trees.
My name will rub off out there on the lips of the watershed
and when I am fine as cloud-webbing, I will drift
vaguely down valleys,
me, or my water, if it comes to that,
into further lives.
I will make good ancestors.
PORTRAIT OF THE AUTIST AS A NEW WORLD DRIVER
A car is also
a high-speed hermitage. Here
only the souls of policemen can get at you.
Who would put in a telephone,
that merciless foot-in-the-door
of realities, realties?
Delight of a stick-shift –
farms were abandoned for these pleasures. Second
to third in this Mazda is a stepped inflection
third back to first at the lights
a concessive
V of junction.
Under the overcoming
undiminishing sky you are scarcely supervised:
you can let out language
to exercise, to romp in the grass beyond Greek.
You can rejoice in tongues,
orotate parafundities.
They simplify
who say the Artist’s a child
they miss the point closely: an artist
even if he has brothers, sisters, spouse
is an only child.
Among the self-taught
the loners, chart-freaks, bush encyclopedists
there are protocols, too: we meet
gravely as stiff princes, and swap fact:
Did you know some bats can climb side on?
Mind you, Hitler was one of us.
He had a theory. We also count stern scholars
in whose disputes you almost hear the teenage
hobbyist still disputing proof and mint
