by Les Murray
and wheelmen who murmur Suffering is bourgeois.
But swapping cogs to pass a
mountainous rig and its prime mover, I
reflect that driving’s a mastery the mastered
are holding on to.
It has gone down among the ancient crafts
to hide in our muscles.
Indeed, if you asked
where the New World is, I’d have to answer
he is in his car
he is booming down the highways
in that funnel of blue-green-gold, tree-flecked and streaming
light that a car is always breaking out of –
We didn’t come of
the New World, but we’ve owned it.
From a steady bang, ever more globes, flying outward;
strange tunings are between us.
Of course we love our shells: they make the anthill
bearable. Of course the price is blood.
COMPANY
Where two or three
are gathered together, that
is about enough.
CYCLING IN THE LAKE COUNTRY
Dried phlegm of lakes
that die of thirst. Burnt umber
dust, wind-smoothed, on glue.
Miles across, cattle-coloured
are the plains of Ryoanji.
Lakes of craze-brick. The salt
detailing around mallee islands
is two brush-hairs thick
(the galvanized salt farther out
sustains mirage islands).
No ruins in Australia?
Here are the ruins of seas
and ruins in the mouth:
the place-names here are now
pronounced in English.
Choking beasts to kill time
the particulate, millionfold
lake basins, wind-topped,
are eon-strength ocean paste
awaiting pole-melt and rains.
o
This angelic free walking:
in a long meditation of shores
far-reachingly stepping
I cross the immense north stations
ahead of blown grass.
Passing smoke-coloured emus:
the Army, with Lewis guns,
once fought that lot in the wheat country.
Throat-talking sandgropers, they rise
dangling medals of clay.
No man ever composed
a sacred song. The honey ant,
euro and wagtail fathers brought them forth
thigh-slapping in showers of selves,
lying down, being outcrops.
When the humans reeled
under violence, they gave boys’
foreskins to the hawk men
on the whirlwind ground.
Age-long, it sufficed us.
o
The free-leaping spirit
hunters and white men with wheels
have one fact in common:
heat, flies and self-doubt
fall away from a man dressed in speed.
Roused by the full moon
I ride on along
the wire coasts of the outstation paddocks,
those seas of tranquillity,
in daylight, dry land.
The hull-down homestead passes me, miles off
‘I knew you were missing the sea,
love, that first year.’
They lie, embraced, their backs to history
she listens to the sea in his chapped ear.
o
The war is farmers and miners. Both sides own me.
Big wheels revolve, and my mother’s Cornish dad
comes into mind: he coughs up red and black,
dying, before my day,
on the Hunter fields.
The gold rushes conquered the world
most work, most love
most art is mining now.
The mullock is still
literal in Kalgoorlie.
Hearing the word gentleman
in a public bar there
I recognize a line of evolution
we thought to secure with a distant crown
lest it outgrew privilege.
In Kalgoorlie, though, I meet
a blind gem cutter. She
can put any stone to her cheek
name it and grade it.
She has no fear of cold stones at her cheek.
o
The light-wheeled VeeJays of
Kambalda Yacht Club
set spinnakers and career off
ages into the blue.
There is, naturally, a Commodore.
The day I reach Kambalda
some revenant waters still lie
thumbnail-deep, off the causeway
the sky floating there vast as Huron
but flesh shows between waves.
In sheltered, warm plasma
I dive to ring-finger depth,
no unwelcome settler.
A span deeper, and gravity’s
calf begins sucking my hand.
o
Lionel Brockman hides his wife
and children in several stones
and watches from a finch as I camp.
I don’t understand the world,
I confess, to coax them.
They are wise to fight shy.
Trees withdrew from my kind
when we said Tactics.
Nor is our takeover smell lessened, now that art
is not culture, but a culture.
I have been drunk in towns
built out of defiance of taste
which is to say, Europe.
I have rolled in the fact
and made a jingling sound.
Who am I to throw clay
at a Valiant abandoned in glare
stripped raw and daubed CONSTIPATED – CAN’T PASS A THING
we are a colloquial nation
most colonial when serious.
I am drawn to the noble mad, but
they betray evolution:
they do not lie, or joke.
One I met on the Goldfields would have it honour was sperm
and sadism a preference.
At birth, each Australian
receives a stout bullshit gauge
made of mulga from here
double-edged, emblematic
it is his to break.
Country the forceful can
wreck but not reach
shall welcome the calm man
with nothing to teach,
I sing to Brockman in the mulga forest.
o
Out here, the trees
grow coolly under the earth
and the bush is branches.
Something crashes away
in a dream of tall woods.
Going south all day
I think about the Republic.
I will improve my silence and listen to lives.
Those who would listen
have always been the Republic.
I rest, and my two wheels
continue as if the plains sloped
south, as the map falls.
Sunrise and sunset ride over me,
unending wheels.
o
The Tuareg say
God made the desert last
as his most spacious great hall
to withdraw in from creation.
He is receding north now.
Limestone plain. The round lakes
clutch bulrushes at their deep point
bayonet-stiff between rains
the bottoms shelve in months and days of chalk
white circling rings. Impenetrable hollows.
Riding at noon
the great paddocks swimming with heat
I come to a stone hut. It is hard to think there,
the walls drip with laughter,
the tank, the yards, the downed fence cower with laughter.
> o
Young man in a ute:
I’m from over in New South. I bought this block.
A lifetime of work stares at him off the leaves.
In Sydney they keep a black stump with a share
and handles. The first plough on this continent.
In Esperance, I reached a final lake
cupped in rough talcum.
Soft facepowder bloom made all the hanging country
faintly peach. Downward among cloud-wools
I had for long moments
a more-than-perfect self
refined by the lands
in mourning for the sea.
We bobbed at each other as the coast wind passed
the drive-in, and found us.
SIDERE MENS EADEM MUTATO
A SPIRAL OF SONNETS FOR ROBERT ELLIS
Out of the Fifties, a time of picking your nose
while standing at attention in civilian clothes,
we travelled luxury class in our drift to the city
not having a war, we went to university.
We learned to drink wine, to watch Swedish movies, and pass
as members, or members-in-law, of the middle class
but not in those first days when, stodge-fed, repressed,
curfewed and resented, we were the landladies’ harvest.
I had meant to write a stiff poem about that, to be
entitled NOTES FROM THE HOUSE OF MRS HARVEY
it might have been unkind, in part – but then, to be honest
one did evict me for eating my dessert first
and even from the kindliest, we were
estranged, as from parents, in a green Verona,
o
a nail-biting fiefdom of suede boots, concupiscence, tea,
a garden pruned by the Herald angels yearly.
In that supermarket of styles, with many a setback
we tried everything on, from Law School Augustan to rat pack
and though in Chinese my progress was smooth up to K’ung
and in German I mastered the words that follow Achtung
in my slow-cycling mind an eloquence not yet articulate
was trying to say Youth. This. I will take it straight.
And you were losing your bush millenarian faith – I
remember your dread of the Wrath on first tasting coffee.
We were reading Fisher Library, addressing gargoyles on the stair,
drafting self after self on Spir-O-Bind notepaper
as the tidal freshers poured in, with hard things to learn
in increasing droves they were getting off at Redfern.
o
Literate Australia was British, or babu at least,
before Vietnam and the American conquest
career had overwhelmed learning most deeply back then:
a major in English made one a minor Englishman
and woe betide those who stepped off the duckboards of that.
Slacking and depth were a single morass. But a spirit
of unresolved life caught more and more in its powerful
field. It slowed their life to bulk wine and pool.
Signals had to be found. The day you gave up fornication
we took your WetChex and, by insufflation,
made fat balloons of them, to glisten aloft in the sun
above the Quad, the Great Hall, the Carillon –
and that was Day One in the decade of chickens-come-home
that day kids began smoking the armpit hairs of wisdom.
o
It is some while since we roomed at Bondi Beach
and heard the beltmen crying each to each.
Good friends we made while snatching culture between
the cogs of the System (they turned slower then)
reemerge, and improve as their outlines grow more clear
(but where’s Lesley now? and Jacqueline, what of her?).
Academe has grown edgier. Many still drowse in the sun
but intellect sounds like the cocking of a sten gun.
Remember urbanity, by which our time meant
allusion to little-known Names in a special accent?
It persists – but war’s grown; war, snarling out of that trip
in which Freud and Marx are left and right thongs in a goosestep.
Mind you, Jane Fonda plays in it too. It’s fairly thin war.
The tiger is real, and in pain. He is fed on paper.
o
When the decorous towers were shaken by screams and bare hands
they deserved to be shaken. They had sought to classify humans.
The kids were constructing a poem of feathers and pain,
a prayer, a list, a shriek, it reached no resolution
except to stay crucial. Their prophets said different things:
Pour wax on the earth. Beat spirals into rings.
But though they shamed Magog their father and crippled his war
their own gnawed at them. They colonized one another.
With the cameras running, somehow the beat had to go on
(in times of trend, death comes by relegation)
but selfhood kept claiming the best people hand over fist
in a few months a third of mankind had been called fascist –
as the music slowed, the big track proved to be
‘Fantasia of the World as a Softened University’.
o
Some things did change. Middle-class girls learned to swear,
men walked on the face of the moon once the Pill had tamed her
and we entered our thirties. No protest avails against that.
The horror of Time is, people don’t snap out of it.
Now student politicoes well known in our day
have grown their hair two inches and are running the country.
Revolution’s established. There will soon be degrees
conferred, with fistshake and speech, by the Dean of Eumenides.
The degree we attained was that brilliant refraction of will
that leaves one in several minds when facing evil.
It’s still being offered. The Church of Jesus and Newman
did keep some of us balanced concerning the meanings of human
that greased golden term (all the rage in the new demiurgy)
though each new Jerusalem tempts the weaker clergy.
o
Academe has gained ground. She is the great house of our age,
replacing Society, granting the entree to privilege
likewise a museum, of peoples, of scholars, of writing –
vampires at times may tend an iron lung.
Her study is fashion, successive lock-gates leaking Time
she loves this new goddess for whom abortion is orgasm,
the talkative one. Nothing, now, less intense
could thrill an elite above unwilled experience.
When our elders, the castes who live by delegation,
turned in, like unlicensed guns, imagination,
thought, spirit, ideals to the all-wise University
there were aspects of learning they did not foresee
like being called the Masses, Funny Little Men
who live in the Suburbs and resemble Eichmann.
o
Academe is the class struggle, and whatever side
prevails will be hers. But I’m no alma-matricide
her task’s also central: not making chemists and lawyers
but getting the passionate through their mating-and-war-years
to compromise. Remember? These shibboleths seem very real
in the light of a burning green stick. But where death’s not literal
grace must be discerning. We have seen noble minds become rabid
and, as democrats, treat the Union stewards like dirt –
doctrine takes such a long view, especially in colonies,
that I’m grateful, like you, for downtown a
nd country-town eyes
that glint and stay subtle while knowledge is power and foreign
through these, and some clowning, we master generalization
that blade of Caesarean rebirth which, day after day,
freed words in us. And cut our homes away.
o
That’s the nub and the cork of it. Most rhymes in -ism and -ation
are nothing but cabals, though, out to take over the nation
compared with true persons: with Peter who sought gallant war,
with Herr Doktor Kurt H., who was a Siegfried-figure
by his own admission, with Vanessa Max Lawrence Penny
of Honi Soit then – they were our peerless company –
with Duncan the Sydney historian, who in an Aust-
ralian course might send off the First Fleet by August:
and Dave Croll who died of a train, having seen much reality
these dine with my uncles and hills in the restaurant of memory
(which is also a starship, a marriage, a crystal of heaven)
with the droll men of Physics who one day would capture the Quark
with Germaine a few tables off winning a hard conversation
and Lex who cried Poetry is not the wine but the cognac …
THE BROAD BEAN SERMON
Beanstalks, in any breeze, are a slack church parade
without belief, saying trespass against us in unison,
recruits in mint Air Force dacron, with unbuttoned leaves.
Upright with water like men, square in stem-section
they grow to great lengths, drink rain, keel over all ways,
kink down and grow up afresh, with proffered new greenstuff.
Above the cat-and-mouse floor of a thin bean forest
snails hang rapt in their food, ants hurry through several dimensions:
spiders tense and sag like little black flags in their cordage.
Going out to pick beans with the sun high as fence-tops, you find
plenty, and fetch them. An hour or a cloud later
you find shirtfulls more. At every hour of daylight
appear more that you missed: ripe, knobbly ones, fleshy-sided,
thin-straight, thin-crescent, frown-shaped, bird-shouldered,
boat-keeled ones,
beans knuckled and single-bulged, minute green dolphins at suck,
beans upright like lecturing, outstretched like blessing fingers
in the incident light, and more still, oblique to your notice
that the noon glare or cloud-light or afternoon slants will uncover
till you ask yourself Could I have overlooked so many, or
do they form in an hour? unfolding into reality
like templates for subtly broad grins, like unique caught expressions,
like edible meanings, each sealed around with a string
and affixed to its moment, an unceasing colloquial assembly,
