Collected Poems

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,