Collected Poems
Page 13
she is a warders’ shop
with heavy dancing overhead
the music will not stop
and when the drummers want a laugh
Australians are sent up.
When Sydney and the Bush meet now
there is no common ground.
THE RETURNEES
As we were rowing to the lakes
our oars were blunt and steady wings
the tanbark-coloured water was
a gruel of pollen: more coming down
hinted strange futures to our cells
the far hills ancient under it
the corn flats black-green under heat
were cut in an antique grainy gold
it was the light of Boeotian art.
o
Bestowing tourbillons that drowned
the dusty light we had used up
pulling the distance to us, we
were conscious of a lifelong sound
on everything, that low fly-humming
melismatic untedious endless
note that a drone-pipe-plus-chants or
(shielding our eyes, rocking the river)
a ballad – some ballads – catch, the one
some paintings and many yarners summon
the ground-note here of unsnubbing art
cicadas were in it, and that Gothic
towering of crystals in the trees
Jock Neilson cutting a distant log
o
still hearing, we saw a snake ahead
winding, being his own snorkel
aslant in the swimming highlights, only
his head betrayed him, leading two
ripples and a scaled-down swirl. We edged
closer, were defied and breathed at.
A migrant, perhaps? a pioneer?
or had a kookaburra dropped
him, missing the organ-busting ground
and even the flat of the drinking-ground?
o
Touching the oars and riding, we
kept up with the blunt, heat-tasting head
debating its life, and sparing it
which is the good of Athens. Where
the rotted milk-wharf took the sun
flint-hard on top, dappling below
(remembered children danced up there
spinning their partners, the bright steel cans.
A way of life. But a way of life.)
the snake rose like a Viking ship
signed mud with a scattering flourish and
was into the wale of potato ground
like a whip withdrawn. We punted off.
o
Oar-leather jumping in spaced kicks
against the swivel-screw of rowlocks
we hauled the slow bush headlands near
drinking beer, and talking a bit
such friendliness shone into us, such
dry complex cheer, insouciant calm
out of everything, the brain-shaped trees
the wrinkling middle gleam, the still
indifferently well-wooded hills, it was
like rowing to meet your very best
passionately casual and dead friends
and feast with them on a little island
or an angel leaning down to one
queuing on the Day, to ask
what was the best throw that you did?
that note, raised to the pitch of tears:
tower of joking, star of skill,
gate of sardonyx and worn gold
Black men and Rosenberg and I
have beliefs in common, I exclaimed
and you were agreeing that Mao Tse-tung
had somehow come to Dunsinane –
o
any more heightening and it would
have been a test, but the centre we
had stirred stopped down again, one notch
to happiness, and we were let dip
our points in the wide stopped water and
reclaim our motion. Bloodwood trees
round there were in such a froth of bloom
their honey dripped on shale and gummed
blady-grass in wigwams and ant-towns
sweetness, infusing, followed us
Reality is somebody’s, you said
with a new and wryly balanced smile
We’re country, and Western, I replied.
SPURWING PLOVER
Foiled hunters sulk homewards at dusk
and the plover, among bitten grass
and the puffed felt of cattle manure
has made his white head and chest
a peg, or a mushroom. His greys
and dark tints are tucked in the gloom.
It is a discipline test
his still white. It faces sharp critics.
Those fellows are burning to shoot:
they’d like the stiff crack in the air
and your struggles, plover, much more
than ever your family-defending
quick dives, or your dinnerplate-scraping
sad cry: turkey work! turkey work!
LACONICS: THE FORTY ACRES
We have bought the Forty Acres,
prime bush land.
If Bunyah is a fillet
this paddock is the eye.
The creek half-moons it,
log-deep, or parting rocks.
The corn-ground by now
has had forty years’ grassed spell.
Up in the swamp
are paperbarks, coin-sized frogs –
The Forty, at last,
our beautiful deep land
it was Jim’s, it was Allan’s,
it was Reg’s, it is Dad’s –
Brett wanted it next
but he’d evicted Dad:
for bitter porridge
many cold returns.
That interior machine-gun,
my chainsaw, drops dead timber.
Where we burn the heaps
we’ll plant kikuyu grass.
Ecology? Sure.
But also husbandry.
And the orchard will go there,
and we’ll re-roof the bare pole barn.
Our croft, our Downs,
our sober, shining land.
CREEPER HABIT
On Bennelong Point
a two-dimensional tree
drapes the rock cutting.
Bird-flecked, self-espaliered
it issues out of the kerb
feeding on dead sparks
of the old tram depot;
a fig, its muscles
of stiffened chewing gum grip
the flutings and beads
of the crowbar-and-dynamite wall.
The tree has height and extent
but no roundness. Cramponned in cracks
its branches twine and utter
coated leaves.
With half its sky blank rock
it has little choice.
It has climbed high from a tiny sour gall
and spreads where it can,
feeding its leaves on the light
of North Shore windows.
TANKA: THE COFFEE SHOPS
Lorenzini’s, Vadim’s,
Rowe Street, and Repin’s upstairs,
all shuttered and gone.
The coffee shops vanished
just as they’d conquered the world.
THE GALLERY
Stale pasture, midsummer
going down to the canopy
that is under the paddocks
tristania trees, laurinas, water gums
are a sinewy corps
beneath their loot of rosettes
floodwrack hangs jammed
in the lillipilli boughs
it is campfires fixed above ground
it is wet-season beards
through root-stumbling cattletrack
doors, below the landscape
to the pavement, cracked floor
and the
bouldery parterres
bulltussocks ostend
fierce wheat-heads of their bloom
dead-end water breeds
still-purposeful water finds ways
between rock, and the light
hangs quivering all day.
In the inwardness
it is twilit and tall,
inleaning, with stilled sway.
Flies stay out in the farms.
Parrots sweep in here
from the hacking gunshot corn
for their sip of ancient
and way along the gallery
a great white-cedar tree,
Melia azedarach, burns
in a Christmas of sun.
The creek is a vein
like every stream on earth
going back to the heart
but the gallery’s a bridge
of the forest across cleared land,
battalions sheltering
out of the chainsaw age here.
The cool of high country
marches west with the galleries
shade, verticals, complexity
hide out from the plains inside
half-day horizons
whisky of the high
peat maltings, smuggled out
under Antarctic beeches,
runoff from the white man’s tent,
washes one’s feet here
black thwarts, branched tackle
rotting where they paused
on their way to the lagoons
deflect and bridge
the fish-scummed spider pools
rust drip, glass gravel,
kingfisher, robin, wren.
All tumbled together, in the vanished flood,
eel bones, the rock of horror,
style-test of fellows
and the rock of God who does not rescue flesh.
This skeleton river, soil-shadow feeding the farms:
to be under these terraces
understanding your life
that is more than half gone, and your friends dismarrying,
to be here with your country, that will waken when it wakens,
that won’t be awakened by contempt
or love;
to know you may live and die in colonial times.
rock-bar of quartz
why should your life go well?
rock-bench of basalt
do we know everything yet?
despair and attitudes
might be licensed then
oar-bench of mahogany
is all the evidence in?
courage and largesse
of hope may, till then, be licensed
in the middle of the world
Out of the ochre-mined
farm gullies, milky blood
and bottles creep in
but the creek is irreverent
in its riddling way:
when they stole my hat
I hid beneath a stone
and I starved their corn
and when I got strong
I ate the bastards’ corn
but the gallery’s the interchange
of some primal worlds
it points out of every
evergreen island,
it is
greater than hedgerows
where doomed pets hang on
against autumn cultures;
it leads inland to the heart.
And climbing up, out
through liana cordage, boot-slipping
on humus, under panicles,
acmena and syzygium trunks, you
come into the place where fathers and children are sitting
around under paperbark trees. They are eating wrapped tucker
and God-enclosed melons. The daylight moon is rising
over the shoulder of towns, it is putting on flesh
and seeds; it will ripen smoke-red above the white farms.
EMPLOYMENT FOR THE CASTES IN ABEYANCE
I was a translator at the Institute:
fair pay, clean work, and a bowerbird’s delight
of theory and fact to keep the forebrain supple.
I was Western Europe. Beiträge, reviste,
dissertaties, rapports turned English under my
one-fingered touch. Teacup-and-Remington days.
It was a job like Australia: peace and cover,
a recourse for exiles, poets, decent spies,
for plotters who meant to rise from the dead with their circle.
I was getting over a patch of free-form living:
flat food round the midriff, long food up your sleeves –
castes in abeyance, we exchanged these stories.
My Chekhovian colleague who worked as if under surveillance
would tell me tales of real life in Peking and Shanghai
and swear at the genders subsumed in an equation.
The trade was uneasy about computers, back then:
if they could be taught not to render, say, out of sight
out of mind as invisible lunatic
they might supersede us – not
because they’d be better. More on principle.
Not that our researchers were unkindly folk:
one man on exchange from Akademgorod
told me about Earth’s crustal plates, their ponderous
inevitable motion, collisions that raised mountain chains,
the continents rode on these Marxian turtles, it seemed;
another had brought slow death to a billion rabbits,
a third team had bottled the essence of rain on dry ground.
They were translators, too, our scientists:
they were translating the universe into science,
believing that otherwise it had no meaning.
Leaving there, I kept my Larousse and my Leutseligkeit
and I heard that machine translation never happened:
language defeated it. We are a language species.
I gather this provoked a shift in science,
that having become a side, it then changed sides
and having collapsed, continued at full tempo.
Prince Obolensky succeeded me for a time
but he soon returned to Fiji to teach Hebrew.
In the midst of life, we are in employment:
seek, travel and print, seek-left-right-travel-and-bang
as the Chinese typewriter went which I saw working
when I was a translator in the Institute.
THE CARDIFF COMMONWEALTH ARTS FESTIVAL POETRY CONFERENCE 1965, RECALLED
Three a.m., Tiger Bay. In the only
club still open, the Sheik’s Tent,
James McAuley and two Welsh students
are discussing enjambment.
Uptown, the Bomb Culture’s just opened
its European run,
discounting many things on its counter:
calm tradition is one;
here, though, cheesecloth, fuzzed menace and Sin
are all mortified to death
to find themselves kindly dismissed
for talk of Wordsworth;
the Pleasure Principle’s looking quite haggard,
belching whisky, sweating scent,
the belly dancers rhythmically twitching,
pallid boughs in a current.
DRIVING TO THE ADELAIDE FESTIVAL 1976 VIA THE MURRAY VALLEY HIGHWAY
A long narrow woodland with channels, reentrants, ponds:
the Murray’s a mainstream with footnotes, a folklorists’ river.
The culture, on both banks, is pure Victoria:
the beer, the footy, the slight earnest flavour, the cray.
Some places there’s a man-made conventional width of water
studded with trunks; a cold day in the parrots’ high rooms.
Walking on the wharf at Echuca, that skyscraper roof:
sixty feet down timber to a dry-season splash.
In the forest there
are sudden cliffs: dusty silken water
moving away: the live flow is particle-green.
Billabongs are pregnant with swirls, and a sunken road
of hyacinth leads to an eerie noonday corner.
Ships rotting in the woods, ships turning to silt in blind channels;
one looked like a bush pub impelled by a combine header.
Out in the wide country, channels look higher than the road
even as you glance along them. Salt glittering out there.
Romance is a vine that survives in the ruins of skill:
inside the horizon again, a restored steamboat, puffing.
Thinking, at speed among lakes, of a time beyond denim
and the gardens of that time. Night-gardens. Fire gardens.
Crazed wood, brushed chars, powder-blue leaves. Each year the purist
would ignite afresh with a beerbottle lens, a tossed bumper –
Heading for a tent show, thinking stadium thoughts,
a dense bouquet slowing the van through the province of sultanas.
THE BULADELAH-TAREE HOLIDAY SONG CYCLE
1
The people are eating dinner in that country north of Legge’s Lake;
behind flywire and venetians, in the dimmed cool, town people eat Lunch.
Plying knives and forks with a peek-in sound, with a tuck-in sound,
they are thinking about relatives and inventory, they are talking about customers and visitors.
In the country of memorial iron, on the creek-facing hills there,
they are thinking about bean plants, and rings of tank water, of growing a pumpkin by Christmas;
rolling a cigarette, they say thoughtfully Yes, and their companion nods, considering.
Fresh sheets have been spread and tucked tight, childhood rooms have been seen to,
for this is the season when children return with their children
to the place of Bingham’s Ghost, of the Old Timber Wharf, of the Big Flood That Time,
the country of the rationalized farms, of the day-and-night farms, and of the Pitt Street farms,
of the Shire Engineer and many other rumours, of the tractor crankcase furred with chaff,
the places of sitting down near ferns, the snake-fear places, the cattle-crossing-long-ago places.
2
It is the season of the Long Narrow City; it has crossed the Myall, it has entered the North Coast,
that big stunning snake; it is looped through the hills, burning all night there.
Hitching and flying on the downgrades, processionally balancing on the climbs,
it echoes in O’Sullivan’s Gap, in the tight coats of the flooded-gum trees;
the tops of palms exclaim at it unmoved, there near Wootton.