Collected Poems
Page 15
a moment, on deck, and on the bridge,
and the lengthening forward.
And then there’s the density of
fraught thresholds in
first love, and in first real love.
Some cross them again.
We are mad for fresh starts, for leaps forward,
for this vertigo;
for new Angles, and recycled Breakthroughs,
the 1912 Show,
for the terrorist’s clenched joy
when told he, or she,
is to move at the vortex of things
with the Chosen Company.
Connoisseurship of outsets
is required, perhaps,
to say what is shrouds in all this,
what is silk, what straps:
I have loved the absorbed angel
Preparation, and that charge
that gathers in maps, stores, field-glasses
and attracts a charge:
the squadron, the Core Group, the Movement,
Sinn Fein amháinn! –
how briefly we knew not to join
was best for man.
The swimmer into cleanness leaping
spurns the shore,
exultant, out of gravity, acclaimed,
upright in water,
and this is the way the worlds end
after space, after sense:
not by the tin bowl, nor the Bomb,
but by Significance.
3. The Gum Forest
After the last gapped wire on a post,
homecoming for me, to enter the gum forest.
This old slow battlefield: parings of armour,
cracked collars, elbows, scattered on the ground.
New trees step out of old: lemon and ochre
splitting out of grey everywhere, in the gum forest.
In there for miles, shade track and ironbark slope,
depth casually beginning all around, at a little distance.
Sky sifting, and always a hint of smoke in the light;
you can never reach the heart of the gum forest.
In here is like a great yacht harbour, charmed to leaves,
innumerable tackle, poles wrapped in spattered sail,
or an unknown army in reserve for centuries.
Flooded-gums on creek ground, each tall because of each.
Now a blackbutt in bloom is showering with bees
but warm blood sleeps in the middle of the day.
The witching hour is noon in the gum forest.
Foliage builds like a layering splash: ground water
drily upheld in edge-on, wax-rolled, gall-puckered
leaves upon leaves. The shoal life of parrots up there.
Stone footings, trunk-shattered. Non-human lights.
Enormous abandoned machines. The mysteries of the gum forest.
Delight to me, though, at the water-smuggling creeks,
health to me, too, under banksia candles and combs.
A wind is up, rubbing limbs above the bullock roads;
mountains are waves in the ocean of the gum forest.
I go my way, looking back sometimes, looking round me;
singed oils clear my mind, and the pouring sound high up.
Why have I denied the passions of my time? To see
lightning strike upward out of the gum forest.
4. Elegy for Angus Macdonald of Cnoclinn
The oldest tree in Europe’s lost
a knotty branch it could ill spare
to make a hump in Sydney ground,
not for the first time. No. But the last.
A genus of honey bees has died out,
a strain that came to us from the lost world.
Anger at that coarse canting fool
who tried to bury you meanings and all
under his turnip-cairn of texts
– you with the knowledge, he with the talk –
kept us from tears, the day you rode
down ropes in your chest of polished wood.
You were as strange in our waters as
the Atlantis-reef Rocabarraidh. Students,
we came for ancestral language, but you,
no teacher of grammar, gave us lore,
a sight down usages to the Bronze Age
and an ideal from then, older than Heaven,
the ‘harmony of the men of peace’.
The highest folk culture in the West
and terms from a lost, non-Greek Agora
mingled in you, our giver of words:
feallsanachd, oine, foidhirlisg.
Late on and far from heirs, you wrote
your oral learning down in a book,
a dense heaped Cadbury Hill of a book,
the history of your island, songs
and steadings of Heisgir under the sea,
black crimes from the Age of Forays, wise
folk government in the Lordship of the Isles,
astronomy and logic of the men
who taught in that curious late druidical
university of the White Mountain;
you were oath-bound to transmit these things
and you did transmit them. The book remains,
cranky, magnificent, pregnant with rethinkings
as the Watts Towers or Fort’s museum,
a Celtic history indeed, a line –
for this is the meaning of the drowned lands –
by which to haul from the conqueror’s sea
of myth, our alternative antiquity.
Teacher of my heart, you’ll not approve
my making this in the conqueror’s language
(though Calgacus used their Latin finely:
‘You have made a desert and called it peace’).
Even the claim I make at times
to writing Gaelic in English words
would make you sniff (but also smile),
but my fathers were Highlanders long ago
then Borderers, before this landfall
– ‘savages’ once, now we are ‘settlers’
in the mouth of the deathless enemy –
but I am seized of this future now.
I am not European. Nor is my English.
And perhaps you too were better served here
than in Uist of the Sheldrakes and the tides
watching the old life fade, the toradh,
the good, go out of the island world.
Exile’s a rampart, sometimes, to the past,
a distiller of spirit from bruised grains;
this is a meaning of the New World.
The good does not go out of the past.
Angles of the moving moon and sun
elicit fresh lights from it continually;
now, in the new lands, everyone’s Ethnic
and we too, the Scots Australians, who’ve been
henchmen of much in our self-loss
may recover ourselves, and put off oppression.
This, then, for the good you put on us,
round-tower of Gaelic, grand wrongheaded one,
now you have gone to the dark crofts:
the oldest tree in Europe’s shed
a seed to us – and the Otherworld
becomes ancestral, a code of history,
a style of fingering, an echo of vowels,
honey that comes to us from the lost world.
RAINWATER TANK
Empty rings when tapped give tongue,
rings that are tense with water talk:
as he sounds them, ring by rung,
Joe Mitchell’s reddened knuckles walk.
The cattledog’s head sinks down a notch
and another notch, beside the tank,
and Mitchell’s boy, with an old jack-plane,
lifts moustaches from a plank.
From the puddle that the tank has dripped
hens peck glimmerings and uptilt
their heads to shape the quickness down;
/> petunias live on what gets spilt.
The tankstand spider adds a spittle
thread to her portrait of her soul.
Pencil-grey and stacked like shillings
out of a banker’s paper roll
stands the tank, roof-water drinker.
The downpipe stares drought into it.
Briefly the kitchen tap turns on
then off. But the tank says Debit, Debit.
THE FUTURE
There is nothing about it. Much science fiction is set there
but is not about it. Prophecy is not about it.
It sways no yarrow stalks. And crystal is a mirror.
Even the man we nailed on a tree for a lookout
said little about it; he told us evil would come.
We see, by convention, a small living distance into it
but even that’s a projection. And all our projections
fail to curve where it curves.
It is the black hole
out of which no radiation escapes to us.
The commonplace and magnificent roads of our lives
go on some way through cityscape and landscape
or steeply sloping, or scree, into that sheer fall
where everything will be that we have ever sent there,
compacted, spinning – except perhaps us, to see it.
It is said we see the start.
But, from here, there’s a blindness.
The side-heaped chasm that will swallow all our present
blinds us to the normal sun that may be imagined
shining calmly away on the far side of it, for others
in their ordinary day. A day to which all our portraits,
ideals, revolutions, denim and deshabille
are quaintly heartrending. To see those people is impossible,
to greet them, mawkish. Nonetheless, I begin:
‘When I was alive – ‘
and I am turned around
to find myself looking at a cheerful picnic party,
the women decently legless, in muslin and gloves,
the men in beards and weskits, with the long
cheroots and duck trousers of the better sort,
relaxing on a stone verandah. Ceylon, or Sydney.
And as I look, I know they are utterly gone,
each one on his day, with pillow, small bottles, mist,
with all the futures they dreamed or dealt in, going
down to that engulfment everything approaches;
with the man on the tree, they have vanished into the Future.
COWYARD GATES
I saw from the road last time, our house
is all down now.
I didn’t go to look.
My cousin had prised the last sheet iron off
the rafters of our sleep
and winced the wall-studs down.
He didn’t want an untidy widower ageing
on his new farm.
I’ll want the timber for cowyard gates, he said.
The floor joists will persist awhile
and the fireplace, that pack-ice of concrete, stained
with the last spilt fat.
I didn’t go to look.
I had said goodbye to that house many times
and so helped it fall.
I have even ransacked it,
carried off slants of sunlight and of wind
that used to strike through the bedroom planking, blades
against the upstart.
Many feelings are suspended:
the front verandah feeling, looking away at the west,
the back verandah feeling, wet boards, towel on its nail,
all widowed in the air,
but, half demolished, it was almost an eddy
standing there on the ridge,
memory and loss in a grove of upright boards.
Now Time’s free to dissipate all the days trapped there:
books in the sleepout, green walling of branches around
our Christmas table, my mother placing and placing
a tin ring on scone-dough, telling me about French.
The first weeks of her death.
Suppertime lamp,
full moon through the loungeroom door.
I did not go to look.
IMMIGRANT VOYAGE
My wife came out on the Goya
in the mid-year of our century.
In the fogs of that winter
many hundred ships were sounding;
the DP camps were being washed to sea.
The bombsites and the ghettoes
were edging out to Israel,
to Brazil, to Africa, America.
The separating ships were bound away
to the cities of refuge
built for the age of progress.
Hull-down and pouring light
the tithe-barns, the cathedrals
were bearing the old castes away.
o
Pattern-bombed out of babyhood,
Hungarians-become-Swiss,
the children heard their parents:
Argentina? Or Australia?
Less politics, in Australia …
Dark Germany, iron frost
and the waiting many weeks
then a small converted warship
under the moon, turning south.
Way beyond the first star
and beyond Cape Finisterre
the fishes and the birds
did eat of their heave-offerings.
o
The Goya was a barracks:
mess-queue, spotlights, tower,
crossing the Middle Sea.
In the haunted blue light
that burned nightlong in the sleeping-decks
the tiered bunks were restless
with coughing, demons, territory.
On the Sea of Sweat, the Red Sea,
the flat heat melted even
dulled deference of the injured.
Nordics and Slavonics
paid salt-tax day and night, being
absolved of Europe
but by the Gate of Tears
the barrack was a village
with accordions and dancing
(Fräulein, kennen Sie meinen Rhythmus?)
approaching the southern stars.
o
Those who said Europe
has fallen to the Proles
and the many who said
we are going for the children,
the nouveau poor
and the cheerful shirtsleeve Proles,
the children, who thought
No Smoking signs meant men
mustn’t dress for dinner,
those who had hopes
and those who knew that they
were giving up their lives
were becoming the people
who would say, and sometimes urge,
in the English-speaking years:
we came out on the Goya.
o
At last, a low coastline,
old horror of Dutch sail-captains.
Behind it, still unknown,
sunburnt farms, strange trees, family jokes
and all the classes of equality.
As it fell away northwards
there was one last week for songs,
for dreaming at the rail,
for beloved meaningless words.
Standing in to Port Phillip
in the salt-grey summer light
the village dissolved
into strained shapes holding luggage;
now they, like the dour
Australians below them, were facing
encounter with the Foreign
where all subtlety fails.
o
Those who, with effort,
with concealment, with silence, had resisted
the collapsed star Death,
who had clawed their families from it,
those crippled b
y that gravity
were suddenly, shockingly
being loaded aboard lorries:
They say, another camp –
One did not come for this –
As all the refitted
ships stood, oiling, in the Bay,
spectres, furious and feeble,
accompanied the trucks through Melbourne,
resignation, understandings
that cheerful speed dispelled at length.
That first day, rolling north
across the bright savanna,
not yet people, but numbers.
Population. Forebears.
o
Bonegilla, Nelson Bay,
the dry-land barbed wire ships
from which some would never land.
In these, as their parents
learned the Fresh Start music:
physicians nailing crates,
attorneys cleaning trams,
the children had one last
ambiguous summer holiday.
Ahead of them lay
the Deep End of the schoolyard,
tribal testing, tribal soft-drinks,
and learning English fast,
the Wang-Wang language.
Ahead of them, refinements:
thumbs hooked down hard under belts
to repress gesticulation;
ahead of them, epithets:
wog, reffo, Commo Nazi,
things which can be forgotten
but must first be told.
And farther ahead
in the years of the Coffee Revolution
and the Smallgoods Renaissance,
the early funerals:
the misemployed, the unadaptable,
those marked by the Abyss,
friends who came on the Goya
in the mid-year of our century.
THE CRAZE FIELD
These lagoons, these watercourses,
streets of the underworld.
Their water has become the trees that stand along them.
Below root-revetments, in the circles of the water’s recession
the ravines seem thronged with a legacy of lily pads.
Earth curls and faintly glistens, scumbled painterly and peeling.
Palates of drought-stilled assonance,
they are cupped flakes of grit, crisps of bottom, dried meniscus
lifted at the edges.
Abstracts realized in slime. Shards of bubble, shrivelled viscose
of clay and stopped life:
the scales of the water snake have gone to grey on this channel.
o
Exfoliate bark of the rain tree, all the outer
plaques have a jostling average size.
It is a kind of fire, the invention of networks.
Water’s return, however gradual (and it won’t be)
however gentle (it won’t be) would not re-lay all seamless