by Les Murray
this basal membrane;
it has borne excess of clarity.
This is the lush sheet that overlay the first cities,
the mother-goddess towns, but underlay them first;
this they had for mortar.
Laminar, half detached, these cusps are primal tissue,
foreshadowings of leaf, pottery, palimpsest,
the Dead Lagoon Scrolls.
In this hollow season
everything is perhaps to be recapitulated,
hurriedly, approximately. It is a kind of fire.
Saturate calm is all sprung, in the mother country.
o
The lagoon-bed museums meanwhile have a dizzy stillness
that will reduce, with all the steps that are coming,
to meal, grist, morsels.
Dewfall and birds’ feet have nipped, blind noons have nibbled
this mineral matzoh.
The warlike peace-talking young, pacing this dominion
in the beautiful flesh that outdoes their own creations,
might read gnomic fragments:
corr lux Romant irit
or fragmentary texts:
who lose belief in God will not only believe
in anything. They will bring blood offerings to it.
Bones, snags, seed capsules,
intrinsic in the Martian central pan,
are hidden, in the craze, under small pagoda eaves.
FOR A JACOBITE LADY
Proud heart, since the light of making lace
for an exiled prince died in your eyes
it is above two centuries.
Your Cause grew literary as it died;
it was Gothic in classicizing times
and a wilder gothic extinguished it,
but you are there in the heat of it,
codes, glasses, the waiting on Versailles,
the sin of hope that eats the heart.
Your needle has left what it could trace:
your life’s thread, in endless free returns,
making little subjoined worlds of grace.
That was monarchy. At its defeat
earth fell against heaven, and everyone
was exposed to glory in the street.
I write you this from the Land of Peace,
the Plain of Sports of the vision poems;
your wars drove us here; we possess it now.
We are descendants. As was our one Prince.
Not over the water, but in the wine,
he is more assailed now, since more visible,
freed from the robes of any court.
Causes are our courts; they try our lives,
and dispose of them, to prove their own
as if to see both sides of death
truly, at once, in their due weight
were not reserved to the consummate.
THE GRASSFIRE STANZAS
August, and black centres expand on the afternoon paddock.
Dilating on a match in widening margins, they lift
a splintering murmur; they fume out of used-up grass
that’s been walked, since summer, into infinite swirled licks.
The man imposing spring here swats with his branch, controlling it:
only small things may come to a head, in this settlement pattern.
Fretted with small flame, the aspiring islands leave
odd plumes behind. Smuts shower up every thermal
to float down long stairs. Aggregate smoke attracts a kestrel.
Eruption of darkness from far down under roots
is the aspect of these cores, on the undulating farmland;
dense black is withered into web, inside a low singing;
it is dried and loosened, on the surface; it is made weak.
The green feed that shelters beneath its taller death yearly
is unharmed, under new loaf soot. Arriving hawks teeter
and plunge continually, working over the hopping outskirts.
The blackenings are balanced, on a gradient of dryness
in the almost-still air, between dying thinly away
and stripping the whole countryside. Joining, they never gain
more than they lose. They spread away from their high moments.
The man carries smoke wrapped in bark, and keeps applying it
starting new circles. He is burning the passive ocean
around his ark of buildings and his lifeboat water.
It wasn’t this man, but it was man, sing the agile
exclamatory birds, who taught them this rapt hunting
(strike! in the updrafts, snap! of hardwood pods).
Humans found the fire here. It is inherent. They learn,
wave after wave of them, how to touch the country.
Sterilizing reed distaffs, the fire edges on to a dam;
it circuits across a cow-track; new surf starts riding outward
and a nippy kestrel feeds from its foot, over cooling mergers.
It’s the sun that is touched, and dies in expansion, mincing,
making the round dance, foretelling its future, driving
the frantic lives outwards. The sun that answers the bark tip
is discharged in many little songs, to forestall a symphony.
Cattle come, with stilted bounding calves. They look across the
ripple lines of heat, and shake their armed heads at them;
at random, then, they step over. Grazing smudged black country
they become the beasts of Tartarus. Wavering, moving out over
dung-smouldering ground still covered with its uncovering.
HOMAGE TO THE LAUNCHING-PLACE
Pleasure-craft of the sprung rhythms, bed,
kindest of quadrupeds,
you are also the unrocking boat
that moves on silence.
Straining hatchway into this world,
you sustain our collapses
above earth; guarantor of evolution,
you are our raised base-line.
Resisting gravity, for us and in us,
you form a planet-wide
unobtrusive discontinuous platform,
a layer: the mattressphere,
pretty nearly our highest common level
(tables may dispute it).
Muscles’ sweatprinted solace,
godmother of butt-stubbing dreams,
you sublimate, Great Vehicle,
all our upright passions;
midwife of figuring, and design,
you moderate them wisely;
aiming solitude outwards, at action,
you sigh Think some more. Sleep on it …
Solitude. Approaching rest
Time reveals her oscillation
and narrows into space;
there is time in that dilation:
Mansions. Defiles. Continents.
The living and the greatly living,
objects that take sides,
that aren’t morally neutral –
you accept my warm absence
there, as you will accept,
one day, my cooling presence.
I loved you from the first, bed,
doorway out of this world;
above your inner springs
I learned to dig my own.
Primly dressed, linen-collared one,
you look so still, for your speed,
shield that carries us to the fight
and bears us from it.
FIRST ESSAY ON INTEREST
Not usury, but interest. The cup slowed in mid-raise,
the short whistle, hum, the little forwards shift
mark our intake of that non-physical breath
which the lungs mimic sharply, to cancel the gap in pressure
left by our self vanishing into its own alert –
A blink returns us to self, that intimate demeanour
self-repairing as a bow-wave. What we have received
is the
ordinary mail of the otherworld, wholly common,
not postmarked divine; no one refuses delivery,
not even the eagle, her face fixed at heavy Menace:
I have juices to sort the relevant from the irrelevant;
even her gaze may tilt left, askance, aloof, right,
fixing a still unknown. Delaying huge flight.
Interest. Mild and inherent with fire as oxygen,
it is a sporadic inhalation. We can live long days
under its surface, breathing material air
then something catches, is itself. Intent and special silence.
This is interest, that blinks our interests out
and alone permits their survival, by relieving
us of their gravity, for a timeless moment;
that centres where it points, and points to centring,
that centres us where it points, and reflects our centre.
It is a form of love. The everyday shines through it
and patches of time. But it does not mingle with these;
it wakens only for each trace in them of the Beloved.
And this breath of interest is non-rhythmical;
it is human to obey, humane to be wary of rhythm
as tainted by the rallies, as marching with the snare drum.
The season of interest is not fixed in the calendar cycle;
it pulls towards acute dimensions. Death is its intimate.
When that Holland of cycles, the body, veers steeply downhill
interest retreats from the face; it ceases to instill
and fade, like breath; it becomes a vivid steady state
that registers every grass-blade seen on the way,
the long combed grain in the steps, free insects flying;
it stands aside from your panic, the wracked disarray;
it behaves as if it were the part of you not dying.
Affinity of interest with extremity
seems to distil to this polar disaffinity
that suggests the beloved is not death, but rather
what our death has hidden. Which may be this world.
THE FISHERMEN AT SOUTH HEAD
They have walked out as far as they can go on the prow of the continent,
on the undercut white sandstone, the bowsprits of the towering headland.
They project their long light canes
or raise them up to check and string, like quiet archers.
Between casts they hold them couched,
a finger on the line, two fingers on a cigarette, the reel cocked.
They watch the junction of smooth blue with far matt-shining blue,
the join where clouds enter,
or they watch the wind-shape of their nylon
bend like a sail’s outline
south towards, a mile away, the city’s floating gruel
of gull-blown effluent.
Sometimes they glance north, at the people on that calf-coloured edge
lower than theirs, where the suicides come by taxi
and stretchers are winched up
later, under raining lights
but mostly their eyes stay level with the land-and-ocean glitter.
Where they stand, atop the centuries
of strata, they don’t look down much
but feel through their tackle the talus-eddying
and tidal detail of that huge simple pulse
in the rock and their bones.
Through their horizontal poles they divine the creatures of ocean:
a touch, a dip, and a busy winding death gets started;
hands will turn for minutes, rapidly,
before, still opening its pitiful doors, the victim
dawns above the rim, and is hoisted in a flash above the suburbs
– or before the rod flips, to stand
trailing sworn-at gossamer.
On that highest dreadnought scarp, where the terra cotta
waves of bungalows stop, suspended at sky,
the hunters stand apart.
They encourage one another, at a distance, not by talk
but by being there, by unhooking now and then
a twist of silver for the creel, by a vaguely mutual
zodiac of cars TV windcheaters.
Braced, casual normality. Anything unshared,
a harlequin mask, a painted wand flourished at the sun,
would anger them. It is serious to be with humans.
THE DOORMAN
The man applying rules to keep me out
knows if I have to deal with him the rules
apply to me. I am to be kept out.
Naïve to think that he respects the rules;
he knows their purpose. Complicity is out:
if I were his sort I would know the rules.
His genes have seeped down a hundred centuries;
in a slave-ship’s hold they pooled to form his eyes,
on a Sunday-school mop they collected to a face
and they formed a skin in the dry air of a palace.
In stripes, in armour, in pinstripes, he stays the same man
and I know his sister, that right-thinking woman.
He is a craftsman, and these are his tools:
unyielding correctness, thin mouth, a nose for clout,
modulations of boredom (let the blusterers threaten).
He guards the status quo as he guards mankind’s salvation
and those he protects need never learn the rules:
his contempt is reserved for those who are In, and Out.
ANTHROPOMORPHICS
Outside the serious media, the violence of animals
is often like a sad cartoon. Tom catches Jerry
and one of them grows less cute, glibbed with saliva,
shivering, darting. But Tom keeps his appealing intent look.
Similarly the snake, having struck and left you with it,
flourishes off quickly, his expression if anything self-righteous.
Hunting, we know, is mostly a form of shopping
where the problem’s to make the packages hold still;
Death’s best for that, though cheetahs have been seen feeding
on the bulk of a gazelle while the raised head end still bleated:
it was like the companionable sacking of a small Norse ship.
Even with sex, the symbolic beasts can be unreliable:
the great bull, mounting, cramps his lungs on her knobbed spine
and looks winded and precarious. He is more sexual walking.
I praise, nonetheless, our humane and Scythian arts.
THE NEW MORETON BAY
(ON THE CONVERSION TO CATHOLICISM OF THE POET KEVIN HART)
A grog-primed overseer, who later died,
snapped at twenty convicts gasping in a line
That pole ain’t heavy! Two men stand aside!
and then two more, And, you, pop-eyes! And you!
– until the dozen left, with a terrible cry,
broke and were broken
beneath the tons of log they had stemmed aloft desperately.
Because there is no peace in this world’s peace
the timber is to carry. Many hands heave customarily,
some step aside, detained by the Happiness Police
or despair’s boutiques; it is a continual sway –
but when grace and intent
recruit a fresh shoulder, then we’re in the other testament
and the innocent wood lifts line-long, with its leaves and libraries.
THE SYDNEY HIGHRISE VARIATIONS
1. Fuel Stoppage on Gladesville Road Bridge
in the Year 1980
So we’re sitting over our sick beloved engine
atop a great building of the double century
on the summit that exhilarates cars, the concrete vault on its thousands
of tonnes of height, far above the tidal turnaround.
Gigantic pure form, all exterior, su
perbly uninhabited
or peopled only by transients at speed, the bridge
is massive outline.
It was inked in by scaffolding and workers.
Seen from itself, the arch
is an abstract hill, a roadway up-and-over without country,
from below, a ponderous grotto, all entrance and vast shade
framing blues and levels.
From a distance, the flyover on its vaulting drum
is a sketched stupendous ground-burst, a bubble raising surface
or a rising heatless sun with inset horizons.
Also it’s a space-probe,
a trajectory of strange fixed dusts, that were milled,
boxed with steel rod mesh and fired, in stages,
from sandstone point to point. They docked at apogee.
It feels good. It feels right.
The joy of sitting high is in our judgement.
The marvellous brute-force effects of our century work.
They answer something in us. Anything in us.
2. View of Sydney, Australia, from Gladesville Road Bridge
There’s the other great arch eastward, with its hanging highways;
the headlands and horizons of packed suburb, white among bisque-fired; odd smokes rising;
there’s Warrang, the flooded valley, that is now the ship-chained Harbour,
recurrent everywhere, with its azure and its grains;
ramped parks, bricked containers,
verandahs successive around walls,
and there’s the central highrise, multi-storey, the twenty-year countdown,
the new city standing on its haze above the city.
Ingots of sheer
affluence poles
bomb-drawing grid
of columnar profit
piecrust and scintillant
tunnels in the sky
high window printouts
repeat their lines
repeat their lines
credit conductors
repeat their lines
bar graphs on blue
glass tubes of boom
in concrete wicker
each trade Polaris
government Agena
fine print insurrected
tall drinks on a tray
All around them is the old order: brewery brick terrace hospital
horrible workplace; the scale of the tramway era,
the peajacket era, the age of the cliff-repeating woolstores.
South and west lie the treeless suburbs, a mulch of faded flags,
