Collected Poems

by Les Murray

  with mink and a nose ring. That is Society. That’s Style.

  Sprawl is more like the thirteenth banana in a dozen

  or anyway the fourteenth.

  Sprawl is Hank Stamper in Never Give an Inch

  bisecting an obstructive official’s desk with a chainsaw.

  Not harming the official. Sprawl is never brutal

  though it’s often intransigent. Sprawl is never Simon de Montfort

  at a town-storming: Kill them all! God will know his own.

  Knowing the man’s name this was said to might be sprawl.

  Sprawl occurs in art. The fifteenth to twenty-first

  lines in a sonnet, for example. And in certain paintings;

  I have sprawl enough to have forgotten which paintings.

  Turner’s glorious Burning of the Houses of Parliament

  comes to mind, a doubling bannered triumph of sprawl –

  except, he didn’t fire them.

  Sprawl gets up the nose of many kinds of people

  (every kind that comes in kinds) whose futures don’t include it.

  Some decry it as criminal presumption, silken-robed Pope Alexander

  dividing the new world between Spain and Portugal.

  If he smiled in petto afterwards, perhaps the thing did have sprawl.

  Sprawl is really classless, though. It’s John Christopher Frederick Murray

  asleep in his neighbours’ best bed in spurs and oilskins

  but not having thrown up:

  sprawl is never Calum who, drunk, along the hallways of our house,

  reinvented the Festoon. Rather

  it’s Beatrice Miles going twelve hundred ditto in a taxi,

  No Lewd Advances, No Hitting Animals, No Speeding,

  on the proceeds of her two-bob-a-sonnet Shakespeare readings.

  An image of my country. And would that it were more so.

  No, sprawl is full-gloss murals on a council-house wall.

  Sprawl leans on things. It is loose-limbed in its mind.

  Reprimanded and dismissed

  it listens with a grin and one boot up on the rail

  of possibility. It may have to leave the Earth.

  Being roughly Christian, it scratches the other cheek

  and thinks it unlikely. Though people have been shot for sprawl.

  THREE POEMS IN MEMORY OF MY MOTHER, MIRIAM MURRAY NÉE ARNALL

  BORN 23.5.1915, DIED 19.4.1951

  Weights

  Not owning a cart, my father

  in the drought years was a bowing

  green hut of cattle feed, moving,

  or gasping under cream cans. No weight

  would he let my mother carry.

  Instead, she wielded handles

  in the kitchen and dairy, singing often,

  gave saucepan-boiled injections

  with her ward-sister skill, nursed neighbours,

  scorned gossips, ran committees.

  She gave me her factual tone,

  her facial bones, her will,

  not her beautiful voice

  but her straightness and her clarity.

  I did not know back then

  nor for many years what it was,

  after me, she could not carry.

  Midsummer Ice

  Remember how I used

  to carry ice in from the road

  for the ice chest, half running,

  the white rectangle clamped in bare hands

  the only utter cold

  in all those summer paddocks?

  How, swaying, I’d hurry it inside

  en bloc and watering, with the butter

  and the wrapped bread precarious on top of it?

  ‘Poor Leslie,’ you would say,

  ‘your hands are cold as charity – ’

  You made me take the barrow

  but uphill it was heavy.

  We’d no tongs, and a bag

  would have soaked and bumped, off balance.

  I loved to eat the ice,

  chip it out with the butcher knife’s grey steel.

  It stopped good things rotting

  and it had a strange comb at its heart,

  a splintered horizon rife with zero pearls.

  But you don’t remember.

  A doorstep of numbed creek water the colour of tears

  but you don’t remember.

  I will have to die before you remember.

  The Steel

  I am older than my mother.

  Cold steel hurried me from her womb.

  I haven’t got a star.

  What hour I followed

  the waters into this world

  no one living can now say.

  My zodiac got washed away.

  The steel of my induction

  killed my brothers and sisters;

  once or twice I was readied for them

  and then they were not mentioned

  again, at the hospital

  to me or to the visitors.

  The reticence left me only.

  I think, apart from this,

  my parents’ life was happy,

  provisional, as lives are.

  Farming spared them from the war,

  that, and an ill-knit blue shin

  my father had been harried back

  to tree-felling with, by his father

  who supervised from horseback.

  The times were late pioneer.

  So was our bare plank house

  with its rain stains down each crack

  like tall tan flames,

  magic swords, far matched perspectives:

  it reaped Dad’s shamed invectives –

  Paying him rent for this shack!

  The landlord was his father.

  But we also had fireside ease,

  health, plentiful dinners, the radio;

  we’d a car to drive to tennis.

  Country people have cars

  for more than shopping and show,

  our Dodge reached voting age, though,

  in my first high school year.

  I was in the town at school

  the afternoon my mother

  collapsed, and was carried from the dairy.

  The car was out of order.

  The ambulance was available

  but it took a doctor’s say-so

  to come. This was refused.

  My father pleaded. Was refused.

  The doctor wanted details

  but my father could only say

  A bad turn. She’s having a bad turn!

  the words his culture

  could allow on a party-line phone.

  At length a neighbour nurse

  produced the jargon: haemorrhage,

  miscarriage, and the ambulance

  was swiftly on its way.

  The time all this took didn’t pass,

  it spread through sheets, unstoppable.

  Thirty-seven miles to town

  and the terrible delay.

  Little blood brother, blood sister,

  I don’t blame you.

  How can you blame a baby?

  or the longing for a baby?

  Little of that week

  comes back. The vertigo,

  the apparent recovery –

  She will get better now.

  The relapse on the Thursday.

  In school and called away

  I was haunted, all that week,

  by the spectre of dark women,

  Murrays dressed in midday black

  who lived on the river islands

  and are seen only at funerals;

  their terrible weak authority.

  Everybody in the town

  was asking me about my mother;

  I could only answer childishly

  to them. And to my mother,

  and on Friday afternoon

  our family world

  went inside itself forever.

  Sister Arnall, city girl

  wi
th your curt good sense,

  were you being the nurse

  when you let them hurry me?

  being responsible

  when I was brought on to make way

  for a difficult birth in that cottage hospital

  and Mrs Cheers’ child stole my birthday?

  Or was it our strange diffidence,

  unworldly at a pinch, unresentful

  of being a case among cases,

  a relative, wartime sense,

  modern, alien to fuss,

  that is not in the Murrays?

  I don’t blame the Cheers boy’s mother:

  she didn’t put her case.

  It was the steel proposed

  reasonably, professionally,

  that became your sentence

  but I don’t decry unselfishness:

  I’m proud of it. Of you.

  Any virtue can be fatal.

  In the event, his coming gave no trouble

  but it might have, I agree;

  nothing you agreed to harmed me.

  I didn’t mean to harm you

  I was a baby.

  For a long time, my father

  himself became a baby

  being perhaps wiser than me,

  less modern, less military;

  he was not ashamed of grief,

  of its looking like a birth

  out through the face

  bloated, whiskery, bringing no relief.

  It was mainly through fear

  that I was at times his father.

  I have long been sorry.

  Caked pans, rancid blankets,

  despair and childish cool

  were our road to Bohemia

  that bitter wartime country.

  What were you thinking of,

  Doctor MB, BS?

  Were you very tired?

  Did you have more pressing cases?

  Know panic when you heard it:

  Oh you can bring her in!

  Did you often do

  diagnosis by telephone

  while not knowing rural language?

  Perhaps we wrong you,

  make a scapegoat of you;

  perhaps there was no stain

  of class in your decision,

  no view that two framed degrees

  outweighed a dairy.

  It’s nothing, dear:

  just some excited hillbilly –

  As your practice disappeared

  and you were cold-shouldered in town

  till you broke and fled,

  did you think of the word Clan?

  It is an antique

  concept. Not wholly romantic.

  More, I think, my mother

  was well loved. And people

  stopped trusting their lives

  to the one who understood anguish

  only in translation.

  I can forgive you. It was

  cold steel that you blundered on.

  Thirty-five years on earth:

  that’s short. That’s short, Mother,

  as the lives cut off by war

  and the lives of spilt children are short.

  Justice wholly in this world

  would bring them no rebirth

  nor restore your latter birthdays.

  How could that be justice?

  My father never quite

  remarried. He went back

  by stages of kindness to me

  to the age of lonely men,

  of only men, and men’s company

  that is called the Pioneer age.

  Snig chain and mountain track;

  he went back to felling trees

  and seeking justice from his

  dead father. His only weakness.

  One’s life is not a case

  except of course it is.

  Being just, seeking justice:

  they were both of them right,

  my mother and my father.

  There is justice, there is death,

  humanist: you can’t have both.

  Activist, you can’t serve both.

  You do not move in measured space.

  The poor man’s anger is a prayer

  for equities Time cannot hold

  and steel grows from our mother’s grace.

  Justice is the people’s otherworld.

  MACHINE PORTRAITS WITH PENDANT SPACEMAN

  FOR VALERIE

  The bulldozer stands short as a boot on its heel-high ripple soles;

  it has toecapped stumps aside all day, scuffed earth and trampled rocks

  making a hobnailed dyke downstream of raw clay shoals.

  Its work will hold water. The man who bounced high on the box

  seat, exercising levers, would swear a full frontal orthodox

  oath to that. First he shaved off the grizzled scrub

  with that front-end safety razor supplied by the school of hard knocks

  then he knuckled down and ground his irons properly; they copped many a harsh rub.

  At knock-off time, spilling thunder, he surfaced like a sub.

  o

  Speaking of razors, the workshop amazes with its strop,

  its elapsing leather drive-belt angled to the slapstick flow

  of fast work in the Chaplin age; tightened, it runs like syrup,

  streams like a mill-sluice, fiddles like a glazed virtuoso.

  With the straitlaced summary cut of Sam Brownes long ago

  it is the last of the drawn lash and bullocking muscle

  left in engineering. It’s where the panther leaping, his swift shadow

  and all such free images turned plastic. Here they dwindle, dense with oil,

  like a skein between tough factory hands, pulley and diesel.

  o

  Shaking in slow low flight, with its span of many jets,

  the combine seeder at nightfall swimming over flat land

  is a style of machinery we’d imagined for the fictional planets:

  in the high glassed cabin, above vapour-pencilling floodlights, a hand,

  gloved against the cold, hunts along the medium-wave band

  for company of Earth voices; it crosses speech garble music –

  the Brandenburg Conch the Who the Illyrian High Command –

  as seed wheat in the hoppers shakes down, being laced into the thick

  night-dampening plains soil, and the stars waver out and stick.

  o

  Flags and a taut fence discipline the mountain pasture

  where giant upturned mushrooms gape mildly at the sky

  catching otherworld pollen. Poppy-smooth or waffle-ironed, each armature

  distils wild and white sound. These, Earth’s first antennae

  tranquilly angled outwards, to a black, not a gold infinity,

  swallow the millionfold numbers that print out as a risen

  glorious Apollo. They speak control to satellites in high

  bursts of algorithm. And some of them are tuned to win

  answers to fair questions, viz. What is the Universe in?

  o

  How many metal-bra and trumpet-flaring film extravaganzas

  underlie the progress of the space shuttle’s Ground Transporter Vehicle

  across macadam-surfaced Florida? Atop oncreeping house-high panzers,

  towering drydock and ocean-liner decks, there perches a gridiron football

  field in gradual motion; it is the god-platform; it sustains the bridal

  skyscraper of liquid Cool, and the rockets borrowed from the Superman

  and the bricked aeroplane of Bustout-and-return, all vertical,

  conjoined and myth-huge, approaching the starred gantry where human

  lightning will crack, extend, and vanish upwards from this caravan.

  o

  Gold-masked, the foetal warrior

  unslipping on a flawless floor,

  I backpack air; my life machine

  breathes me head-Earthwards, speaks the Choc
taw

  of tech-talk that earths our discipline –

  but the home world now seems outside-in;

  I marvel that here background’s so fore

  and sheathe my arms in the unseen

  a dream in images unrecalled

  from any past takes me I soar

  at the heart of fall on a drifting line

  this is the nearest I have been

  to oneness with the everted world

  the unsinking leap the stone unfurled

  o

  In a derelict village picture show I will find a projector,

  dust-matted, but with film in its drum magazines, and the lens

  mysteriously clean. The film will be called Insensate Violence,

  no plot, no characters, just shoot burn scream beg claw

  bayonet trample brains – I will hit the reverse switch then, in conscience,

  and the thing will run backwards, unlike its coeval the machine-gun;

  blood will unspill, fighters lift and surge apart; horror will be undone

  and I will come out to a large town, bright parrots round the saleyard pens

  and my people’s faces healed of a bitter sophistication.

  o

  The more I act, the stiller I become;

  the less I’m lit, the more spellbound my crowd;

  I accept all colours, and with a warming hum

  I turn them white and hide them in a cloud.

  To give long life is a power I’m allowed

  by my servant, Death. I am what you can’t sell

  at the world’s end – and if you’re still beetle-browed

  try some of my treasures: an adult bird in its shell

  or a pink porker in his own gut, Fritz the Abstract Animal.

  o

  No riddles about a crane. This one drops a black clanger on cars

  and the palm of its four-thumbed steel hand is a raptor of wrecked tubing;

  the ones up the highway hoist porridgy concrete, long spars

  and the local skyline; whether raising aloft on a string

  bizarre workaday angels, or letting down a rotating

  man on a sphere, these machines are inclined to maintain

  a peace like world war, in which we turn over everything

  to provide unceasing victories. Now the fluent lines stop, and strain

  engrosses this tower on the frontier of junk, this crane.

  o

  Before a landscape sprouts those giant stepladders that pump oil

  or before far out iron mosquitoes attach to the sea

  there is this sortilege with phones that plug into mapped soil,

  the odd gelignite bump to shake trucks, paper scribbling out serially

  as men dial Barrier Reefs long enfolded beneath the geology

  or listen for black Freudian beaches; they seek a miles-wide pustular