by Les Murray
rock dome of pure Crude, a St Paul’s-in-profundis. There are many
wrong numbers on the geophone, but it’s brought us some distance, and by car.
Every machine has been love and a true answer.
o
Not a high studded ship boiling cauliflower under her keel
nor a ghost in bootlaced canvas – just a length of country road
afloat between two shores, winding wet wire rope reel-to-reel,
dismissing romance sternwards. Six cars and a hay truck are her load
plus a thoughtful human cast which could, in some dramatic episode,
become a world. All machines in the end join God’s creation
growing bygone, given, changeless – but a river ferry has its timeless mode
from the grinding reedy outset; it enforces contemplation.
We arrive. We traverse depth in thudding silence. We go on.
THE INTERNATIONAL POETRY FESTIVALS THING
Those conventions of the trade
in affluent stone cities:
we travel to them up the long shaft
polished by Europe’s victims;
since few books can ascend that,
we walk out past the airport submachine-guns
carrying the mirrors we hold up
to the life of our people.
Those scenes at the first
usually luxurious breakfast:
Ciao Allen! Zhenia moi!
polished brevity of attention,
hooded senior repartee,
witty switching of small table flags
but always the unspoken
question, too: how many
divisions, with that fellow?
You notice, on lone walks,
how the city was rebuilt.
Yet you do the unspeakable
among competitive nonchalances
and the polite who’ve seen Hell:
you are unguarded.
No one is that distinguished!
At last the readings,
super-cool or impassioned recitals
very largely of subtitles
even in fair translation.
Hour on stylish hour of it:
Who is to read now – the Pole?
No, the opposite Pole –
Nothing worthwhile is lost:
the poetry is in print somewhere.
And afterwards, always,
an Englishman quoting cliché
with a heavy archness,
often doing it out of friendliness.
Some things do get through,
your relief at quiet praise
tells you how unguarded
you really were not, previously.
To your terror, you find
you have earned the admiration
of that bright girl who
for always coming down on one side
you had nicknamed Winter Sunlight:
now you may have to say it –
il me serait trop
distingué, ton prolétariat –
Meanwhile, the spirit follows
its curious own nose
collecting, for its lasting life,
south sun. A Gothic square.
Café lamps. Two conversations.
Icecreamed tongues in the horse chestnut trees.
Declining, conjugating,
the week ends in embraces
of love, of career,
Will you be now in Cambridge?
in real regard and book exchanges.
And we carry home our sleek
mirrors cram-full of chic
to show our people.
LITTLE BOY IMPELLING A SCOOTER
Little boy on a wet pavement
near nightfall, balancing his scooter,
his free foot spurning it along,
his every speeding touchdown
striking a match of spent light,
the long concrete patched with squeezed-dry impacts
coming and going, his tyres’ rubber edge
splitting the fine water. He jinks the handlebars
and trots around them, turning them
back, and stamps fresh small impulsions
maddeningly on and near, off and behind
his earlier impulses.
Void blurring pavement stars,
void blurring wheel-noise, uneven with hemmed outsets
as the dark deepens over town. To bear his rapture,
to smile, to share in it, require attitudes
all remote from murder,
watching his bowed intent face and slackly trailing
sudden pump leg passing and hemm! repassing
under powerlines and windy leaves
and the bared night sky’s interminable splendours.
SELF-PORTRAIT FROM A PHOTOGRAPH
If this picture has survived
its subject’s absorption in the absolute
which is either God or death
it will first have been obsolete
for many years, till its style
was wholly defused, its life
glazed over by pathos, by summary
and it could grow timeless,
a midcentury face, taken late in that century.
A high hill of photographed sun-shadow
coming up from reverie, the big head
has its eyes on a mid-line, the mouth
slightly open, to breathe or interrupt.
The face’s gentle skew to the left
is abetted, or caused, beneath the nose
by a Heidelberg scar, got in an accident.
The hair no longer meets across the head
and the back and sides are clipped ancestrally
Puritan-short. The chins are firm and deep
respectively. In point of freckling
and bare and shaven skin is just over
halfway between childhood ginger
and the nutmeg and plastic death-mottle
of great age. The large ears suggest more
of the soul than the other features:
dull to speech, alert to language,
tuned to background rustle, easily agonised,
all too fond of monotony, they help
keep the eyes, at their sharpest, remote,
half-turned to another world
that is poorer than this one, but contains it.
The short bulb nose is propped firmly
by flesh ridges. In decline, slow or steep,
this face might have wrinkled copiously
by the shoalwater webbing near the eyes.
With temples this military-naked
you see muscles chewing in the head.
That look of dawning interest, or objection
in which we glimpse dread of dentists,
could be shifting to enjoy a corny joke
out of friendship, or in reflex defiance
of claimant Good Taste and display;
such moods were one edge of his loyalty.
Another is the biceps tourniquet
of rolled sleeves, just out of frame,
a fashion of darkening carriers,
farmers, labourers and their sons
for more than a century.
Wardrobe, this precise relation
between a pinstriped business shirt
and its absent tie can never be recaptured,
and slighter factors, in this drapery and skin:
like impulses deflected by the saints
they end here, short of history.
THE HYPOGEUM
Below the moveable gardens of this shopping centre
down concrete ways
to a level of rainwater,
a black lake glimmering among piers, electric lighted,
windless, of no depth.
Rare shafts of daylight
waver at their base. As the water is shaken, the few
cars parked down here seem to rock. In everything
&
nbsp; there strains that silent crash, that reverberation
which persists in concrete.
The cardboard carton
Lorenzo’s Natural Flavour Italian Meat Balls has foundered
into a wet ruin. Dutch Cleanser is propped at a high
featureless wall. Self-raising Flour is still floating
and supermarket trolleys hang their inverse harps,
silver leaking from them.
What will help the informally religious
to endure peace? Surface water dripping into
this underworld makes now a musical blip,
now rings from nowhere.
Young people descending the ramp
pause at the water’s brink, banging their voices.
AN IMMORTAL
Beckoner of hotheads, brag-tester, lord of the demi-suicides,
in only one way since far before Homer have you altered:
when now, on wry wheels still revolving, the tall dust showers back
and tongue-numbing Death stills a screaming among the jagged images,
you disdain to strip your victims’ costly armour, bright with fire and duco,
or even to step forth, visible briefly in your delusive harness,
glass cubes whirling at your tread, the kinked spear of frenzy in your hand.
Do you appear, though, bodily to your vanquished challengers
with the bare face of the boy who was large and quickest at it,
the hard face of the boss and the bookie, strangely run together,
the face of the expert craftsman, smiling privately, shaking his head?
Are you sometimes the Beloved, approaching and receding through the glaze?
Or is this all merely cinema? Are your final interviews wholly personal
and the bolt eyes disjunct teeth blood-vomit all a kind mask lent by physics?
We will never find out, living. The volunteers, wavering and firm,
and the many conscripted to storm the house of meaning
have stayed inside, with the music. Or else they are ourselves,
sheepish, reminiscent, unsure how we made it past the Warrior
into our lives – which the glory of his wheeled blade has infected
so that, on vacant evenings, we may burn with the mystery of his face,
his speed, his streetlights pointing every way, his unbelief in joking.
SECOND ESSAY ON INTEREST: THE EMU
Weathered blond as a grass tree, a huge Beatles haircut
raises an alert periscope and stares out
over scrub. Her large olivine eggs click
oilily together; her lips of noble plastic
clamped in their expression, her head-fluff a stripe
worn mohawk style, she bubbles her pale-blue windpipe:
the emu, Dromaius novaehollandiae,
whose stand-in on most continents is an antelope,
looks us in both eyes with her one eye
and her other eye, dignified courageous hump,
feather-swaying condensed camel, Swift Courser of New Holland.
Knees backward in toothed three-way boots, you stand,
Dinewan, proud emu, common as the dust
in your sleeveless cloak, returning our interest.
Your shield of fashion’s wobbly: You’re Quaint, you’re Native,
even somewhat Bygone. You may be let live –
but beware: the blank zones of Serious disdain
are often carte blanche to the darkly human.
Europe’s boats on their first strange shore looked humble
but, Mass over, men started renaming the creatures.
Worship turned to interest and had new features.
Now only life survives, if it’s made remarkable.
Heraldic bird, our protection is a fable
made of space and neglect. We’re remarkable and not;
we’re the ordinary discovered on a strange planet.
Are you Early or Late, in the history of birds
which doesn’t exist, and is deeply ancient?
My kinships, too, are immemorial and recent,
like my country, which abstracts yours in words.
This distillate of mountains is finely branched, this plain
expanse of dour delicate lives, where the rain,
shrouded slab on the west horizon, is a corrugated revenant
settling its long clay-tipped plumage in a hatching descent.
Rubberneck, stepped sister, I see your eye on our jeep’s load.
I think your story is, when you were offered
the hand of evolution, you gulped it. Forefinger and thumb
project from your face, but the weighing palm is inside you
collecting the bottletops, nails, wet cement that you famously swallow,
your passing muffled show, your serially private museum.
Some truths are now called trivial, though. Only God approves them.
Some humans who disdain them make a kind of weather
which, when it grows overt and widespread, we call war.
There we make death trivial and awesome, by rapid turns about,
we conscript it to bless us, force-feed it to squeeze the drama out;
indeed we imprison and torture death – this part is called peace –
we offer it murder like mendicants, begging for significance.
You rustle dreams of pardon, not fleeing in your hovercraft style,
not gliding fast with zinc-flaked legs dangling, feet making high-tensile
seesawing impacts. Wasteland parent, barely edible dignitary,
the disinterested spotlight of the lords of interest
and gowned nobles of ennui is a torch of vivid arrest
and blinding after-darkness. But you hint it’s a brigand sovereignty
after the steady extents of God’s common immortality
whose image is daylight detail, aggregate, in process yet plumb
to the everywhere focus of one devoid of boredom.
A RETROSPECT OF HUMIDITY
All the air conditioners now slacken
their hummed carrier wave. Once again
we’ve served our three months with remissions
in the steam and dry iron of this seaboard.
In jellied glare, through the nettle-rash season,
we’ve watched the sky’s fermenting laundry
portend downpours. Some came, and steamed away,
and we were clutched back into the rancid
saline midnights of orifice weather,
to damp grittiness and wiping off the air.
Metaphors slump irritably together in
the muggy weeks. Shark and jellyfish shallows
become suburbs where you breathe a fat towel;
babies burst like tomatoes with discomfort
in the cotton-wrapped pointing street markets;
the lycra-bulging surf drips from non-swimmers
miles from shore, and somehow includes soil.
Skins, touching, soak each other. Skin touching
any surface wets that and itself
in a kind of mutual digestion.
Throbbing heads grow lianas of nonsense.
It’s our annual visit to the latitudes
of rice, kerosene and resignation,
an averted, temporary visit
unrelated, for most, to the attitudes
of festive northbound jets gaining height –
closer, for some few, to the memory
of ulcers scraped with a tin spoon
or sweated faces bowing before dry
where the flesh is worn inside out,
all the hunger-organs clutched in rank nylon,
by those for whom exhaustion is spirit:
an intrusive, heart-narrowing season
at this far southern foot of the monsoon.
As the kleenex flower, the hibiscus
drops its browning wads, we forget
an
nually, as one forgets a sickness.
The stifling days will never come again,
not now that we’ve seen the first sweater
tugged down on the beauties of division
and inside the rain’s millions, a risen
loaf of cat on a cool night verandah.
FLOWERING EUCALYPT IN AUTUMN
That slim creek out of the sky
the dried-blood western gum tree
is all stir in its high reaches:
its strung haze-blue foliage is dancing
points down in breezy mobs, swapping
pace and place in an all-over sway
retarded en masse by crimson blossom.
Bees still at work up there tack
around their exploded furry likeness
and the lawn underneath’s a napped rug
of eyelash drift, of blooms flared
like a sneeze in a redhaired nostril,
minute urns, pinch-sized rockets
knocked down by winds, by night-creaking
fig-squirting bats, or the daily
parrot gang with green pocketknife wings.
Bristling food for tough delicate
raucous life, each flower comes
as a spray in its own turned vase,
a taut starburst, honeyed model
of the tree’s fragrance crisping in your head.
When the Japanese plum tree
was shedding in spring, we speculated
there among the drizzling petals
what kind of exquisitely precious
artistic bloom might be gendered
in a pure ethereal compost
of petals potted as they fell.
From unpetalled gum-debris
we know what is grown continually,
a tower of fabulous swish tatters,
a map hoisted upright, a crusted
riverbed with up-country show towns.
THE CHIMES OF NEVERWHERE
How many times did the Church prevent war?
Who knows? Those wars did not occur.
How many numbers don’t count before ten?
Treasures of the Devil in Neverwhere.
The neither state of Neverwhere
is hard to place as near or far
since all things that didn’t take place are there
and things that have lost the place they took:
Herr Hitler’s buildings, King James’ cigar,
the happiness of Armenia,
the Abelard children, the Manchus’ return
are there with the Pictish Grammar Book.
The girl who returned your dazzled look
and the mornings you might have woke to her
