Collected Poems

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