by Les Murray
and breathed straight from the tin,
gave a noble deathly rush
that replaced imagination.
THE DIALECTIC OF DREAMS
Dream harbours Sin, and Innocence, and Magic,
re-stews mundane cabbage, stacks a shifting Tarot,
equivocates naïvely about Death, the secular Absolute –
things Rationality, the replacement aristocrat
approves only for enhancement. By midday
it has clarified its twinship with that relic –
but it comes round again, by deep night at the latest,
in a skin boat sailing on the blood
for dream lives its life engorged. It owns tumescence,
makes eerie conquests, can engender children –
though few who see the sun. The real takes some joint permission
and all of ourself not in the dream lies flaccid.
Every night, stepped mast or unfurled sail,
we reach a land where nothing is held trivial.
o
Real dreams are from home • back there. The light as it was,
will be, might have been • all the receding dream-tenses.
The dreamer is even yourself • or you’re aware it is.
There in the action, unsafe • greater than the action, passive,
rarely uttering, in the endless • preparations, for horror, for happiness,
those appalling formulae • other-directed at us
which may persist as salt foam • on the margin of lapsed scenes
or, like the filmed cities, be resumed • into their own presence.
And that otherworld incongruence • spindling faintly through the day,
heightening thought, blanking it • silvering, beckoning away:
preternatural, those interiors • half-recalled by consciousness,
they were never in this world • not in your life, those wet bossed lanes.
Yet this is the heart of work • the human sage, the butterfly
to be conscious at the source of worlds • rapt, raising the ante.
o
The daylight oil, the heavier grade of Reason,
reverie’s clear water, that of the dreamworld ocean
agitate us and are shaken, forming the emulsion
without which we make nothing much. Not art,
not love, not war, nor its reasoned nightmare methods,
not the Taj, not our homes, not the Masses or the gods
– but the fusion persists in the product, not in us.
A wheel shatters, drains our pooled rainbow. It was a moment:
the world is debris and museum of that moment,
its prospectus and farm. The wheel is turned by this engine.
I think of the people and buildings in a business street,
how they lack a perfect valve to take on and release
unceasing fusions. And will be pulled down for it,
their walls dreamed on in the milk of obsolete children.
o
Dream surrounds, is infused with this world. It is not subordinate.
We come from it; we live at tangents and accords with it; we go
back into it, at last, through the drowsing torture chambers to it.
We have gills for dream-life, in our head; we must keep them wet
from the nine-nights’ immense, or dreams will emerge bodily, and enforce it.
Hide among or deny the shallow dreadful ones, and they may stay out:
moor things in Heaven and earth then, Ratio, anyhow you can
because dream’s the looseleaf book, not of fiction, but of raw Pretend,
incalculable as this world when the God of Mercy intervened often.
It is the free splitting from God that parts Nature from dream.
They refresh each other with bafflement, each as the other’s underground
freeing lives to be finite, because more; to be timeless, yet pure preparation –
while those spaces, sacred as the poor, of the haloed russet kingdom
are tigers impelling us, full of futures and pasts, toward a present.
SATIS PASSIO
Elites, levels, proletariat:
the uniting cloth crowns
of Upper and Lower Egypt
suggests theories of poetry
which kindness would accept
to bestow, like Heaven, dignity
on the inept and the ept,
one Papuan warrior’s phallocrypt
the soaring equal of its fellowcrypt.
By these measures, most knowledge
in our heads is poetry,
varied crystals of detail, chosen
by dream-interest, and poured spirally
from version to myth, with spillage,
from theory to history
and, with toppings-up, to story,
not metered, lined or free
but condensed by memory
to roughly vivid essences:
most people’s poetry is now this.
Some of it is made by poets.
God bless the feral poetries,
littératures and sensibilities,
theory, wonder, the human gamut
leaping cheerfully or in heavy earnest
– but there is this quality to art
which starts, rather than ends, at the gist.
Not the angle, but the angel.
Art is what can’t be summarised:
it has joined creation from our side,
entered Nature, become a fact
and acquired presence,
more like ourselves or any subject
swirled around, about, in and out,
than like the swirling poetries.
Art’s best is a standing miracle
at an uncrossable slight distance,
an anomaly, finite but inexhaustible,
unaltered after analysis
as an ancient face.
Not the portrait of one gone
merely, no pathos of the bygone
but a section, of all that exist,
a passage, a whole pattern
that has shifted the immeasurable
first step into Heaven.
A first approximation.
Where is Heaven? Down these roads.
The fine movement of art’s face
before us is a motionless traffic
between here and remote Heaven.
It is out through this surface,
we may call it the Unfalling Arrow,
this third mode, and perhaps by art first
that there came to us the dream-plan
of equality and justice,
long delayed by the poetries –
but who was the more numinous,
Pharaoh or the hunted Nile heron?
more splendid, the iris or Solomon?
Beauty lives easily with equities
more terrible than theory dares mean.
Of the workers set free to break stone
and the new-cracked stone, which is more luminous?
God bless the general poetries?
This is how it’s done.
FLOOD PLAINS ON THE COAST FACING ASIA
Hitching blur to a caged propeller
with its motor racket swelling
barroom to barrage, our aluminium
airboat has crossed the black coffee
lagoon and swum out onto
one enormous crinkling green.
Now like a rocket loudening
to liftoff, it erects the earsplitting
wigwam we must travel in
everywhere here, and starts skimming
at speed on the never-never
meadows of the monsoon wetland.
Birds lift, scattering before us
over the primeval irrigation,
leaf-running jacanas, twin-boomed
with supplicant bare feet for tails;
knob-headed magpie geese
&nbs
p; row into the air ahead of us;
waterlilies lean away, to go
under as we overrun them
and resurrect behind us.
We leave at most a darker green
trace on the universal glittering
and, waterproof in cream and blue,
waterlilies on their stems, circling.
Our shattering car
crossing exposed and seeping spaces
brings us to finely stinking places,
yet whatever riceless paddies
we reach, of whatever grass,
there is always sheeting spray
underhull for our passage;
and the Intermediate Egret leaps
aloft out of stagnant colours
and many a double-barrelled crossbow
shoots vegetable breath emphatically
from the haunts of flaking buffalo;
water glinting everywhere, like ice,
we traverse speeds humans once reached
in such surroundings mainly
as soldiers, in the tropic wars.
At times, we fold our windtunnel
away, in its blackened steel sail
and sit, for talk and contemplation.
For instance, off the deadly islet,
a swamp-surrounded sandstone knoll
split, cabled, commissured
with fig trees’ python roots.
Watched by distant plateau cliffs
stitched millennially in every crevice
with the bark-entubed dead
we do not go ashore.
Those hills are ancient stone gods
just beginning to be literature.
We release again the warring sound
of our peaceful tour, and go sledding
headlong through mounded paperbark
copses, on reaches of maroon
grit, our wake unravelling
over green curd where logs lie digesting
and over the breast-lifting deeps
of the file snake, whom the women here
tread on, scoop up, clamp head-first in their teeth
and jerk to death, then carry home as meat.
Loudest without speech, we shear
for miles on the paddock of nymphaeas
still hoisting up the paired pied geese,
their black goslings toddling below them.
We, a family with baby and two friends,
one swift metal skin above the food-chains,
the extensible wet life-chains of which
our civility and wake are one stretch,
the pelicans circling over us another
and the cat-napping peace of the secure,
of eagles, lions and two-year-old George
asleep beneath his pink linen hat as
we enter domains of flowering lotus.
In our propeller’s stiffened silence
we stand up among scalloped leaves
that are flickering for hundreds of acres
on their deeper water. The lotus
prove a breezy nonhuman gathering
of this planet, with their olive-studded
rubbery cocktail glasses, loose carmine roses,
salmon buds like the five-fingertips-joined
gesture of summation, of ecco!
waist-high around us in all their greenery
on yeasty frog water. We receive this
sidelong, speaking our wiry language
in which so many others ghost and flicker.
We discuss Leichhardt’s party and their qualities
when, hauling the year 1845
through here, with spearheads embedded in it,
their bullock drays reached and began skirting
this bar of literal water
after the desert months which had been
themselves a kind of swimming,
a salt undersea plodding, monster-haunted
with odd very pure surfacings.
We also receive, in drifts of calm
hushing, which fret the baby boy,
how the fuzzed gold innumerable cables
by which this garden hangs skyward
branch beneath the surface, like dreams.
The powerful dream of being harmless,
the many chains snapped and stretched hard for that:
both shimmer behind our run back
toward the escarpments where stallion-eyed
Lightning lives, who’d shiver all heights
down and make of the earth
one oozing, feeding peneplain.
Unprotected Lightning: there are his wild horses
and brolgas, and far heron not rising.
Suddenly we run over a crocodile.
On an unlilied deep, bare even
of minute water fern, it leaped out,
surged man-swift straight under us. We ran over it.
We circle back. Unhurt, it floats, peering
from each small eye turret, then annuls
buoyancy and merges subtly under,
swollen leathers becoming gargoyle stone,
chains of contour, with pineapple abdomen.
CUMULUS
Repeatedly out of grazed plateaux, the Dividing
Range assumes, soaring after gliding,
into high countries, not peaked but cumulus
in evergreen black and mossy bleached khaki
out under antarctic grey and razory blues,
horizons above the nation, now visited rarely
except in polemic hiking, or on the ski niveaux.
We turned away to ochre and surf sands long ago
and secret cattleyards never formed a traceable city.
White cloud still assembles daily along each island
far above our South Sea levels. Mist forest, tussock sops
under redoubled height drink fog along the Tops
and newly earthed rivers edge out of sphagnum overloads
to shin down human clay and unhuman cobbled roads
to the short east, to the brown west ocean of land;
the cello necks of tree ferns spread as they come uncurled
and screech-red parrots fly, with many stops,
toward the beech trees of the southern world.
On the varying heights where stupendous heights are brewed
out of clear air by pitch and altitude
few have yet lived, in all the centuries. Some have stayed.
Many themes attended the hibernation of Ned Kelly:
the fat moth-feast of the tribes, whip bird and rifle bird,
moleskin prospectors each working his vein of solitude;
Thunderbolt emerging from the wet cave of his treasure
sights a coach down through timber, spurs into ballad measure –
but these disappear down the crumples of the possum-skin rug,
the great ravines of catchment. Jindabygone, Adamemory.
Of Governors fleeing heat on the hill stations, we recall Jimmy,
but the sleepout in the dark ranges has weakened its tug
and retreat is continually modelled. Our plateau capital
avoids its own heights and nearby mountains. They are all
cloud-shadowed with new dry forest. The vixen feeds her cubs,
and kangaroos fold down to graze, above the human suburbs.
Neither fantasy nor fear has built an eagle’s nest fortress
to top our nonfiction poetry. We’ve put the wild above us.
FEDERATION STYLE ON THE NORTHERN RIVERS
And entering on the only smooth road
this steamer glides past the rattling shipyard
where they’re having the usual Aboriginal
whale-feast in reverse, with scaffolding and planking;
engine smoke marching through blue sheoak trees
along the edge of Jack Robertson farms,
the river opens and continually opens
and lashed on deck, a Vauxhall car,
a bulb to squawk, great guillotine levers,
high diamond-buttoned leather club chairs
and dressing-table windscreen to flash afar:
in British cherry metal, detailed in mustard
it cruises up country with a moveless wheel.
In the town it approaches, a Habsburg-yellow store
Provisions – Novelties – J. Cornwell Prop.
contains a knot of debt that has reached
straining point, tugging between many poor
selector farmers and several not necessarily
rich city suppliers. Mobilised, it can tear
the store apart, uproot many families
and tomorrow the auditor will be in town
and the car will be parked just where he comes
after a prolonged hilarious midday dinner
I see your town’s acquired a motor –
You fancy those beasts, do you, Stickney?
One face grows inspired, in step with the other.
What is that sly joker Cornwell at?
asks the Bank of Australasia’s swank bow window:
How can he have afforded a motor?
but a schooner bee deflects the questioner.
Would you like to take a spin in her,
Stickney? – I daresay your books will wait
for half an hour … One mounts from the left,
one hoists the crankhandle. Directly, indirectly
they wind down the street over horsemanures
of varying fatness, past the Coffee Palace
unconcerned with ales – Stickney, you’re a marvel!
Just aim her straight and don’t shout Whoa!
Tread on that to slow her: don’t tug the wheel –
Children running, neighbours cheering, Go it, Jim!
Mr Cornwell lifts his hat to the faces greeting him.
Smashing water-windows along the parallel
wheeltracks of the cart-cut river road
they pass the deeply laden Cornwell shop-boat
Turn inland here: we will have drier going.
I agree she’d be a buy, Stickney: I’d have to think –
Think how to waste more afternoon
with the tall affection of local tales:
… And old Tom Beattie managing himself
along, like a bad horse; you hear him curse it:
Hold up, you bugger! Walk! – Mr Cornwell,
we should get back, to your ledgers. – Yes.
Take the left fork two miles on. A shortcut –
The shortcut ends in blackpudding bog
and no country curricles bowling by it.
Dear God, Cornwell, I must catch tomorrow’s boat!
but heaving, corduroying, pole-levering all fail
and Cornwell must vanish through the rung timber.
