Collected Poems

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,
r />   intricate in brass, with bonnet grooves,

  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.