Collected Poems
Page 24
bearing even the unloaded strap rifles
the Government would still be pursuing
a decade later, along with the brothers.
I have come as far as officials
and sergeants ever came, telling their
hillbilly yarns: the boy-headed calf,
the barbed wire across the teenage bedroom,
the dead wife backpacked forty miles
in a chaff bag, but gutted to save weight.
I have passed where their cars’ spoke wheels
slid and stopped, and the silent vines hung.
Since beyond the exact words, I need
the gesture with which they were said,
the horizons and hill air that shaped them,
the adze-faceted timbers of the kitchen
where they were repeated to the old people
who, having heard nothing about war,
had sent the boys three days round trip
in to town for saltpetre and tobacco.
I need the angle of cloud forest
visible through that door, the fire chains
and the leaf tastes of tank water there.
I will only have history, lacking these,
not the words as they have to be
spoken out, in such moments:
centrally, so as to pass the mind
of cheerful blustering authority
and paralyse it in its dream –
right in the unmeant nick of time
even as the rails were shutting
on the wide whooping yard of adventure
and making it a cattle chute
that led through jokes and accoutrements
to the long blood trail a-winding.
I need not think the brothers were
unattracted by a world venture
in aid of the woman Belgium
or not drawn by herd-warmth towards
the glorious manhunting promised them
by fellows round pipe-drawing fires
outside the beast-pavilions they slept in.
I need remember only the angel
poverty wrestles with in vast places
to know the power of abandon
people want, with control, to touch
when they tell hillbilly stories
and knowing it well, to uncover
how the brothers missed their legendary
Anzac chance, I need only
sit on this rusty bedstead, on a known
vanished sleepout verandah and reflect
how the lifelong lordly of space
might speak, in discernment of spirits
at the loud surcingled overseer’s
very first bawled genial insult
to any of theirs. Not the camel’s-back-
breaking, trapped slight, but the first.
1980 IN A STREET OF FEDERATION HOUSES
In 1980, in a street of Federation houses
a man is brushing his hair inside a car
while waiting for his children. It is his access day.
Men down the street – one perched high
as an oldtime sailor, others hauling long lines –
are dismantling a tree, from the top down. A heavy
branch drops, out of keen gristing noise, and runs
dragging all the stumpy hauliers
inwards on their ropes, then hangs swinging.
In 1964, the same man, slightly plumper,
is proclaiming in the Union bar Now let
us watch the angels dance on the head of a pill!
He does not mean, but swallows, a methedrine tablet.
In the same year he consents for the first time
to find the woodchoppers at the Easter Show
faintly comical, in their cricketing whites and singlets,
starting in handicap order to knock on wood:
one chopper, two choppier, then a clobbering
increment of cobbers, down in the grunting arena –
he assigns them to 1955, an obsolete year,
and the whole Labor Movement
shifts and re-levels in his mind
like mercury, needing new calibrations.
In 1824 in another country
present to his albums, small children run all day
breathing lint in a cavernous tropic factory
lit by weak globes on which older lint has caramelled.
They work from dawn to palm-frond-clattering dark
loading bales of packaged shirts onto trucks
driven by tribesmen who smoke, as they do themselves,
like the Industrial Revolution, paper chimneys in their cursing mouths.
Upcountry, men of the Thirties in 1950s uniform
instruct youths and girls of the starving fourteen hundreds
how to conjure with rifles the year 1792.
Their ammunition is the first packaged goods they have handled.
To reproduce yourself is to admit defeat!
His dashing friend had said it, in the year
he was told about cadmium fish, and blamed for the future.
To reproduce oneself? Who ever did that?
Most perhaps, before the Industrial Revolution
but then permanent death came in; all the years,
all the centuries now had to fit into one lifetime.
As did Heaven. Which drew Hell.
The Bomb and the Club Méditerranée had to lie
down together –. He begins to see his educators
as missionaries of the new unending death.
He shifts to another year, along the band
of his car’s stereo, and his children are playing
in a tent on sandy grass;
can there be a time in which this scene is not a bibelot?
Now that up the suburban street that leads to the past
a figure is leading not greyhounds but Afghan hounds
and on the beach beyond, women who enter the surf
shielding a web of dusty lint emerge
and each is wearing a feather!
THE MILK LORRY
Now the milk lorry is a polished submarine
that rolls up at midday, attaches a trunk and inhales
the dairy’s tank to a frosty snore in minutes
but its forerunner was the high-tyred barn of crisp mornings,
reeking Diesel and mammary, hazy in its roped interior
as a carpet under beaters, as it crashed along potholed lanes
cooeeing at schoolgirls. Long planks like unshipped oars
butted, levelling in there, because between each farm’s
stranded wharf of milk cans, the work was feverish slotting
of floors above floors, for load. It was sling out the bashed
paint-collared empties and waltz in the full,
stumbling on their rims under ribaldry, tilting their big gallons
then the schoolboy’s calisthenic, hoisting steel men man-high
till the glancing hold was a magazine of casque armour,
a tinplate ’tween-decks, a seminar engrossed
in one swaying tradition, behind the speeding doorways
that tempted a truant to brace and drop, short of town,
and spend the day, with book or not, down under
the bridge of a river that by dinnertime would be
tongueing like cattledogs, or down a moth-dusty reach
where the fish-feeding milk boat and cedar barge once floated.
THE BUTTER FACTORY
It was built of things that must not mix:
paint, cream and water, fire and dusty oil.
You heard the water dreaming in its large
kneed pipes, up from the weir. And the cordwood
our fathers cut for the furnace stood in walls
like the sleeper-stacks of a continental railway.
The cream arrived in lorried tides; its procession
crossed a platform of workers’ stagecraft:
Come here
Friday-Legs! Or I’ll feel your hernia –
Overalled in milk’s colour, men moved the heart of milk,
separated into thousands, along a roller track – Trucks?
That one of mine, son, it pulls like a sixteen-year-old –
to the tester who broached the can lids, causing fat tears,
who tasted, dipped and did his thin stoppered chemistry
on our labour, as the empties chattered downstage and fumed.
Under the high roof, black-crusted and stainless steels
were walled apart: black romped with leather belts
but paddlewheels sailed the silvery vats where muscles
of the one deep cream were exercised to a bullion
to be blocked in paper. And between waves of delivery
the men trod on water, hosing the rainbows of a shift.
It was damp April even at Christmas round every
margin of the factory. Also it opened the mouth
to see tackles on glibbed gravel, and the mossed char louvres
of the ice-plant’s timber tower streaming with
heavy rain all day, above the droughty paddocks
of the totem cows round whom our lives were dancing.
ROMAN CAGE-CUPS
Polish, at a constant curving interval, within
a layer of air between the inner and outer
skins of a glass beaker, leaving only odd struts integral.
Pause, and at the same ablative atom-
by-atom rate, sculpt the outer shell to an openwork
of rings, or foliage, or a muscular Elysium –
It made for calm paste and a steady file
that one false stroke, one twitch could cost a year’s time,
a good billet, your concubine. Only the cups were held noble.
Plebs and immigrants fashioned them, punters
who ate tavern-fried pike and talked Vulgate.
The very first might have been made as a stunt, as
the life-gambit of a slave. Or a joke on the feasting scene:
a wine-bowl no one coarsely drunk could handle
nor, since baseless, easily put down,
a marvel of undercutting, a glass vessel
so costly it would exact that Roman gravity,
draw blood, and feud, if grasped without suavity.
The one depicting Thracian Lycurgus
strangled by amorous vines for slighting Bacchus
could hardly have survived an old-time bacchanal.
The glass flowers of Harvard, monks’ micro pen-lace, a chromosome
needled to grow wings on a horse (which they’d also have done),
the freely moving ivory dragons-inside-a-dragon
ball of Cathay – the impossible is a groove:
why else do we do it? Even some given a choice
would rather work the metaphors than live them, in society.
But nothing, since sparkle became permanent in the thumbs
and rib-cages of these craftsmen, has matched their handiwork
for gentleness, or edge. They put the gape into agapé,
these factory products, of all Rome’s underground Gothic:
cups transfigured by hand, too delicate to break.
Some, exported beyond the Rhine as a miss-
ion civilisatrice, have survived complete and unchipped
a sesquimillennium longer than the trumpets (allude,
allude) of the arena. Rome’s very hardest rock.
THE LAKE SURNAMES
There are rental houseboats down the lakes now.
Two people facing, with drinks, in a restaurant party
talk about them: That idiot, he ran us aground
in the dark! These fishermen rescued us,
towed us off the mudbank. They were frightening actually,
real inbred faces, Deliverance people
when we saw them by torchlight in their boat –
For an instant, rain rattles at the glass
and brown cardboards of a kitchen window
and drips lamplight-coloured out of soot
in the fireplace, hitching steam off stove-iron.
Tins of beeswax, nails and poultice mixture
stick to shelves behind the door. Triangular
too, the caramel dark up under rafters
is shared, above one plank wall, by the room
where the English housekeeper screamed
at a crisp bat on the lino. Guest room,
parents’ room, always called the room
with tennis racquet and rifle in the lowboy.
Quick steps jingle the glassed cabinet
as a figure fishes spoons from scalding water
(‘what’s not clean’s sterilised’) in the board-railed
double triangle of a kerosene-tin sink,
a real Bogan sink, on the table.
The upright wireless, having died when valves vanished,
has its back to the wall. It is a plant for money
guarded by a nesting snake, who’ll be killed when discovered.
The new car outside, streaming cricket scores,
is a sit-in radio, glowing, tightly furnished
but in the Auburn wood stove, the fire laps
and is luxury too, in one of them flood years.
– With only the briefest pause, the other
answers: There aren’t that many full-time
surnames down the lakes. If you’d addressed them
as Mr Blanche, Mr Woodward, Mr Legge,
Mr Bramble, or Palmer, your own surname,
you’d probably have been right. And more at ease.
NOCTURNE
Brisbane, night-gathered, far away
estuarine imaginary city
of houses towering down one side
of slatted lights seen under leaves
confluence of ranginess with lush,
Brisbane, of rotogravure memory
approached by web lines of coke and grit
by sleepers racked in corridor trains
weatherboard incantatory city
of the timber duchess, the strapped port
in Auchenflower and Fortitude Valley
and bottletops spat in Vulture Street
greatest of the floodtime towns
that choked the dictionary with silt
and hung a navy in the tropic gardens.
Brisbane, on the steep green slope to war
brothel-humid headquarters city
where commandos and their allies fought
down café stairs, belt buckle and boot
and once with a rattletrap green gun.
In midnight nets, in mango bombings
Brisbane, storied and cable-fixed,
above your rum river, farewell and adieu
in marble on the hill of Toowong
by golfing pockets, by deep squared pockets
night heals the bubbled tar of day
and the crab moon, rising, reddens above
Brisbane, rotating far away.
LOTUS DAM
Lotus leaves, standing feet above the water,
collect at their centre a perfect lens of rain
and heel, and tip it back into the water.
Their baby leaves are feet again, or slant lips
scrolled in declaration; pointed at toe and heel
they echo an unwalked sole in their pale green crinkles
and under blown and picket blooms, the floor
of floating leaves rolls light rainwater marbles
back and forth on sharkskins of anchored rippling.
Each speculum, pearl and pebble of the first water
rides, sprung with weight, on its live mirroring skin
tipped green and loganberry, till one or other sky
redeems it, beneath bent foils and ferruled canes
where cupped pink bursts all day, above riddled water.
AT MIN-MIN CAMP
In the afternoon, a blue storm walloped and split
like a loose mainsail behind us. Then another
far out on the plain fumed its corrugated walls.
A heavy dough of cloud kept rising, and reached us.
The speeding turbid sky went out of focus, fracturing
continually, and poured. We made camp on a verandah
that had lost its house. I remembered it: pitsawn pine
lined with newspaper. People lived on treacle and rabbit
by firelight, and slept under grain-bag quilts there.
It was a lingering house. Millions had lived there
on their way to the modern world. Now they longed for and feared it.
It had been the last house, and the first.
Dark lightnings tore the ground as we ripped up firewood
and when the rain died away to conversation, and parted
on refreshed increasing star-charts, there arose
an unlikely bushfire in the ranges. The moon leaped from it,
slim, trim in perfect roundness. Spiderwebs palely yellow
by firelight changed sides, and were steel thread, diamante.
Orange gold itself, everything the moon gave, everywhere
was nickel silver, or that lake-submerged no-colour
native to dreams. Sparse human lights on earth
were solar-coloured, though: ingots of a homestead,
amoebae that moved and twinned on distant roads
and an unfixed anomaly, like a star with land behind it.
We were drinking tea round a sheet-iron fire on the hoards
bearing chill on our shoulders, like the boys who’d slept
on that verandah, and gone to be wandering lights
lifelong on the plains. You can’t catch up to them now
though it isn’t long ago: when we came from the Rift Valley
we all lived in a small star on the ground.
From the Rift we also carried the two kinds of fear
humans inherit: the rational kind, facing say weapons,
and the soul’s kind, the creeps. Awe, which warns of law.
The two were long bound together, in the sacred
cultures of fright, that called shifting faces to the light’s edge:
none worse than our own, when we came dreaming of houses.
Then the sacred turned fairytale, as always. And the new thing,
holiness, a true face, constant in all lights,
was still very scattered. It saved some. It is still scattered.
Many long for the sacred lights, and would renew their lore
in honoured bantustans – no faery for the laager of the lagerphone –