Collected Poems
Page 25
but they are unfixed now, and recede, and suddenly turn pale as
an escaped wife dying of a dread poem. Or her child
who sniffs his petrol, and reels like a shot kangaroo:
something else, and not the worst, that happens in a shifting light.
Holiness is harder to inhale, for adventure or desperation.
It cleanses awe of fear, though not of detailed love,
the nomads’ other linkage, and maps the law afresh with it.
We left that verandah next day, and its ruined garden
of wire and daylilies, its grassy fringe of ancient pee scalds,
and travelled further west on a truck that had lost its body.
HEARING IMPAIRMENT
Hearing loss? Yes, loss is what we hear
who are starting to go deaf. Loss
trails a lot of weird puns in its wake, viz.
Dad’s a real prism of the Left –
you’d like me to repeat that?
THE SAD SURREALISM OF THE DEAF
It’s mind over mutter at work
guessing half what the munglers are saying
and society’s worse. Punchlines elude to you
as Henry Lawson and other touchy drinkers
have claimed. Asides, too, go pasture.
It’s particularly nasty with a wether.
First you crane at people, face them
while you can still face them. But grudgually
you give up dinnier parties; you begin
to think about Beethoven; you Hanover
next visit here on silly Narda Fearing – I SAY
YOU CAN HAVE AN EXQUISITE EAR
AND STILL BE HARD OF HEARING.
It seems to be mainly speech, at first,
that escapes you – and that can be a rest,
the poor man’s escape itch from Babel.
You can still hear a duck way upriver,
a lorry miles off on the highway. You
can still say boo to a goose and
read its curt yellow-lipped reply.
You can shout SING UP to a magpie,
but one day soon you must feel
the silent stopwatch chill your ear
in the doctor’s rooms, and be wired
back into a slightly thinned world
with a faint plastic undertone to it
and, if the rumours are true, snatches
of static, music, police transmissions:
it’s a BARF minor Car Fourteen prospect.
But maybe hearing aids are now perfect
and maybe it’s not all that soon.
Sweet nothings in your ear are still sweet;
you’ve heard the human range by your age
and can follow most talk from memory;
the peace of the graveyard’s well up
on that of the grave. And the world would
enjoy peace and birdsong for more moments
if you were head of government, enquiring
of an aide Why, Simpkins, do you tell me
a warrior is a ready flirt?
I might argue – and flowers keep blooming
as he swallows his larynx to shriek
our common mind-overloading sentence:
I’M SORRY, SIR, IT’S A RED ALERT!
AT THUNDERBOLT’S GRAVE IN URALLA
The New England Highway was formed
by Christian men who reckoned
Adam and Eve should have been
sodomized for the curse of work
they brought on humankind,
not drudgery, but work.
No luxury of distinctions.
None ever went to Bali. Some set out.
But roads were game reserves to Thunderbolt
when a bridge was a leap, and wheels
were laborious, trundling through the splashways.
There were two heights of people: equestrians
and those foreshortened on foot.
All were more dressed, because more naked.
That German brass band that Thunderbolt,
attended by a pregnant boy,
bailed up on Goonoo Goonoo Gap:
‘Gentlemen, if you are that poor
I’ll refund your twenty pound, provided
a horse I mean to shake wins at Tenterfield.’
And it did, arching its neck, and he did
by postal note at Warwick.
Hoch! Public relations by trombone!
No convict ever got off Cockatoo
Island by swimming except Thunderbolt.
His lady, Yellow Long or Long Yella,
whichever way the name points, swam
the channel from Balmain before him
bringing tucker and clothes, and she got
him past the sharks when he swam for it.
But who wouldn’t swim, and wear trousers
for a man pinched and bearded as the nine
lions on the courthouse coat of arms
with their tongues saying languish and lavish,
who took her from men who gasped romance
into her lungs and offered sixpence,
from her own heart-gelded tribesfolk
and white women’s dreadful eyes?
Though Uralla creek is floored with planks now
the amethystine light of New England
still seems augmented from beneath
both horizons; tin outside chimneys
still squeeze woodsmoke into the air
but the police cars come wailing their
unerotic In-Out In-Out,
red-shifting over Goonoo Goonoo.
Of all the known bushrangers,
those cropped in the floggers’ gulag,
those jostled by its Crown guards,
the bolters and the hoods were merely shot
or ironed or hanged. Only three required
frenzied extermination, with rituals:
Jackey Westaway, made monstrous by torture,
Fred Ward shot and head-pulped, Ben Hall
shot dead, and for several minutes afterwards.
All three were thieves. They likely never met.
All three stole the Crown’s magic pallium
and trailed it through the bush, a drag
for raging pursuit. On every snag
they left some white or blue – the red part
they threw away at once, disdaining murder.
Robbery with mock menaces? Why that is subsidy!
The part they died hard for was the part
they wouldn’t play, not believing the game worth murder.
Criminal noncomplicity! It was something nameless
above all stations, that critical magic
haloed in laughter. Tell Fred I need to be robbed Friday
or I’m jiggered! A deadly style suddenly felt lumbering,
battered with a slapstick. Our only indigenous revolution.
It took Ned Kelly to reassure policemen.
Why don’t we kill like Americans?
We started to. The police were pushing it
but we weren’t a republic for bringing things to a head
and these, even dying – Are you a married man?
cried Ward, and fired wide – helped wrong-foot mortal drama
and leave it decrepit, a police atmosphere.
In a few years, the game was boss and union.
Now society doesn’t value individuals
enough for human sacrifice.
You were a cross swell, Fred. You alone never
used a gang. Those always kill, as Hall learned.
I hope your children found your cache
and did good with it. They left some on deposit.
INFRA RED
FOR PROF. FRED HOYLE AND THE IRAS TELESCOPE
Dark stars that never fire,
brown dwarfs, whose deepening collapse
inward on themselves never tightens to fuse glory,
scorched dust the size of world
s, and tenuous
sandbars strung between the galaxies,
a universe dull with life:
with the eye and eye-adjuncts
mind sees only what is burning, the peak nodes of fury
that make all spiralling in on them
or coronally near, blowing outward from them,
look eager, intense, even brave. Most of the real
however is obscurely reflective, just sauntering along,
yarning across a ditch, or watching television,
vaguely dreaming, perhaps about pubic stuff,
getting tea ready. This absorbs most of the light
but is also family. It impoverishes to unreality
not to consider the dim, cannon fodder of stardom,
the gravities they are steepening to,
the unfathomable from which the trite is spoken.
And starry science is an evening-paper astrology
without the unknown bodies registered
only by total pain, only by dazzled joy,
the transits marked by a tight grip of the heart.
That the visible stars are suburbs and slow towns
hyped to light speed is the testimony of debris
and the serious swarms at rest in migrant trajectories.
Brilliance stands accused of all their losses.
Presence perhaps, and the inference of presence,
not light, should found a more complete astronomy.
It will draw in absence, too:
the pain-years between a love and its fulfilment,
the intricate spiral space of suppressed tradition
and all the warmth, whose peaks aren’t those of heat,
that the white dwarfs froze out of their galaxies.
POETRY AND RELIGION
Religions are poems. They concert
our daylight and dreaming mind, our
emotions, instinct, breath and native gesture
into the only whole thinking: poetry.
Nothing’s said till it’s dreamed out in words
and nothing’s true that figures in words only.
A poem, compared with an arrayed religion,
may be like a soldier’s one short marriage night
to die and live by. But that is a small religion.
Full religion is the large poem in loving repetition;
like any poem, it must be inexhaustible and complete
with turns where we ask Now why did the poet do that?
You can’t pray a lie, said Huckleberry Finn;
you can’t poe one either. It is the same mirror:
mobile, glancing, we call it poetry,
fixed centrally, we call it a religion,
and God is the poetry caught in any religion,
caught, not imprisoned. Caught as in a mirror
that he attracted, being in the world as poetry
is in the poem, a law against its closure.
There’ll always be religion around while there is poetry
or a lack of it. Both are given, and intermittent,
as the action of those birds – crested pigeon, rosella parrot –
who fly with wings shut, then beating, and again shut.
INVERSE BALLAD
Grandfather’s grandfather rode down from New England
that terrible steep road. One time there, his horse
shat over his shoulder. It’s not so steep now.
Anyway he was riding, and two fellows came
out of the brush with revolvers pointed at him:
Bail up! What joy have you got for the poor, eh?
Bail up? Ye’re never bushrangers? Wad ye shoot me?
My oath we’d shoot yer – . He looked them up and down,
poor weedy toerags both. Ye’d really shoot, then?
Masel, I never find it necessary.
Eh? You’re on our lay, are you? – Aye, I am.
Ward’s the name. – Not Thunderbolt? By Hell. Hmm.
They muttered some asides. Well, Mister Ward, you
are money on the hoof. A thousand’s a fair screw
for turning you in. Dead or alive, so ride!
We’re going to town to sell your pretty hide.
It must have felt lonely, riding ahead of them
knowing they could just as easily turn you in,
head lolling and blood dripping, strapped over your saddle.
When they reached the police post, the old sergeant listened
a moment, then snapped: Ye’ll gie me thae barkers;
hand them over! Constable, handcuff yon men!
Ye ignorant puir loons, did ye no ken
Thunderbolt’s no Scots. He disnae talk like me.
Ye’ll hae time tae regret bailing up Mister Murray!
Ward’s wintertime employer, had the police or he known.
RELICS OF SANDY
Beside the odd gene
just three pictures remain
of Uncle Sandy Beattie,
big fair man:
He used to swim his horse
through the flooded rivers
with bags tied on the saddle
when he was the mailman;
he’d hang on to its tail:
he couldn’t swim at all.
Once for a bet he
humped a ton of iron
sheets up from the jetty
to the pub at Tinonee
and found a man had ridden
up, clinging on the load:
Ye’ve bowed my legs, laddie.
A loudmouth in the pub
was needling Sandy
one night, talking fight,
all the men he’d stiffened,
how the big raw ones were easy.
Yes, McMahon, I hear ye.
He finished his beer.
It’s hard to take, McMahon,
and I’ll not take any more.
Barman, give me a room key.
And he took the bareknuckle man
upstairs to the room,
pushed him in, locked the door:
Now, man, it’s what you wanted,
no audience, we’re private.
Just you and me for it!
There was thunder up there.
All the bottles jinked about
in the bar, and the fighter
squealed like a poor rabbit.
The barman got a pound
when Sandy came downstairs:
Yon man shouldn’t have to
pay twice, for accommodation.
Sandy Beattie. Big fair man.
JOKER AS TOLD
Not a latch or lock could hold
a little horse we had
not a gate or paddock.
He liked to get in the house.
Walk in, and you were liable
to find him in the kitchen
dribbling over the table
with a heap behind him
or you’d catch a hoof
right where it hurt bad
when you went in your bedroom.
He grew up with us kids,
played with us till he got rough.
Round then, they cut him,
but you couldn’t ride him:
he’d bite your bum getting on,
kick your foot from the stirrup
and he could kick the spurs off
your boots. Almost hopped on with you,
and if he couldn’t buck you
he’d lie down plop! and roll
in his temper, and he’d squeal.
He was from the Joker breed,
we called him Joker;
no joke much when he bit you
or ate the Monday washing.
They reckon he wanted to be
human, coming in the house.
I don’t think so, I think he
wanted something people had.
He didn’t do it from love of us.
He couldn’t grow up to be a
full horse, and he wouldn’t be
a slave one.
I think he was looking for his childhood,
his foalhood and ours, when we played.
He was looking for the Kingdom of God.
WRITER IN RESIDENCE
I was good at the Common Room game
but when Dr X dropped a name
it hung in the air
like a parachute flare
far over my head, to my shame.
A PUBLIC FIGURE
To break the Judaeo-Christian mould was his caper
but the ethic he served torched him with its newspaper.
THE YOUNG WOMAN VISITOR
I never heard such boasting.
For two whole days while I was there
he never let up. He was the best axeman,
driver, horsebreaker, farmer, bullocky and judge
of standing timber ‘that ever God put guts in’.
He’s also had the best dog, the best car,
the best crop of corn and the very best eight-day clock
and he’d been the best psalm-singer in his church, too.
Someone had let a little boy grow old;
I saw that all these things were a posy of flowers
snatched out of a funeral wreath and offered
to me, or to anyone,
not a wreath that would lie heaped on his grave
but the little special one that would go down
diminishing past clay, and trembling, on his coffin.
THE GRANDMOTHER’S STORY
Just a few times in your life, you speak
those strange words. Or they speak themselves
out of you, before you can bite your tongue.
They are there, like a dream. You’re not sure you’ve spoken
but you see them hit the other person
like a stone into floodwater. No splash much
but they go right to the bottom. To the soul.
No use saying you’re sorry, or didn’t mean them.
I never liked Ted Quarrie. Partly the way
he treated women. More, and it’s the same,
the way he made poor Annie behave like him,
drinking and dribbling with Harold’s whisky friends,
falling on the floor. The way they drank it:
Heere’s luck! and pitch it down like castor oil;
they almost held their noses. They were like that at the show
when Ted sneaked up and pinched me. Hard, to hurt
and I hit him. Not slapped him. Shut my fist
and flattened him, in front of the whole showground.