Collected Poems

by Les Murray

  A Man Sitting With Knees Against His Chest:

  baga waga, knees up, the burial-shape of a warrior.

  Eagles flying below me, I will ascend Wallanbah,

  that whipcrack country of white cedar

  and ruined tennis courts, and speed up on the tar.

  In sight of the high ranges I’ll pass the turnoff to Bundook,

  Hindi for musket – which it also took

  to add to the daylight species here, in the prim-

  al 1830s of our numbered Dreamtime

  and under the purple coast of the Mograni

  and its trachyte west wall scaling in the sky

  I will swoop to the valley and Gloucester Rail

  where boys hand-shunted trains to load their cattle

  and walk on the platform, glancing west at that country

  of running creeks, the stormcloud-coloured Barrington,

  the land, in lost Gaelic and Kattangal, of Barandan.

  THE IDYLL WHEEL: CYCLE OF A YEAR AT BUNYAH, NEW SOUTH WALES, APRIL 1986–APRIL 1987

  PREFACE

  An east-running valley where two hooded creeks make junction

  and two snoring roads make a rainguttered cross of function:

  there, each hamlet of house-and-sheds stands connected and alone

  and the chimneys of old houses are square bottles cut from iron.

  Gum forest is a solid blue cloud on the hills to the south

  and bladygrass and chain rust round its every wheeltracked mouth.

  Being back home there, where I am all my ages,

  I wanted to trace a year through all its stages.

  I would start after summer, to catch a subtly vernal effect

  (April is also when I conceived the project).

  At one poem per month, it would take a baker’s dozen

  to accommodate the stretch and overlap of season

  into season, in any single year –

  and to be real, the year had to be particular

  since this wasn’t to be a cyclic calendar

  of miniature peasantry painted as for a proprietor.

  No one can own all Bunyah. Names shouted over coal-oil lamps

  cling to their paddocks. Bees and dingoes tax the cattlecamps.

  As forefather Hesiod may have learned too, by this time,

  things don’t recur precisely, on the sacred earth: they rhyme.

  To illuminate one year on that known ground

  would also draw light from the many gone underground

  with steel wedges and glass and the forty thousand days lost or

  worked, daylight to dark, there between Forster and Gloucester.

  So: as grass tips turn maroon in a further winter

  I present how time revolved through the spiral of a year

  average, says experience, in erosions and deposit of seeds.

  I thank Rosalind Atkins, whose burin opens up further leads

  into the heart of it, making the more exquisite lines –

  and I thank Alec Bolton for a book that dresses ours to the nines.

  APRIL

  Leaf Spring

  The long-limbed hills recline high

  in Disposals khaki boiled in tankwater

  or barbed-wire-tattered navy wool.

  A dust of oil blues the farther air.

  Crotches of black shade timber

  thicken, and walled sky insets;

  friezes of the one tree are repeated

  along ridgelines, and the gesture of the heights

  continues beneath the valley floor,

  outcrops stepping toward the roofed creeks’

  greener underground forest, spacing

  corrugated corn flats. Contour-line by contour

  cattle walk the hills, in a casual-seeming

  prison strung from buried violins.

  Sparse houses sit unpacked for good, each

  among sheds, in its wheeltracked star.

  Hobnail and elastic-side, bare and cloven feet:

  you can’t know this landscape in shoes, or with ideas

  like relevance. It is a haughty pastoral

  bent fitfully to farming’s fourteen-hour days.

  Disked-up ground in unseasonable heat

  burns purple, and the tracks of a foam-white

  longed-for watersnake are brown down every incline.

  Season of smoke and parrots pecking the road,

  half-naturalized autumn. Fruit is almost done

  though few deciduous imports have yet decided;

  no rain, and the slow tanks fill with dew;

  nothing flowering, yet colour is abundant:

  it is leaf spring, that comes on after heat.

  The paperbark trees that suck on swampy clay

  are magnified in skims of leek and sherry.

  Though growth’s gone out of grass, and cattle nose

  green from underneath its tawny pelt,

  the creek trees cluster, showered with pale expansion

  from inside themselves, as if from dreams of rain;

  heightening gum trees are tipped bronze and citrine

  and grey-barked apple trees are misted round

  with rosy blue – the aged angophora trees

  that sprout from every live part of themselves

  and drop their heavy death along the ground

  on just such a still day here

  as shade broadens south of everything

  and fugitive whisky-bottle blink

  and windscreen glance point the paddock air.

  MAY

  When Bounty Is Down To Persimmons and Lemons

  In May, Mary’s month,

  when snakes go to sleep,

  sunlight and shade lengthen,

  forest grows deep,

  wood coughs at the axe

  and splinters hurt worse,

  barbed wire pulls through

  every post in reverse,

  old horses grow shaggy

  and flies hunker down

  on curtains, like sequins

  on a dead girl’s ball gown.

  Grey soldier-birds arrive

  in flickers of speed

  to hang upside down

  from a quivering weed

  or tremble trees’ foliage

  that they trickle down through.

  Women’s Weekly summer fashions

  in the compost turn blue.

  The sun slants in under things

  and stares right through houses;

  soon pyjamas will peep, though,

  from the bottoms of trousers.

  Night-barking dogs quieten

  as overcast forms

  and it rains, with far thunder,

  in queer predawn storms;

  then the school bus tops ridges

  with clay marks for effort,

  picking up drowsy schoolkids,

  none of them now barefoot,

  and farmers take spanners

  to the balers, gang ploughs

  and towering diesel tractors

  they prefer to their cows.

  JUNE

  The Kitchens

  This deep in the year, in the frosts of then

  that steeled sheets left ghostly on the stayed line,

  smoked over verandah beds, cruelled water taps rigid,

  family and visitors would sit beside the lake

  of blinding coals, that end of the detached kitchen,

  the older fellows quoting qoph and resh

  from the Book of Psalms, as they sizzled phlegm

  (some still did it after iron stoves came

  and the young moved off to cards and the radio)

  and all told stories. That’s a kind of spoken video:

  We rode through from the Myall

  on that road of the cedarcutter’s ghost.

  All this was called Wild Horses Creek then;

  you could plait the grass over the pommel

  of your saddle. That grass don’t grow now.
>
  I remember we camped on Waterloo that night

  there where the black men gave the troopers a hiding.

  The garden was all she had: the parrots were at it

  and she came out and said to them, quite serious

  like as if to reasonable people They are my peas.

  And do you know? They flew off and never come back.

  If you missed anything: plough,

  saddle, cornplanter, shovel,

  you just went across to Uncle Bob’s

  and brought it home. If he

  was there, he never looked ashamed:

  he’d just tell you a joke,

  some lies, sing you a poem,

  keep you there drinking all night –

  Bloody cruel mongrels, telling me the native bear

  would grow a new hide if you skun it alive.

  Everybody knows that, they told me. I told them

  if I caught any man skinning bears alive

  on my place, he’d bloody need a new hide himself.

  Tommy Turpin the blackfellow said to me More better

  you walk behind me today, eh boss.

  Might be devil-devil tell me hit you with the axe

  longa back of the head. I thought he was joking

  then I saw he wasn’t. My word I stayed behind

  that day, with the axe, trimming tongues on the rails

  while he cut mortises out of the posts. I listened.

  I wis eight year old, an Faither gied me the lang gun

  tae gang doon an shuit the native hens at wis aitin

  aa oor oats. I reasoned gin ye pit ae chairge

  i the gun, pouder waddin an shot, ye got ae shot

  sae pit in twa, ye’d get twa. Aweel, I pit in seven,

  liggd doon ahint a stump, pu’d the trigger – an the warld

  gaed milky white. I think I visited Scotland

  whaur I had never been. It was a ferlie I wis seean.

  It wis a sonsy place. But Grannie gard me gang back.

  Mither wis skailan watter on ma heid, greetin. Aa they found

  o the gun wis stump-flinders, but there wis a black scour thro the oats,

  an unco ringan in ma ears, an fifteen deid native hens.

  Of course long tongue she laughed about that other

  and they pumped her about you can guess and hanging round there

  and she said He’s got one on him like a horse, Mama,

  and I like it. Well! And all because of you know –

  Father couldn’t stand meanness.

  When Uncle you-know-who

  charged money for milking our cows

  that time Isabel took bad

  Father called him gutless,

  not just tin-arsed, but gutless.

  Meanness is for cowards, Father reckoned.

  The little devil, he says to the minister’s wife

  Daddy reckons we can’t have any more children,

  we need the milk for the pigs. Dear I was mortified –

  Poor Auntie Mary was dying Old and frail

  all scroopered down in the bedclothes pale as cotton

  even her hardworking old hands Oh it was sad

  people in the room her big daughters performing

  rattling the bedknobs There is a white angel

  in the room says Mary in this weird voice And then

  NO! she heaves herself up Bloody no! Be quiet!

  she coughed and spat Phoo! I’ll be damned if I’ll die!

  She’s back making bread next week Lived ten more years.

  Well, it was black Navy rum; it buggered Darcy.

  Fell off his horse, crawled under the cemetery fence.

  Then some yahoos cantered past Yez all asleep in there?

  All but me, croaks Darcy. They off at a hand gallop,

  squealing out, and his horse behind them, stirrups belting it.

  The worst ghost I ever saw

  was a policeman and (one of the squatters)

  moving cattle at night.

  I caught them in my headlights.

  It haunted me. Every time

  I went in to town after that

  somehow I’d get arrested –

  I’ll swear snakes have got no brains!

  The carpet snake we had in the rafters

  to eat rats, one day it et a chook.

  I killed it with the pitchfork, ran a tine

  through the top of its head, and chucked it

  down the gully. It was back in a week

  with a scab on its head and another under its chin.

  They bring a house good luck but they got no brain.

  Then someone might cup his hand short of the tongue

  of a taut violin, try each string to be wrung

  by the bow, that spanned razor of holy white hair

  and launch all but his earthly weight into an air

  that breathed up hearth fires strung worldwide between

  the rung hills of being and the pearled hills of been.

  In the language beyond speaking they’d sum the grim law,

  speed it to a daedaly and foot it to a draw,

  the tones of their scale five gnarled fingers wide

  and what sang were all angles between love and pride.

  JULY

  Midwinter Haircut

  Now the world has stopped. Dead middle of the year.

  Cloud all the colours of a worn-out dairy bucket

  freeze-frames the whole sky. The only sun is down

  intensely deep in the dam’s bewhiskered mirror

  and the white-faced heron hides in the drain with her spear.

  Now the world has stopped, doors could be left open.

  Only one fly came awake to the kitchen heater

  this breakfast time, and supped on a rice bubble sluggishly.

  No more will come inside out of the frost-crimped grass now.

  Crime, too, sits in faraway cars. Phone lines drop at the horizon.

  Now the world has stopped, what do we feel like doing?

  The district’s former haircutter, from the time before barbers, has shaved

  and wants a haircut. So do I. No longer the munching hand clippers

  with locks in their gears, nor the scissors more pointed than a beak

  but the buzzing electric clipper, straight from its cardboard giftbox.

  We’ll sit under that on the broad-bottomed stool that was

  the seat for fifty years of the district’s only sit-down job,

  the postmistress-telephonist’s seat, where our poor great-aunt

  who trundled and spoke in sour verdicts sat to hand-crank

  the tingling exchange, plugged us into each other’s lives

  and tapped consolation from gossip’s cells as they unlidded.

  From her shrewd kind successor who never tapped in, and planes

  along below the eaves of our heads, we’ll hear a tapestry

  of weddings funerals surgeries, and after our sittings

  be given a jar of pickle. Hers won’t be like the house

  a mile down the creek, where cards are cut and shuffled

  in the middle of the day, and mortarbombs of beer

  detonate the digestion, and they tell world-stopping yarns

  like: I went to Sydney races. There along the rails,

  all snap brims and cold eyes, flanked by senior police

  and other, stony men with their eyes in a single crease

  stood the entire Government of New South Wales

  watching Darby ply the whip, all for show, over this fast colt.

  It was young and naïve. It was heading for the post in a bolt

  while the filly carrying his and all the inside money

  strained to come level. Too quick for the stewards to note him

  Darby slipped the colt a low lash to the scrotum.

  It checked, shocked, stumbled – and the filly flashed by.

  As he came from weighing in, I caught Darby’s eye

&n
bsp; and he said Get out of it, mug, quite conversationally. –

  AUGUST

  Forty Acre Ethno

  The Easter rains are late this year

  at this other end of a dry hard winter.

  Low clouds grow great rustling crops of fall

  and all the gully-courses braid and bubble,

  their root-braced jugs and coarse lips pour

  and it’s black slog for cows when, grass lake to puddle,

  a galloping dog sparks on all four.

  It’ll be plashy England here for a while

  or boggy Scotland, by the bent straw colour

  and the breaks of sun mirror-backed with chill.

  Coming home? It was right. And it was time.

  I had been twenty-nine years away

  after books and work and society

  but society vanished into ideology

  and by then I could bring the other two home.

  We haven’t been out at night since we came

  back, except last month, in the United Kingdom.

  The towns ranged like footlights up the highway

  and coastline here rehearse a subtle play

  that’s only staged in private by each family.

  Sight and life restored by an eye operation

  my father sits nightly before the glass screen

  of a wood-burning slow combustion stove. We see

  the same show, with words, on television.

  Dad speaks of memories, and calls his fire homely:

  when did you last hear that word without scorn

  for something unglossy, or some poor woman?

  Here, where thin is poor, and fat is condition,

  ‘homely’ is praise and warmth, spoken gratefully.

  Its opposite lurks outside in dark blowing rain.

  Horses are exposed to it, wanly stamping out

  unglazed birth ware for mosquitoes in the coming season

  and already peach trees are a bare wet frame

  for notional little girls in pink dots of gingham.

  Cars coming home fishtail and harrow the last mile,

  their undersea headlights kicking gum trees around eerily;

  woodducks wake high in those trees, and peer from the door

  they’ll shove their ducklings out of, to spin down in their down,

  sprawl, and swim to water. Our children dog the foot-

  steps of their grandfather, learning their ancient culture.

  SEPTEMBER

  Mercurial

  Preindustrial haze. The white sky rim

  forecasts a hot summer. Burning days