Collected Poems

by Les Murray

  indeed are rehearsed, with flies and dinnertime fan,

  but die out, over west mountains

  erased with azure, into spring-cool nights

  and the first flying insects

  which are the small weeds of a bedroom window.

  Early in the month, the valley was a Friesian cow:

  knobbed black, whitened straw.

  Alarming smokes bellied up behind the heights of forest.

  Now green has invested fires’

  fixed cloud-shadows; lower gum boughs are seared chestnut.

  Emerald kingparrots, crimson-breasted, whirr

  and plane out of open feed sheds.

  Winds are changeable. We’re tacking.

  West on rubbed blue days,

  easterlies on hot, southerly and dead calm for rain.

  Mercury is near the moon, Venus at perigee

  and frogs wind their watches all night on swampy stretches

  where waterhens blink with their tails at dusk, like rabbits

  and the mother duck does her cripple act.

  Dams glitter like house roofs again.

  The first wasp comes looking for a spider to paralyse:

  a flimsy ultralight flier

  who looks like a pushover, but after one pass lifts

  you, numb, out of your trampoline. Leaves together

  as for prayer or diving, bean plants erupt

  into the grazing glory. Those unnibbled spread their arms.

  Poddy calves wobbling in their newborn mushroom colours

  ingest and make the pungent custard of infancy.

  Sign of a good year, many snakes lie flattened

  on the roads again. Bees and pollens drift

  through greening orchards. And next day it pours rain:

  smokes of cloud on every bushland slope,

  that opposite, wintry haze. The month goes out facing backwards.

  OCTOBER

  Freshwater and Salt

  It’s the opening of the surf season

  thirty miles away east;

  most things speak a different dialect

  over there on the coast.

  Here, the rising wave comes as

  grass. The animals drink it

  thirstily. It’s a sweetwater ocean.

  If your house is fenced in, it’ll sink it.

  Fire and snakes swim in it;

  you have to slash and mow.

  Time for rotary blades, and weeping salt water

  with your whole skin as you make them go.

  It isn’t in fact such a whelming

  tide. But it’s an ever-swelling one

  you have to keep in balance, like the Dutch.

  Much worse when it doesn’t run.

  Between us and the saltwater breakers

  there’s that rind, too, of chip-frying city

  twelve thousand miles long, that locals

  will come home from soon with gritty

  trunksful and running shoes full

  of ground bottle, ground coral, ground shell.

  I guess we’re all flesh of that shell

  and will broach it by New Year, and wade gingerly

  up to our nacres in salt swirl,

  even we freshwater pearlers

  and privately pale herbage hurlers

  happiest on the grassed forms of groundswell.

  NOVEMBER

  The Misery Cord

  IN MEMORY OF F.S. MURRAY

  Misericord. The Misery Cord.

  It was lettered on a wall.

  I knew that cord, how it’s tough to break

  however hard you haul.

  My cousin sharefarmed, and so got half:

  half dignity, half hope, half income,

  for his full work. To get a place

  of his own took his whole lifetime.

  Some pluck the misery chord from habit

  or for luck, however they feel,

  some to deceive, and some for the tune –

  but sometimes it’s real.

  Milking bails, flannel shirts, fried breakfasts,

  these were our element,

  and doubling on horses, and shouting Score!

  at a dog yelping on a hot scent –

  but an ambulance racing on our back road

  is bad news for us all:

  the house of community is about

  to lose a plank from its wall.

  Grief is nothing you can do, but do,

  worst work for least reward,

  pulling your heart out through your eyes

  with tugs of the misery cord.

  I looked at my cousin’s farm, where he’d just

  built his family a house of their own,

  and I looked down into Fred’s next house,

  its clay walls of bluish maroon.

  Just one man has broken the misery cord

  and lived. He said once was enough.

  A poem is an afterlife on earth:

  Christ grant us the other half.

  DECEMBER

  Infant Among Cattle

  Young parents, up at dawn, working. Their first child can’t

  be his own babysitter, so as they machine the orphaned milk

  from their cows, he must sit plump on the dairy cement,

  the back of his keyhole pants safetypinned to a stocking

  that is tied to a bench leg. He studies a splotch of cream,

  how the bubbles in it, too thick to break, work like

  the coated and lucid gravels in the floor. On which he then dings

  a steel thing, for the tingling in it and his fingers

  till it skips beyond his tether. As the milkers front up

  in their heel-less skiddy shoes, he hangs out aslant

  on his static line, watching the breeching rope brace them

  and their washed udders relieved of the bloodberry ticks

  that pull off a stain, and show a calyx of kicking filaments.

  By now the light stands up behind the trees like sheet iron.

  It photographs the cowyard and dairy-and-bails in one vast

  buttery shadow wheel on the trampled junction of paddocks

  where the soil is itself a concrete, of dust and seedy stones

  and manure crustings. When his father slings a bucketful

  of wash water out the door, it wallops and skids

  and is gulped down by a sudden maw like the cloth of a radio.

  Out and on out, the earth tightens down on the earth

  and squeezes heat up through the yellow grass

  like a surfaceless fluid, to pool on open country,

  to drip from faces, and breed the insect gleams of midday.

  Under the bench, crooning this without words to his rag dog,

  he hears a vague trotting outside increase – and the bull

  erupts, aghast, through the doorway, dribbling, clay in his curls,

  a slit orange tongue working in and out under his belly –

  and is repulsed, with buckets and screams and a shovel.

  The little boy, swept up in his parents’ distress, howls then

  but not in fear of the bull, who seemed a sad apparition:

  a huge prostrate man, bewildered by a pitiless urgency.

  JANUARY

  Variations on a Measure of Burns

  When January is home to visit her folks

  and official work is a public hoax,

  soy sprouts dotting the serpentine strokes

  ploughs combed in the lacquered

  hill soil that each afternoon’s rainstorm soaks

  weave a green jacquard

  and zucchini and wart squash and Queensland Blues

  (not the dog, but the pumpkin) squeak together like shoes

  in tractor trailers, and nectarines bruise

  from being awaited,

  but the grizzled haze over mountain views

  looks faintly methylated

  because Drought, who’s in on every forced sale,


  thought he may have seen the farmers granted bail

  this summer, has the continent in his entail.

  Even smashed, he’s seen you:

  that old man up a back road fumbling his mail

  gets letters from El Niño.

  Disappointment, holiday and heatwave shilly-shally

  round this snaky time of year. Stock prices plunge and rally

  but the government’s retreated for keeps from this valley:

  the flash brick erstwhile

  Whitlam toilet block lacks its school, and stands orphaned on its gully;

  the PO’s a closed file.

  We retain a public phone and some dirt main roads

  on whose corners part-time squatters tip sprawling loads

  of gravel for drunk drivers who for lifetimes and by codes

  like Whoa car! and hug-the-crown

  miraculously get home to treat their families like toads

  or finish upside down

  in the dark, miles from town,

  standing on my scalp with the rain’s sparks falling upward,

  windscreen a collective noun,

  delighted by the spinning tyre slowing above the cupboard

  and the glare-path through inverted trees – myself as I could

  have been, through brutal labour for a bare livelihood,

  myself on that quest

  few families dare acknowledge, let alone go with you on,

  the hunger for the Rest

  when mortgage world time politics, everything’s on top of one

  and the teenage girl you married is not months but decades gone:

  I’m sorry for myself in his sideburns and cardigan.

  O he will like that,

  murmurs his wife, wrestling farm accounts, steering above the rocks,

  then bundling the children off to bed, switching off the box:

  Television makes you fat!

  Our concern cuts away at once. Moorhen and flying fox

  outside creak identical rusty keys in their vocal locks

  and the dark stands pat.

  FEBRUARY

  Feb

  Seedy drytime Feb,

  lightning between its teeth,

  all its plants pot-bound.

  Inside enamelled rims

  dams shrink their mirroring shields,

  baking the waterlilies.

  Days stacked like clay pigeons

  squeezed from dust and sweat.

  Two cultures: sun and shade.

  Days dazed with actuality

  like a bottle shot

  sniping fruit off twigs,

  by afternoon, portentous

  with whole cloud-Atlantics

  that rain fifteen drops.

  Beetroot and iron butter,

  bread staled by the fan,

  cold chook: that’s lunch with Feb.

  Weedy drymouth Feb, first cousin of scorched creek stones,

  of barbed wire across gaunt gullies, bringer of soldered

  death-freckles to the backs of farmers’ hands. The mite-struck

  foal rattles her itch on fence wires, like her mother,

  and scraped hill pastures are grazed back to their charred

  bulldozer stitchings. Dogs nip themselves under the tractor

  of needy Feb, who waits for the raw eel-perfume

  of the first real rain’s pheromones, the magic rain-on-dust

  sexual scent of Time itself, philtre of all native beings –

  Lanky cornhusk Feb,

  drilling the red-faced

  battalions of tomatoes

  through the grader’s slots:

  harvest out of bareness,

  that semidesert mode.

  Worn grasshopper month

  suddenly void of children;

  days tucking their tips in

  with blackberry seeds to spit

  and all of life root-bound;

  stringy dryland Feb.

  MARCH

  Masculeene, Cried the Bulls

  Bang! it was autumn,

  right on the first of the month,

  cool overcast after scorchers

  and next day it poured.

  Four and a half inches

  of rise in the dams, of wet in garden soil:

  we know how long you were, rain,

  four and a half deep inches.

  As fresh green abolished

  this summer’s only white-blond month

  the first autumnal scents

  were ginger and belladonna

  and as beds resumed their blankets

  at the mopoke hour, bulls sang.

  Among cattle, the more masculine

  the higher the voice is pitched.

  Our pumpkins took

  first prize at Nabiac Show,

  where a horse named Danielle

  pirouetted, and posed on a tub,

  and men raced through solid timber

  backwards, with aimed steel strides,

  and we met the Anglo-Nubian

  tree-climbing goat, maker of,

  and sheep of, the desert.

  This was the weekend after clocks

  jerked the sun an hour forward,

  and all the time, leafage

  of various winebottle colour

  sprouted on the roses and lemon trees

  and dew twinkled for longer

  on the lengthening paddocks.

  APRIL

  The Idyll Wheel

  And so we’ve come right round the sun

  to April again. It’s unique again

  like each month, each year. Much less of summer

  reached April this year. Yet grass burgeoned after Easter.

  Now fenced cultivations rug up, blue and tan

  and old fruit trees declare themselves russet

  along the creeks, or that dismantling brown

  of cedars long ago spied from a mountain.

  Into blue dimensionless as an ideal

  with a Y-shaped prop, Mavis hoists the unreal

  statures, flat and wet, of her whole family

  for her glance and the warm sun to re-fill

  above the pleats and hoed flickers of their hill

  where Jack and her father move bent, keeping busy.

  This isn’t that year. But their names are there still

  with Careys, Monks, Arnolds, the farms of surnames gone.

  Here, roads have different names coming and going.

  Over Bulby kinks one the Murrays rode along

  into the hard-to-discern ruins of an idyll,

  beige, drab with new bush, country emptied and unshaven.

  On went Johnnie and Bella, east went Mina and Jimmy

  whose family milked squatting so as not to get lazy,

  Uncle Hughie, Aunt Grace – us girls say Mrs Murray! –

  and years turned with handles were the first farming wheel.

  This month, this year, Hiles’ cattle mar the air

  with saleyards’ caked music. Before dinner, Charlie sang

  The old folk had their reasons over the horizontal

  queer hang of his guitar. Then we who say muttai

  ate the last of this year’s, boiled. Those who say corn

  didn’t all fly Macquarie Street dachas, though, here:

  many are as poor as settlers ever were.

  Now small frogs turn bronze. With the Post Office gone

  nowhere’s left for district people to meet by accident.

  It has to be by knowledge. Ellen Harris, who taught me

  to walk, Joyce new-widowed, and Vera and Norm

  bail up cows, or watch milk suffuse the machine-glass

  like a blizzarding idea. And I’m visible to them

  on this wheel that was our Law, once. I haven’t milked,

  again, and it’s sundown. They are the last to dairy.

  Still, farmlets and cattle-spreads also live by touches,

  a stump burning, dam scoopings, new wire stitch
es

  and unstated idylls had driving to and from.

  THE TRANSPOSITION OF CLERMONT

  After the Big Flood, we elected

  to move our small timber city

  from the dangerous beauty of the river

  and its fringed lagoons

  since both had risen to destroy us.

  Many buildings went stacked on wagons

  but more were towed entire

  in strained stateliness, with a long groyning sound,

  up timber by traction engines.

  Each moved singly. Life went on round them;

  in them, at points of rest.

  Guests at breakfast in the Royal Hotel, facing

  now the saddlery, now the Town Hall.

  We drank in the canted Freemasons

  and the progressive Shamrock, but really

  all pubs were the Exchange. Relativities

  interchanged our world like a chess game:

  butcher occluded baker, the police

  eclipsed both brothels, the dance hall

  sashayed around the Temperance Hall,

  front doors sniffed rear, and thoughtfully ground on.

  Certain houses burst, and vanished.

  One wept its windows, one trailed mementoes up the street.

  A taut chain suddenly parted and scythed down

  horses and a verandah. Weed-edged black rectangles

  in exploded gardens yielded sovereigns and spoons.

  That ascent of working architecture

  onto the pegged plateau was a children’s crusade

  with lines stretching down to us.

  Everything standing in its wrong accustomed place.

  My generation’s memories are intricately transposed:

  butcher occluding dance music, the police

  eclipsed by opportunity, brothels sashaying royally

  and, riding sidesaddle up shined skids, the Town Hall.

  Excited, we would meet on streets that stayed immutable

  sometimes for weeks; from irrecoverable corners

  and alleys already widening, we’d look

  back down at our new graves and childhood gardens,

  the odd house at anchor for a quick tomato season

  and the swaying nailed hull of a church going on before us.

  And many allotments left unbought, or for expansion

  never filled up, above, as they hadn’t below.

  What was town, what was country stayed elusive

  as we saw it always does, in the bush,

  what is waste, what is space, what is land.