by Les Murray
but there were eventually also joyous days
when the sea of Martinique yielded to the Marmara’s glitter.
Now a messenger approaches the Executioner’s House
beyond which only one entire man may pass
into this precinct on the headland of the city,
this Altai meadow of trees and marble tents.
An indifferent face is summoned to the grille
and the letter the messenger brings goes speeding on
to the woman concluding Glory Be among the cushions.
The rest withdraw, rustling, as she reads the superscription:
From the Commander of the Faithful to the Most Illustrious
Lady of the Seraglio – Mother, I have today
made a treaty with the Tsar, ceding one province
and retaining two we had also certainly lost.
These favourable terms arise from the Tsar’s great need
of his army to face an invasion by the man Bonaparte,
Commander of the Faithless, to borrow your title for him.
Prospects for the Empire are improved at last
by this invasion, which will come. Russia is very great
but Bonaparte may defeat her. He may be Chinghiz Khan.
Our mightiest enemy would thereby be nullified
and such a victory might well ensnare the victor.
On the other hand, Bonaparte may lose – and then I think
with his legend broken, all Europe would turn on him
with Russia in the van, and engaged in that direction.
I must add, mother, that as I released the Tsar
for this coming contest, I had in mind our cousin
the Empress Josephine, dear playmate of your childhood
whom the Viper of the Nile so shamefully cast off
two years ago, in his quest for a Habsburg connection.
I was holding an exact balance: the choice was mine
to release the Tsar, or keep him engaged a while longer –
our treacherous Janissaries beat their spoons for this option.
If I held him, destruction of our old foe was assured:
I savoured that a little. Then I savoured his shielding us from
the spirit that drives France. As you taught me, the spirit is inseparable –
thus the honour of two wronged ladies tipped my decision.
Such moments, not I, are the shadow of God upon Earth. –
Aimée Dubucq de Rivéry, mother of the Sultan
walks in her pavilion, her son’s letter trailing in her hand
and the carpets are a beach far beyond the Barbary pirates.
There she skips with Marie-Josèphe, her poor first cousin
but poor concerns parents only. A black manservant
attends each girl, as they splash filigree in the tide-edge
and gather it, as coral and pierced shells, which the men receive
for in that age young women are free, and men are passive.
GLAZE
Tiles are mostly abstract:
tiles come from Islam:
tiles have been through fire:
tiles are a sacred charm:
After the unbearable parallel
trajectories of lit blank tile,
figure-tiles restore the plural,
figuring resumes its true vein.
Harm fades from the spirit as tiles
repeat time beyond time their riddle,
neat stanzas that rhyme from the middle
styles with florets with tendrils of balm.
Henna and mulberry mos-
aics controvert space:
lattice on lattice recedes
through itself into Paradise
or parrot starbursts framing themes
of stars bursting, until they salaam
the Holy Name in sprigged consonants
crosslaced as Welsh metrical schemes.
Conjunct, the infinite doorways
of the mansions of mansions amaze
underfoot in a cool court, with sun-blaze
afloat on the hard water of glaze.
Ur shapes under old liquor
ziggurats of endless incline;
cruciform on maiolica
flourishes the true vine.
Tulip tiles on the grate of Humoresque
Villa join, by a great arabesque
cream boudoirs of Vienna, then by left-
handed rhyme, the blue pubs of Delft
and prominence stands in a circle
falling to the centre of climb:
O miming is defeated by mime:
circles circle the PR of ominence.
Cool Mesach in fused Rorschach,
old from beyond Islam,
tiles have been to Paradise,
clinkers of ghostly calm.
FARMER AT FIFTY
He could envisage
though he didn’t invent
the breeze-steered dam
in its khaki pug,
cattle twinned at their drinking
and the baby frogs
still in their phlegm.
Woodducks drowsing on their feet
enriching the dam wall,
he could foresee them,
but not the many jets
of the native waterlily
burning Bunsen-blue
on many a high stem
out of leaf-clouds
on the anchored stream.
He didn’t know they’d come.
But: what he’d done, stopping
erosive water’s hurry
had also been to build
a room for them.
The same with home.
He could foresee
daily bunting on the line,
white, pink, swallowtail and square
flags announcing a baby
but not what came then,
nor who had come;
not the childhoods he’d be in
and left in, eventually.
On the dam wall, the dog
sits beside its tail
and turns its head with him
as he looks into the tops
of the trees downstream.
THE TUBE
FOR ANN MOYAL AND ROB CRAWFORD
Many resemble Henry Sutton
in sleevelinks in Ballarat
who invented television;
later several would do that
but not in eighteen eighty seven.
‘Telephany’ – he named it well:
his Greek was more correct.
His design was theoretical
but: Nipkow disc and Kerr effect
and selenium photocell,
all were there. It would have worked
and brought the Melbourne Cup alive
to Ballarat, which was his object –
but no one had yet sent an aerial wave
and wire had this defect:
signals couldn’t race so fast
along it that they’d sustain a picture.
Only when the horse-drawn age was past
could horses surge into the air
with music and gunfire, galloping broadcast.
Tremendous means, and paltry vision:
some will dare ask you about that
in your interview, Henry Sutton,
in Ballarat, in your floreat,
standing telephanous on your front lawn.
SHALE COUNTRY
Watermelon rinds around the house,
small gondolas of curling green
lined with sodden rosy plush;
concrete paths edged with kerosene,
tricycles and shovels in the yard
where the septic tank makes a fairy ring;
a wire gate leads into standing wheat,
cream weatherboard overlaps everything –
and on the wheatless side, storm-blue
plaques curl off the spotted-gum trees
which, in
new mayonnaise trunks, stand over
a wheelbarrow on its hands and knees.
BARRENJOEY
Along Sydney’s upraised finger
diced suburbs mass and hide
in bush, or under brilliant towels
that swirl – or brace and glide
man-hung out over blue horizons
that roll in on the land.
Twinned dips, with imprinted nipples
or not, cool in the sand,
and castles top odd headlands
and rarely a shark-bell rings;
loud-hailers honk French: Cardin! Croissants!
and detectives wear G-strings.
Where the poet Brennan wandered
the soaked steeps of his mind
now men and women warily
strike deals that can’t be signed.
Where once in salt sheet-iron days
a girl might halt her filly
under posies atop cornstalks three yards high,
groves of the Gymea lily,
the northward sandstone finger, knobbed
with storms and strange injections
has beckoned Style, and Porsche windscreens
glimmer with cool deflections –
but Pittwater’s still a quiver of masts
and Broken Bay in the sun
is seamed with tacking arrowheads
and that’s always gone on.
Modest wealth’s made a paradise garden
of that range and its green sound
so to throw sand in the evil eye
some scandal must be found.
To flesh a bone for envy’s pup
now scandals must be found.
THE INTERNATIONAL TERMINAL
Some comb oil, some blow air,
some shave trenchlines in their hair
but the common joint thump, the heart’s spondee
kicks off in its rose-lit inner sea
like an echo, at first, of the one above
it on the dodgy ladder of love –
and my mate who’s driving says I never
found one yet worth staying with forever.
In this our poems do not align.
Surely most are if you are, answers mine,
and I am living proof of it,
I gloom, missing you from the cornering outset –
and hearts beat mostly as if they weren’t there,
rocking horse to rocking chair,
most audible dubbed on the tracks of movies
or as we approach where our special groove is
or our special fear. The autumn-vast
parking-lot-bitumen overcast
now switches on pumpkin-flower lights
all over dark green garden sites
and a wall of car-bodies, stacked by blokes,
obscures suburban signs and smokes.
Like coughs, cries, all such unlearned effects
the heartbeat has no dialects
but what this or anything may mean
depends on what poem we’re living in.
Now a jet engine, huge child of a gun,
shudders with haze and begins to run.
Over Mount Fuji and the North Pole
I’m bound for Europe in a reading role
and a poem long ago that was coming for me
had Fuji-san as its axle-tree.
Cities shower and rattle over the gates
as I enter that limbo between states
but I think of the heart swarmed round by poems
like an egg besieged by chromosomes
and how out of that our world is bred
through the back of a mirror, with clouds in its head
– and airborne, with a bang, this five-hundred-seat
theatre folds up its ponderous feet.
GRANITE COUNTRY
Out above the level
in enormous room
beyond the diagram fences
eggs of the granite loom.
In droughts’ midday hum,
at the crack of winter,
horizons of the tableland
are hatched out of them
and that levelling forces
all the more to rise
past swamp, or thumbwhorled ploughing,
tor, shellback, cranium
in unended cold eruption.
Forces and strains of granite
ascended from a kingdom
abandon over centuries
their craft on the sky-rim,
sprung and lichened hatches,
as, through gaps in silence, what
made itself granite goes home.
THE OCEAN BATHS
Chinning the bar or Thirties concrete rim
of this ocean baths as the surf flings velleities of spray
brimming the bright screen
I am in not the sea but the sea’s television.
As the one starfish below me quivers up
through a fictive kelp of diffraction, I’m thinking of workers
who made pool-cementing last, neap tide by neap,
right through the Depression,
then went to the war, the one that fathered the Bomb
which relegated war to the lurid antique new nations
of emerging television. All those appalling horizontals
to be made vertical and kept the size of a screen –
I duck out of focus
down chill slub walls in this loud kinking room
that still echoes Fung blunger the swearwords Orh you Kongs
of men on relief for years, trapping ocean in oblongs,
and check out four hard roads tamed to a numinous
joke on it all, through being stood up side-on
and joined at their stone ends by bumper-smokers who could,
just by looking up, see out of relegation –
here the sky, the size of a mirror, the size of a fix
becomes imperative: I explode up through it beneath
a whole flowering height of villas and chlorine tiled pools
where some men still swear hard
to keep faith with their fathers
who are obsolete and sacred.
THREE LAST STANZAS
That’s the choice: most
as failures and tools
or an untrustworthy host
of immortal souls.
o
The owl who eats living
mice in the gloom
is still in the long
rehearsals for your freedom.
o
Absolutely anything
is absolute to those
who see the poem in it.
Relegation is prose.
MIRROR-GLASS SKYSCRAPERS
Jade suits pitched frameless up the sky
drift all day with sheer weather,
annexed cubes ascend and blend
at chisel points away high
on talc-green scintillant towers,
diurnal float-glass apparitions:
through their aspects airliners flow,
their decoration’s anything that happens.
Even their height above suburb
is reflected. Perfect borrowers’ rococo!
Outside, squared, has finally gone in,
closed over like steadying water,
to quote storms, to entertain strapped gondolas
and loose giants swimming in contour.
Inside yearning out isn’t seen;
work’s turned its back on sweat brilliantly –
but when they start to loom, these towers
disappear. Dusk’s lightswitches reveal
yellow Business branching kilotall
and haloed with stellar geometry.
THE LIEUTENANT OF HORSE ARTILLERY
Full tilt for my Emperor and King, I
galloped down the moonlit roads of Hungary
past poplar after Lombardy poplar tree
in our dear multicultural
Empi-
re alas! on a horse I didn’t know
had been requisitioned from a circus. Without fail
he leaped every tree-shadow lying like a fox’s tail
over the road, O despite whip, despite Whoa!
unswerving, he hurdled them. My leather shako jerked,
my holster slapped my hip, my despatch case too,
every leap! I was clubbed black and blue
inside my tight trousers. So many shadows lurked
to make him soar and me cry out, taking wing
every fifty metres the length of a desperate ride
for my Emperor and King, as our Empire died
with its dream of happy cultures dancing in a ring.
DOG FOX FIELD
The test for feeblemindedness was, they had to make up a sentence using the words dog, fox and field.
– Judgement at Nuremberg
These were no leaders, but they were first
into the dark on Dog Fox Field:
Anna who rocked her head, and Paul
who grew big and yet giggled small,
Irma who looked Chinese, and Hans
who knew his world as a fox knows a field.
Hunted with needles, exposed, unfed,
this time in their thousands they bore sad cuts
for having gaped, and shuffled, and failed
to field the lore of prey and hound
they then had to thump and cry in the vans
that ran while stopped in Dog Fox Field.
Our sentries, whose holocaust does not end,
they show us when we cross into Dog Fox Field.
HASTINGS RIVER CRUISE
I.M. RUTH AND HARRY LISTON, D. PORT MACQUARIE 1826
Getting under way in that friendly suburb of balconies
we were invited to imagine up to thirty woollen ships
and timber ships and beef ships with fattening sails
along the one-time quay. Then down Heaven-blued
olive water of the estuary, we saw how ocean’s crystal
penned up riverine tinctures. On our coast, every river
is a lake, for lack of force, and lives within its colour bar.
Upstream, past the bullock-faced and windjammer-ballasted shore
we passed where men in canary flannel were worked barefoot
on oystershells in shark tides. No one’s walked in Australia
since, for pride and sympathy. Sheds lay offshore, pegged to the water
and lascivious oysters, though they are nearly all tongue
didn’t talk drink, on their racks of phlegm, but lived it.
