Collected Poems

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.