by Les Murray
Opposite lay the acre where Queensland was first planted
as the pineapple of cropped heads in hot need of sugar walls.
There too, by that defiance, were speedboat mansions up canals
and no prescriptive ulcers or divorces apparent in them
though one, built late in life perhaps, spilled grapefruit down its lawns.
And the river curved on, and a navy-backed elephant stood
in the mountains for mission boys who stepped right up, through the drum,
and belted blue eyes into red-leather Kingdom Come.
At the highway bridge, in sight of plateaux, we turned back
and since the shore of the present was revetments and raw brick
or else flood-toppled trees with mullet for foliage, I looked
over at the shore of the past. Rusty paddocks, with out-of-date palms,
punt ramps where De Sotos crossed; there, in houses patched with tan,
breezeways wound to green bedrooms with framed words like He Moaneth,
the sort of country I might traverse during death.
Returning downstream, over the Regatta Ground’s liquid tiling,
we passed through the place where, meeting his only sister
in a new draft to the Port, the tugged escapee snatched the musket
of a redcoat captor, aimed and shot her dead –
and was saluted for it, as he strangled, by the Commandant.
In sight of new motels, this opposite potential stayed defined
and made the current town look remote, and precarious, and kind.
GUN-E-DARR
The red serpent of cattle, that eclipsed the old dreaming serpents,
there it still is, the first stock route, winding out of far lilac ranges
onto the grassed sea-floor of the plain. The shortest distance
between two points being, in life, the serpentine,
it was dissimulation to have angled it to a crankshaft
of official roads. I see it now, smoking high and raw with dust
as it curved and lengthened in its first days. And if taking
the continent was no walkover, then there were brave men
on both sides, amid the bellowing, the scattering whipcrack undulations
and sleepy flooding onward of the blood-red cattle serpent,
destroyer of sacred dance circles, and equally of little hoed farms.
WORDS OF THE GLASSBLOWERS
In a tacky glass-foundry yard, that is shadowy and bright
as an old painter’s sweater stiffening with light,
another lorry chockablock with bottles gets the raised thumb
and there hoists up a wave like flashbulbs feverish in a stadium
before all mass, nosedive and ditch, colour showering to grit,
starrily, mutually, becoming the crush called cullet
which is fired up again, by a thousand degrees, to a mucilage
and brings these reddened spearmen bantering on stage.
Each fishes up a blob, smoke-sallow with a tinge of beer
which begins, at a breath, to distil from weighty to clear
and, spinning, is inflated to a word: the paraison
to be marvered on iron, box-moulded, or whispered to while spun –
Sand, sauce-bottle, hourglass – we melt them into one thing:
that old Egyptian syrup, that tightens as we teach it to sing.
HIGH SUGAR
Honey gave sweetness
to Athens and Rome,
and later, when splendour
might rise nearer home,
sweetness was still honey
since, pious or lax,
every cloister had its apiary
for honey and wax
but when kings and new doctrines
drained those deep hives
then millions of people
were shipped from their lives
to grow the high sugar
from which were refined
frigates, perukes, human races
and the liberal mind.
LEVITIES OF THE SHORT GIANT
Afternoon, and the Short Giant takes his siesta
on a threadbare ruby sofa which, being shorter than he,
curves him into the half moon or slice-of-pawpaw position,
hull down, like a deep-timbered merchantman, with both hands on deck,
his stubbed head for poop and lantern, and at the bow
twin figureheads: bare feet with soles the earthen green
of seed potatoes, rimmed with old paintings’ craquelure.
Massive mosquito-scabbed legs slope down into dungaree;
asleep in his own arms, he makes odd espresso noises.
This man, who warms cold ground by lying on it, who hand-parks his car,
who knows in his shoulders crab from scissors from flying mare
is most of all the man who attaches the thick wheels
and coins of weight, the bronzes and black steels,
and hoists (tingling) them, from knees to arrh! collarbone to full
extension overhead, the left and the right, bending his milled bar
– I breathe them up, shutting my thighs, and those fat ladies sing
to crack my spine’s teeth. O but when I drop them, they ding
the stage hollow, jolt gravity itself, and chuck me in the air.
ON REMOVING SPIDERWEB
Like summer silk its denier
but stickily, o ickilier,
miffed bunny-blinder, silver tar,
gesticuli-gesticular,
crepe when cobbed, crap when rubbed,
stretchily adhere-and-there
and everyway, nap-snarled or sleek,
glibly hubbed with grots to tweak:
ehh weakly bobbined tae yer neb,
spit it Phuoc Tuy! filthy web!
THE ASSIMILATION OF BACKGROUND
Driving on that wide jute-coloured country
we came at last to the station,
its homestead with lawn and steel awnings
like a fortress against the sun.
And when we knocked, no people answered;
only a black dog came politely
and accompanied us round the verandahs
as we peered into rooms, and called brightly
Anyone home? The billiard room,
shadowed dining room, gauze-tabled kitchen
gave no answer. Cricket bats, ancient
steamer trunks, the chugging coolroom engine
disregarded us. Only the dog’s very patient
claws ticked with us out of the gloom
to the grounds’ muffling dust, to the machine shed
black with oil and bolts, with the welder
mantis-like on its cylinder of clocks
and then to the stallion’s enclosure.
The great bay horse came up to the wire,
gold flares shifting on his muscles, and stood
as one ungelded in a thousand
of his race, but imprisoned for his sex,
a gene-transmitting engine, looking at us
gravely as a spirit, out between
his brain’s potent programmes. Then a heifer,
Durham-roan, but with Brahman hump and rings
around her eyes, came and stood among us
and a dressy goat in sable and brushed fawn
ogled us for offerings beyond
the news all had swiftly gathered from us
in silence, and could, it seemed, accept.
We had been received, and no one grew impatient
but only the dog, host-like, walked with us
back to our car. The lawn-watering sprays
ticked over, and over. And we saw
that out on that bare, crusted country
background and foreground had merged;
nothing that existed there was background.
ARAUCARIA BIDWILLI
Big leaves of the native
tamarind,
vein-gathered, spread coppery black-green.
Finger-bone beads, refreshing, sour-sweet,
are the amber berries of the native tamarind.
Nearby to far up kink invisibly winging
calls, above vine-strung palisade tracks
and over steep gullies, on the ringing mountain:
stupendous, racial green, the first crosstreed soaring
allosaur-skinned primeval pines, their shrapnel
cones dizzying above gullies, on the rayed mould mountain,
lanterns of fitted flour, that can drop to kill
on once-sacred gullies, along the two-peaked mountain.
These are the trees that teach me again
every tradition is a choke on metaphor
yet the limits to likeness don’t imprison its ends,
climbing above gullies, through mote-drift on the mountain.
SPRING
A window glimmering in wheeltracked clay
and someone skipping on the windowsill;
spins of her skipping-rope widen away.
She is dancing light and water
out of the cold side of the hill
and I’ve brought rhyme to meet her;
rhyme has been ill.
ACCORDION MUSIC
A backstrapped family Bible that consoles virtue and sin,
for it opens top and bottom, and harps both out and in:
it shuffles a deep pack of cards, flirts an inverted fan
and stretches to a shelf of books about the pain of man.
It can play the sob in Jesus!, the cavernous baastards note,
it can wheedle you for cigarettes or drop a breathy quote:
it can conjure Paris up, or home, unclench a chinstrap jaw
but it never sang for a nob’s baton, or lured the boys to war.
Underneath the lone streetlight outside a crossroads hall
where bullocks pass and dead girls waltz and mental gum trees fall
two brothers play their plough-rein days and long gone spoon-licked nights.
The fiddle stitching through this quilt lifts up in singing flights,
the other’s mourning, meaning tune goes arching up and down
as life undulates like a heavy snake through the rocked accordion.
EXPERIENTIAL
Rubbish! As the twig is bent the tree does not grow, at all.
In fact, on the high side of the bend small new twigs appear
and the strongest becomes a new trunk, and restores the vertical.
THE GREENHOUSE VANITY
Sea-perch over paddocks. Dunes. Salt light everywhere low down
just like the increasing gleam between Bass Strait hills
nine thousand years ago. In an offshore crumbling town
the Folk Museum moans of a stormy night, and shrills:
You made the oceans rise! Nonsense, it was you!
The Pioneers Room and Recent Times are quarrelling.
By day the flannelled drone: up at daylight, lard and tea,
axe and crosscut till black dark, once I shot a ding-
o at the cradle, there at fifteen, the only white woman
ploughing by hand, parrot pie, we sewed our own music –
Recent Times blink and hum; one bends to B-cup a pair,
each point the rouge inside a kiss; one boosts the tape-deck:
Hey launder your earnings with a Green gig: show you care!
Rock millionaire,
When every city’s Venice we’ll all go to Venus, yeah!
Smoke green shit there
– till coal conveyors rattle and mile-high smokestacks pant
Beige! Beige! on every viewscreen. This should re-float your Hardships,
despoiler, black-shooter! – Nature’s caught up with you, Trendywank! –
So. We changed the weather. – Yep. Humans. We made and unmade the maps.
SLIP
This week, one third of Australia is under water.
– Sydney newspaper report, 9 April 1989
Over the terra cotta
speeds a mirrored sun
on bare and bush-mossed water
as a helicopter’s stutter
signals a stock-feed run,
and cubic fodder-bombs splash
open on sodden islands
in their yolk of orange squash,
tugging out each mud galosh,
sheep climb those twenty-inch highlands,
and vehicles at a miles-wide rushing
break in the human map
stare mesmerised at the whooshing
pencil strokes that kink where a crushing
car rolls, and turns on like a tap.
A realised mirage reaches
into tack-sheds and yards
and laps undreamed-of beaches
wadded with shock-tranced creatures.
Millennia of red-walled clouds
have left the creekbeds unable
to let the spreading glaze
spill off the water table,
though here and there a cable
braids light between crumbling cays.
Hand-milling tobacco, each dent
in his bronze oilskin adrip,
the scraped owner surveys the extent
of death-slog when the red-ware continent
glistens next week in its slip,
and when all the shapes and shallows
of inland ocean turn grass
and scarlets and purples and yellows,
when lizards eat clouds in jammed hollows
and horizons turn back into glass.
AIRCRAFT STRESSED-SKIN BLOWOUT MID-PACIFIC
(UNITED AIRLINES FLIGHT 811)
The miles-high bubble civility
ruptured, and instantly the tear
stormed with a jetlike volatility
of baggage shoes people into air
darkly white and shrilling as the pole
that every unbuckled thing was whirling to.
Windmilling toward seats already nowhere
a member of the cabin crew
was going with the West out the hole
when legs in a scissor lock around her
and male hands in her clothes before the blue
absolute mastered it, raped her of fall
then, under restored equal pressure,
gestured in a tear-halo with joking humility.
ARIEL
Upward, cheeping, on huddling wings,
these small brown mynas have gained
a keener height than their kind ever sustained
but whichever of them fails first
falls to the hawk circling under
who drove them up.
Nothing’s free when it is explained.
POLITICS AND ART
Brutal policy,
like inferior art, knows
whose fault it all is.
MAJOR SPARRFELT’S TRAJECTORY
Öland, Southern Baltic, 1 June 1676
Our ship was a rope-towered town
built inside its own wall;
carved Romans, niches, mantlings in gilt
made its stern a palace, a Popish cathedral.
That day as we joined battle
my sword swung so wide with the tilt
our mighty Crown assumed, turning
that my crossed right hand missed its hilt
as from lidded and horsecollar ports
the ponderous ship’s cannon ran back:
shrieks mingled with bronze thunder below
– all life then split upward with the crack
of glare that stripped my rational mind
and left me in the one mind of animals.
I flew above crosstrees, over lightning-defined
tangling and clubbed recoil of ships,
every cannon-hit a tube of mortal screams
burrowed deep in a closing gun-wall;
soldiers’ massed steel heads bent to muske
ts
thick as cart-shafts, which squirted a blue pall.
Swordsmen, blood-seekers, crisscrossed everywhere,
letting some from one, from another all,
blood of men, as of fowls and beasts; these pompiers
funèbres in their leaping Aztec skill
were true limbs of perpetual motion.
Remembrance never touched me, overhead,
angel to fragments, that I too was such a one.
Removed, I watched as from the dead,
orbiting the royal park of mastheads
like a soul through war’s updraft of souls,
above where men flared flintlocks intently,
flung, plunged, hung seeping in cloth scrolls
above a chipped sea of continual white tussocks,
of drifting fires, collapsed floats, drinking men,
Swedish blue, Danish red – a cloud-wide bolster
of foresail canvas caught me then
and I slid, grabbed, tumbled to the deck
of our own king’s frigate Draken.
By a singular grace of the Almighty
lifted out of death by the rays of detonation,
I lived fifty-four more years, fought the Tsar,
saw great-grandchildren, was Münchhausen’s uncle, governed Gotland,
but never attained the disembodying era
of television, that I’d foreshadowed. Yet in my life of command
a similar vantage of death would never leave me.
Red health and fierce moustaches
still served their turn, and were true
in the world of acts, but no longer could deceive me;
as a smiling woman said once: Colonel, you
I imagine saying I’ll miss me when I’m gone.
I partly have, but there’s true foretaste and gain
in times even fear’s tight wig does not stay on.
A TORTURER’S APPRENTICESHIP
Those years trapped in a middling cream town
where full-grown children hold clear views
and can tell from his neck he’s really barefoot
though each day he endures shoes,
he’s what their parents escaped, the legend
of dogchained babies on Starve Gut Creek;
be friends with him and you will never
