by Les Murray
be shaved or uplifted, cool or chic.
He blusters shyly – poverty can’t afford instincts.
Nothing protects him, and no one.
He must be suppressed, for modernity,
for youth, for speed, for sexual fun.
Also, believing as tacitly as he
that only dim Godly joys are equal
while the competitive, the exclusive
class pleasures are imperative evil
they see him as a nascent devil,
wings festering to life in his weekly shirt,
and daily go for the fist-and-finger
hung at the arch of keenest hurt.
Slim revenge of sorority. He must shoot birds,
discard the love myth and search for clues.
But for the blood-starred barefoot spoor
he found, this one might have made dark news.
THE BALLAD OF THE BARBED WIRE OCEAN
No more rice pudding. Pink coupons for Plume. Smokes under the lap for aunts.
Four running black boots beside a red sun. Flash wireless words like Advarnce.
When the ocean was wrapped in barbed wire, terror radiant up the night sky,
exhilaration raced flat out in squadrons; Mum’s friends took off sun-hats to cry.
Starting south of the then world with new showground rifles being screamed at and shown
for a giggle-suit three feeds a day and no more plans of your own,
it went with some swagger till God bless you, Tom! and Daddy come back! at the train
or a hoot up the gangways for all the girls and soon the coast fading in rain,
but then it was flared screams from blood-bundles whipped rolling as iron bombs keened down
and the insect-eyed bombers burned their crews alive in off-register henna and brown.
In steep ruins of rainforest pre-affluent thousands ape-scuttling mixed sewage with blood
and fear and the poem played vodka to morals, fear jolting to the mouth like cud.
It was sleep atop supplies, it was pickhandle, it was coming against the wall in tears,
sometimes it was factory banter, stoking jerked breechblocks and filing souvenirs,
or miles-wide humming cattleyards of humans, or oiled ship-fires slanting in ice,
rag-wearers burst as by huge War Bonds coins, girls’ mouths full of living rice.
No one came home from it. Phantoms smoked two hundred daily. Ghosts held civilians at bay,
since war turns beyond strut and adventure to keeping what you’ve learned, and shown,
what you’ve approved, and what you’ve done, from ever reaching your own.
This is died for. And nihil and nonsense feed on it day after day.
MIDNIGHT LAKE
Little boy blue, four hours till dawn.
Your bed’s a cement bag, your plastic is torn.
Your breakfast was tap water, dinner was sleep;
you are the faith your olds couldn’t keep.
In your bunny rug room there were toys on the floor
but nothing is obvious when people get poor
and newspaper crackles next to your skin.
You’re a newspaper fairytale now, Tommy Thin,
a postnatal abortion, slick outer space thing,
you run like a pinball BING! smack crack BING!
then, strung out and spotty, you wriggle and sigh
and kiss all the fellows and make them all die.
ANTARCTICA
Beyond the human flat earths
which, policed by warm language, wreathe
in fog the limits of the world,
far out in space you can breathe
the planet revolves in a cold book.
It turns one numb white page a year.
Round this in shattering billions spread
ruins of a Ptolemaic sphere,
and brittle-beard reciters bore
out time in adamant hoar rods
to freight where it’s growing short,
childless absolutes shrieking the odds.
Most modern of the Great South Lands,
her storm-blown powder whited wigs
as wit of the New Contempt chilled her.
The first spacefarers worked her rope rigs
in horizontal liftoff, when to climb
the high Pole was officer class.
Total prehuman pavement, extending
beyond every roof-brink of crevasse:
Sterility Park, ringed by sheathed animals.
Singing spiritoso their tongueless keens
musselled carollers fly under the world.
Deeper out, our star’s gale folds and greens.
Blue miles above the first flowered hills
towers the true Flood, as it was,
as it is, at the crux of global lattice,
and long-shod humans, risking diamond there,
propitiate it with known laws and our wickedness.
DISTINGUO
Prose is Protestant-agnostic,
story, discussion, significance,
but poetry is Catholic:
poetry is presence.
THE PAST EVER PRESENT
Love is always an awarded thing
but some are no winners, of no awarding class.
Each is a song that they themselves can’t sing.
For months of sundays, singlehanded under iron, with the flies,
they used to be safe from that dizzying small-town sex
whose ridicule brought a shamed evasion to their eyes.
Disdaining the relegated as themselves, they eyed the vividest
for whom inept gentleness without prestige was slow.
Pity even the best, then, when they’re made second best.
Consider the self-sentenced who heel the earth round with shy feet
and the wallflower who weeps not from her eyes but her palms
and those who don’t master the patter, or whom the codes defeat.
If love is always an awarded thing
some have cursed the judging and screamed off down old roads
and all that they killed were the song they couldn’t sing.
LIKE THE JOY AT HIS FIRST LIE
Paradises of limitation, charm
of perpetual doughy innocence –
how quickly the reality
scrubs such stuff from mind.
Today, at eleven and a half,
he made his first purchase:
forty cents, for two biscuits, no change
but a giant step into mankind.
BLUE ROAN
FOR PHILIP HODGINS
As usual up the Giro mountain
dozers were shifting the road about
but the big blue ranges looked permanent
and the stinging-trees held no hint of drought.
All the high drill and blanket ridges
were dusty for want of winter rains
but down in the creases of picnic oak
brown water moved like handled chains.
Steak-red Herefords, edged like steaks
with that creamy fat the health trade bars
nudged, feeding, settling who’d get horned
and who’d horn, in the Wingham abattoirs
and men who remembered droughttime grass
like three days’ growth on a stark red face
described farms on the creeks, fruit trees and fun
and how they bought out each little place.
Where farm families once would come just to watch
men knock off work, on the Bulliac line,
the fear of helplessness still burned live brush.
Dirty white smoke sent up its scattered sign
and in at the races and out at home
the pump of morale was primed and bled:
‘Poor Harry in the street, beer running out his eyes,’
as the cousin who married the baker said.
THE ROAD TOLL
FOR THOSE
MOST RECENTLY SLAUGHTERED ON THE ROADS
Toll. You are part of the toll
government causes, and harps on, and exacts
as more toll. The word means both death and taxes.
Trains are government, so they don’t pay, toll. Trucks pay
and pay, and pay. Speed narrows the wrecked highway
as fines, based on the death toll, are increased continually.
So you justify, and your stretchers drip, the toll
we must pay for the juggernaut Government,
for every Crown careerist’s inner greasy pole,
for the logic of swift movement –
It’s crocodile tears, toll, except from those who loved you.
Your death taps us for revenue. You were driving on the railway
and we’ll all be fined for it. You were a tin boat on the sea
and a ship ran over you. A fleeing merchantman, toll.
AN ERA
The poor were fat and the rich were lean.
Nearly all could preach, very few could sing.
The fashionable were all one age, and to them
a church picnic was the very worst thing.
THE GAELIC LONG TUNES
On Sabbath days, on circuit days,
the Free Church assembled from boats and gigs
and between sermons they would tauten
and, exercising all they allowed of art,
haul on the long lines of the Psalms.
The seated precentor, touching text,
would start alone, lifting up his whale-long tune
and at the right quaver, the rest set sail
after him, swaying, through eerie and lorn.
No unison of breaths-in gapped their sound.
In disdain of all theatrics, they raised
straight ahead, from plank rows, their beatless God-paean,
their giving like enduring. And in rise
and undulation, in Earth-conquest mourned
as loss, all tragedy drowned, and that weird
music impelled them, singing, like solar wind.
WAGTAIL
Willy Wagtail
sings at night
black and white
Oz nightingale
picks spiders off wall
nest-fur and eyesocket
ticks off cows
cattle love that
Busy daylong
eating small species
makes little faeces
and a great wealth of song
Will and Willa Wagtail
indistinguishable
switchers, whizzers
drinkers out of scissors
weave a tiny unit
kids clemming in it
Piping in tizzes
two fight off one
even one eagle
little gun swingers
rivertop ringers
one-name-for-all
whose lives flow by heart
beyond the liver
into lives of a feather
Wag it here, Willy
pretty it there
flicker and whirr –
if you weren’t human
how many would care?
SANDSTONE COUNTRY
Bush and orchard forelands stop sheer
with stencilled hands under mossed cliff eaves
and buried rain peeing far down off balconies
stains ink-dark and slows into leaves.
Bleached rusting country, where waterfalls
reanimate froth and stripped-out cars
in hills being cleft for shopping malls.
If sex and help never dawned on Mars
maybe they’re unique, and yet to spread
and Sun and Moon and barren stars
revolve round the scrub Earth after all,
pale handprints climbing an old smoked wall.
MANNERS OF THE SUPRANATION
Along our hills, before the first star
arises the glow of Meruka,
the clearer, brighter, more focused nation
we enter to rest from contemplation.
There songs are for watching, and sexy as war
and truth is what there is footage for.
Most death is by contract, though. And people kiss a lot
but reproduce by zoom and gunshot.
Night and Day are lighting terms. There are no cycles.
Seasons and epochs there are locales.
Breasts and faces are matte. Chests and horses shine
and everything spoken is a line,
and actorly spoken – though in sport, men, not women
may talk like blokes. The lit bowl all swim in
streams fact, the shortest urban myth:
cholesterol, radon, IQ, coprolith.
Square-muscled as chocolate bars, sirens give tongue
but their fountain of youth is just for the young.
The authentic, from hoeing dry earth to raise rent,
stare into the wash cycle where their children went.
Very few are fat there; all are reduced;
poverty looks applied when it is produced.
The red neck, in country that never gets dark,
is curbed by young nobles from the National Park.
Labour’s dim-sacred, business sinister, trade sly:
the only chic enterprise is private eye.
There the one book in everyone is filmed and on show
but its strange truths are trimmed to what viewers may know;
in spy series, the knowing may rise to despair
which is noblest and deadliest, above savoir faire.
Also Meruka loves animals, but hers have no smell
so those in the animal world can’t tell,
but ads shine through satire like poems through critique
and to win on the replay is mortal technique
as, name-starred, the monolith from 2001
lies half sunk at right angles in Washington.
Meruka, death’s babysitter, hearth fire of cool
the ads are in Hamlet and he’s in Play School:
now you’re First. Second’s us, where we glance or lie curled,
and where anything still happens, that is the Third World.
KIMBERLEY BRIEF
With modern transport, everywhere you go
the whole world is an archipelago,
each place an island in a void of travel.
In our case, cloud obscured the continent’s whole gravel
of infinite dot-painting, as we overflew zones and degrees
toward the great island of the Kimberleys.
It was dusk when we slanted into Broome
to be checked in, each with a bungalow for a room.
Town of bougainvillea, of turmeric dust, of tin
geometric solids that people run tourist shops in,
of pastels and lattice, of ghosts with dented heads
and porthole eyes, whose boats recline on beds
of tidal concentrate, to resurrect, if ever, when aquamarine
re-engorges the mangroves, the raw Romance has been,
where a recent Shire President was Mr Kimberley Male
and pearls shower upward through shops like inverse hail.
In that town restrained from lovingly demolishing its past
I saw fewer brown faces than when I’d been there last,
Malay Afghans, Chinese Aborigines, or Philippine Celts,
and Euro Australians, with hind paws stuck in their belts
and a bumless tail dressed as two moleskin legs from there down
must have hopped to Derby for the races, or moved out of town,
but the sun off Cable Beach, entering the ocean’s hold
ran its broad cable hot with incoming traffic of gold.
Deeper levels were anchored with many-fathomed ropes
knotted with old murder and world-be-my-oyster hopes;
jerseyed grandsons of the neck-chained took mar
ks, or kicked a goal
while a great painter of theirs sat in jail for jumping parole
and it was dry months till some mouthless cave-coloured one
would don cloudy low-pressure dress and dance a cyclone –
Why tell this in verse? For travelling, your reasons can be
the prosiest prose. As a tourist, though, you come for the poetry.
Slot-car racing in a groove deep-cut by a grader through dust
I asked my mate ‘This low bush we’re in, this pubic forest:
is it all picture, or all detail?’ ‘You could die in it, resolving that.’
Our bus seemed to climb all day, the land was so flat.
The Kimberley was once mooted as a National Home for the Jews,
in the late Thirties. Even then, they felt constrained to refuse.
In Palestine were their Dreamings, in Vilna and Krakow their roots.
Midmorning, then, we came to an Aboriginal kibbutz,
with real children, barefoot ones. The square we weren’t to stray from
contained a mud-brick church we hated to come away from,
since inside were Mosaic scale-armour and celestial wicket gates,
the table of God, His kitchen, His dresser of plates
each a lucent pearl shell; above that, His concrete city, rose-pearled
with all the arch-shells’ mundane sides facing out of the world
and their lustre cupped our way. And over all, full span,
hung the Reader among characters: God, sacrificed to man.
The Stations had been painted by Sisters from Mainz and Bavaria,
the sort who seized children to educate and ran hands-on leprosaria
when leprosy was AIDS, but less pitied. The Carpenter who
taught Oscar Wilde, and millions before him too,
that the opposite of a platitude is more likely true
moves through sheets of action that are echoing with energy, like Munch
but often stronger, till he tilts like a plank off a shed
in hue and rigour, with one arm hinged hanging, dead
and helplessly ready to stand all death on its head.
That peninsula, named for a pirate who hated the place,
had no kangaroos to stand with handcuffed paws and belly-face,
no emus, no sheep, but featureless termite men instead.
We lunched under tamarinds planted by some Macassar crew
