by Les Murray
to refresh them when harvesting the sea, as most peoples there do.
If Australia is part of Asia, as some fervently declare,
why were we never kamponged, paddied, pagoda’d from there?
It was Europe’s blood-watering let Asian Australia take root.
We had sights of more sites, and bought tourist stuff as the tribute
such trips vaguely exact. I had wanted to visit Tunnel Creek
and Wolf Creek crater, where huge iron in full spacefall
treated Earth like tar; one mile-wide ripple forms a ring-wall.
Those will have to wait. Instead, our hospitable week
next saw us in Kununurra where, Israel again, the dry earth
is irrigated to supply winter vegie markets, in this case Perth.
There we cruised on a river perennially full to the brim,
that old Outback longing; we heard of Stumpy Michael, of Kim,
and where we landed to buy stuff a square-bearded crow
perturbed our spirits with its wire-prisoned frantic Hello.
And far trees meshed antennae along the ridgelines, like ants;
the sunset, like all the light, was factual; I felt underdreamt.
Chemicals were imprinted with catfish, spouses, cormorants –
how naturally random recording edges into contempt.
Kind people explained about Development and suicide;
which race drank indoors, and which is seen drunk outside.
The lost sounded not dissimilar, whatever their skin.
I saw no squalor. Some houses looked lived around, some in.
It was still four-wheel-drive country. Artefacts and lean beef
were the style, not muddied tractors. No pub was called the Sheaf.
Then past inverted trees and umber hills with slopes of pale cowhair
we were off to Purnúlulu, the Bungles, to camp two nights there.
En route, we were shown the creamy shitwood tree,
named long ago by stockmen, as it would be,
and near it, two such ringers, men with the remote eyes
of those who meet with scant gentleness, who live on supplies,
whose little screw horses perform superbly or get shot –
the sort who took Australia, and founded the good life we’ve got.
And then we reached the Bungles, a massif of roofless caves
made of rock-brittle, like brick skin after a lifetime’s shaves.
Chasms munched underfoot. Long palm trees from primeval
Australia, where we live, emplumed niches near the sky
as if lowered in there by their rotors. In a retrieval
of hobohood that night, I spread my sleeping bag atop dry
grass whose merciless needled spirochaetes of seed
still infest my clothes. I, sex slave to a weed!
On the massif’s other side, striped towers of profiteroles
hid chasms with similar stained flumes and limestone swallow-holes.
Over one of these quivered water-shine from a pool long void.
Gaudí palisades spoke of wet-seasons by which a near-destroyed
otherworld, that long ago was this world, is dissolving.
As we left, tourist dust was a pillar by day, revolving,
and we heard of the crazed hunter, here on human-safari some years ago
who shot several, and died riddled. Rangers told campers that although
guns were outlawed in the park, they were okay for self-protection
and an arsenal emerged: revolvers, assault rifles, a black-powder gun …
Next day on the Dam road, unaccountable miles from water,
a snake-bird showed its prongs to two eagles planning its slaughter.
We netted it, in a jacket. Next monster to devour it was our bus.
It lay in cloth-dark, intensely alive, without fuss,
as we visited the Durack homestead on the ridge where that’d found
Ararat when their grass castle wasn’t blown away, but drowned.
In one room leaned a real spear, not tourist junk, but straitly thin,
tense as if in slung flight, like the legend-shaft Windinbin.
There too hung a kite-framed headdress, coloured in concentric twine:
that’s true Kimberley, and can’t be bought, unless you’re Lord McAlpine.
At the dam, we reimmersed the darter bird, who instantly sounded
(with no notion of cross-species help, it seemed unastounded)
and then we regarded the nine-times-Sydney-Harbour expanse
where nine tipsy Joe Lynches might embrace deep mischance
and ferry the wrecked moonlight down a diminishing spoor
of bubbles between nine Empires’ chained men-o’-war –
that is, if it weren’t desert water, that has not softened
its stark mountain poundage, nor summoned any arbour,
villa, folly or hamlet to make its shores less bare:
merely warnings about crocodiles, by whom you can be leather-coffined.
Our guide showed us the green Ord River in its downstream pose
and the gold kapok flower, and the veal-coloured Kimberley rose.
We learned later about diamonds and their blue clay arcana
and we heard of the scrub cattle who found someone’s marijuana.
In Broome, I didn’t revisit, as they’re now a guidebook draw,
the headstones of Japanese who once trod the sea floor
sending its clamped crockery skywards out of floury detail
and hung nightly in shark-heaven to still their blood’s crippling ale.
Every cemetery’s a fleet of keels. We checked out the Zoo
with its high wired cupola, walked the catwalk in full view
of many endangered species – and beyond them, more and more
dying distinctive towns, looking up in hopes of rescue.
Land of pearl and plain, where just one man now goes for baroque
and is mostly liked for it; of seeping pink gorges and smoke,
where whites run black shops since, as my aunt found at Bunyah,
deny credit to your own poor and your world will shun you,
where great films await making, perhaps not for Southern television
(most Oz comedy dismays us, we agreed, with its terrible derision),
where bush balladry has set rock hard, with decrepitations,
as a means to silence poetry, and a finger stuck up at denigrations,
since most modern writing sounds like a war against love.
We were grateful for our week, and experiences that brought
bottom lip to top teeth, in that f that betokens thought.
The true sign of division, in that land of the boab tree,
lies perhaps between those who must produce and those who must be.
But the nacre of cloud had formed over the earth again, above,
and the rust and dents were gone that say the Kimberleys are
a splendid door ripped off the Gondwanaland car.
EQUINOCTIAL GALES AT HAWTHORNDEN CASTLE
The tidal wind through Drummond’s gorge
washed treetops coralline in its surge
and keyed every reed the house had
hid in its pink quoins overhead.
Allegedly beneath its steeps wound the deep Pict
cave where the Bruce once lay, licked,
watching a bob spider cast, time on time,
its whole self after the slant rhyme
of purchase needed to stay its transverse
then radial map of the universe
and all the tiny mixed krill that
too would jewel the king as he burst out.
ULTIMA RATIO
TRANSLATED FROM THE GERMAN OF
FRIEDRICH GEORG JÜNGER (1945)
Like vapour, the titanic scheme
is dissipated,
everything grows rusty now
that they created.
They hoped to make their craze
the lasting Plan,
now it falls apart everywhere,
sheet steel and span.
Raw chaos lies heaped up
on wide display.
Be patient. Even the fag-ends
will crumble away.
Everything they made contained
what brought their fall
and the great burden they were
crushes them all.
NORTH COUNTRY SUITE
White, towering, polished as an urn,
with blue-winking escort, a cabin cruiser sails
not affluent waters yet, but the coast highway
and swimming pools pass it, stacked like cake-pans.
Even at speeds where landscape is cursory
butter-works have yielded to dozer and nursery.
White volleyed trees like arrested rain
have slumped and burnt and shot green again.
Each river bridge once had a wheel-topped tower
from which a thick stone table hung:
this was when the dead ate midday dinner
and smokes were holy, and trees were rung.
Now a long bridge crosshatching smoke and river-shine
ends, and slowing cars divide.
A man at the lights does what men do alone
and children cheer him from the van alongside.
That bed, with stirrups, their mother relates
when the nurse ran in, Kay was already born.
I was reaching down, singing out, for fear she might
be hanging by her cord like a little telephone!
Textures of men on the courthouse steps
are those of car seat and packing shed
and a busy barrister floats between them
wearing a dried brain on her head.
Paddocks to sell, swamps, creeks to sell:
plateglass and gingerbread shops are tiled
with rectangles of country the colour of soldiers
that old farmers grow and realtors sell.
You not have to leave, Mrs Newell, I bought
your farm, not your home. The Polish farmer is distressed.
My wife and I build own house. You stay for life!
She doesn’t stay. You don’t. But she dies still impressed.
On furrows that once grew hansom-cab fuel
the post-employed fit formwork to their dreams;
their welcome is a finger lifted off a steering wheel
and city and wilderness are extremes.
Some never become cousins. When work died
they moved up to live on a rug-weave hillside.
They love the quiet, the birds, the sun.
There they know everything and no one.
Gathered at a dangerous crux of life
smokers stand around it, all backs, looking down.
A wobble at the centre is help with emotion.
A hollow there is two letting silence have a turn.
Children in that schoolroom, stripped of its brim,
that now teeters in low range out of the hills
were deprived into innocence by family and space.
The world is emptying as it fills,
but even at speeds where the human is cursory
grandchildren of those who left on a bursary
may see, where logs were bloodied with hand tools,
new rainforest, or truckloads of swimming pools.
PRESENCE: TRANSLATIONS FROM THE NATURAL WORLD
Bats’ Ultrasound
Sleeping-bagged in a duplex wing
with fleas, in rock-cleft or building
radar bats are darkness in miniature,
their whole face one tufty crinkled ear
with weak eyes, fine teeth bared to sing.
Few are vampires. None flit through the mirror.
Where they flutter at evening’s a queer
tonal hunting zone above highest C.
Insect prey at the peak of our hearing
drone re to their detailing tee:
ah, eyrie-ire, aero hour, eh?
O’er our ur-area (our era aye
ere your raw row) we air our array,
err, yaw, row wry – aura our orrery,
our eerie ü our ray, our arrow.
A rare ear, our aery Yahweh.
Eagle Pair
We shell down on the sleeping-branch. All night
the limitless Up digests its meats of light.
The circle-winged Egg then emerging from long pink and brown
re-inverts life, and meats move or are still on the Down.
Irritably we unshell, into feathers; we lean open and rise
and magnify this meat, then that, with the eyes of our eyes.
Meat is light, it is power and Up, as we free it from load
and our mainstay, the cunningest hunter, is the human road
but all the Down is heavy and tangled. Only meat is good there
and the rebound heat ribbing up vertical rivers of air.
Layers of Pregnancy
Under eagle worlds each fixed in place
it is to kangaroo all fragrant space
to feed between long feet to hop
from short to ungrazed sweet to stop
there whittling it down between eyed knees
cocked to propel away through shadow trees
as Rain the father scented ahead through time
greens into motherhood expels a blood-clot to climb
wet womb to womb of fur
and implants another in the ruby wall.
Strangler Fig
I glory centennially slow-
ly in being Guugumbakh the
strangular fig bird-born to overgrow
the depths of this wasp-leafed stinging-tree
through muscling in molten stillness down
its spongy barrel crosslacing in overflow
even of myself as in time my luscious fat
leaves top out to adore the sun forest high
and my shade-coldest needs touch a level that
discovered as long yearned for transmutes
my wood into the crystal mode of roots
and I complete myself and mighty on
buttresses far up in combat embraces no
rotted traces to the fruiting rain surface I one.
Two Dogs
Enchantment creek underbank pollen, are the stiff scents he makes,
hot grass rolling and rabbit-dig but only saliva chickweed.
Road pizza clay bird, hers answer him, rot-spiced good. Blady grass,
she adds, ant log in hot sunshine. Snake two sunups back. Orifice?
Orifice, he wriggles. Night fox? Night fox, with left pad wound.
Cement bag, hints his shoulder. Catmeat, boasts his tail, twice enjoyed.
Folded sapless inside me, she clenches. He retracts initial blood.
Frosty darks coming, he nuzzles. High wind rock human-free howl,
her different law. Soon. Away, away, eucalypts speeding –
Bark! I water for it. Her eyes go binocular, as in pawed
hop frog snack play. Come ploughed, she jumps, ground. Bark tractor,
white bitterhead grub and pull scarecrow. Me! assents his urine.
Cockspur Bush
I am lived. I am died.
I was two-leafed three times, and grazed,
but then I was stemmed and multiplied,
sharp-thorned and caned, nested and raised,
earth-salt by sun-sugar. I am innerly sung
by thrushes who need fear no eyed skin thing.
Finched, ant-run, flowered, I am given the years
in now fewer berries, now more of sling
out over directions of luscious dung.
Of water the crankshaft, of gases the gears
my shape is cattle-pruned to a crown spread sprung
above the starve-gut instinct to make prairies
of mice and rank lizards by the butcher bird.
Inches in, baby seed-screamers get supplied.
I am lived and died in, vine-woven, multiplied.
Lyrebird
Liar made of leaf-litter, quivering ribby in shim,
hen-sized under froufrou, chinks in a quiff display him
or her, dancing in mating time, or out. And in any order.
Tailed mimic aeon-sent to intrigue the next recorder,
I mew catbird, I saw crosscut, I howl she-dingo, I kink
forest hush distinct with bellbirds, warble magpie garble, link
cattlebell with kettle-boil; I rank ducks’ cranky presidium
or simulate a triller like a rill mirrored lyrical to a rim.
I ring dim. I alter nothing. Real to real only I sing,
Gahn the crane to Gun the chainsaw, urban thing to being,
Screaming woman owl and human talk: eedieAi and uddyunnunoan.
The miming is all of I. Silent, they are a function
of wet forest, cometary lyrebirds. Their flight lifts them barely a semitone.
Shoal
Eye-and-eye eye an eye
each. What blinks is I,
unison of the whole shoal. Thinks:
a dark idea circling by –
again the eyes’ I winks.
Eye-and-eye near no eye
is no I, though gill-pulse drinks
and nervy fins spacewalk. Jinx
jets the jettisoned back into all,
tasting, each being a tongue,
vague umbrations of chemical:
this way thrilling, that way Wrong,
the pure always inimical,
compound being even the sheer thing
I suspend I in, and thrust
against, for speed and feeding,
all earblades for the eel’s wave-gust
over crayfishes’ unpressured beading,
for bird-dive boom, redfin’s gaped gong –
Prehistory of Air
Fish, in their every body
hold a sac of dry
freeing them from gravity
where fish go when they die.
It is the only dryness,
the first air, weird and thin –
but then my beak strikes from there
and the world turns outside-in.
I’m fishes’ horror, being
