by Les Murray
crushed into dimensions,
yet from their swimming bladder
hatched dry land, sky
and the heron of prehensions.
The Gods
There is no Reynard fox. Just foxes.
I’m the fox who scents this pole.
As a kit on gravel, I brow-arched Play? to a human.
It grabbed to kill, and gave me a soul.
We’re trotting down one hen-stalk gully.
Soul can sit up inside, and be.
I halt, to keep us alive. Soul basks in
scents of shadow, sound of honey.
Call me the lover in the dew
of one in his merriment of blur.
Fragile as the first points of a scent
on the mind’s skin settle his weights of fur.
A light not of the sky attends
his progress down the unleaped dim –
There’s a young false-hoofed dog human coming
and the circling gunshot scent of him
eddies like sickness. I freeze, since their
ears point them, quicker than a wagtail’s beak.
I must be Not for a while, repressing
all but the low drum of the meek.
Dreams like a whistle crack the spring;
a scentless shape I have not been
threads the tall legs of deities
like Hand, and Colour, and Machine.
Cattle Ancestor
Darrambawli and all his wives, they came feeding from the south east
back in that first time. Darrambawli is a big red fellow,
terrible fierce. He scrapes up dust, singing, whirling his bullroarers
in the air: he swings them and they sing out Crack! Crack!
All the time he’s mounting his women, all the time more kulka,
more, more, smelling their kulka and looking down his nose.
Kangaroo and emu mobs run from him, as he tears up their shelters,
throwing the people in the air, stamping out their fires.
Darrambawli gathers up his brothers, all making that sad cry mar mar:
he initiates his brothers, the Bulluktruk. They walk head down in a line
and make the big blue ranges. You hear their clinking noise in there.
Darrambawli has wives everywhere, he has to gallop back and forth,
mad for their kulka. You see him on the coast, and on the plains.
They’re eating up the country, so the animals come to spear them:
You have to die now, you’re starving us. But then Waark the crow
tells Darrambawli Your wives, they’re spearing them. He is screaming,
frothing at the mouth, that’s why his chest is all white nowadays.
Jerking two knives, he screams I make new waterholes! I bring the best song!
He makes war on all that mob, raging, dotting the whole country.
He frightens the water-snakes; they run away, they can’t sit down.
The animals forget how to speak. There is only one song
for a while. Darrambawli must sing it on his own.
Mollusc
By its nobship sailing upside down,
by its inner sexes, by the crystalline
pimplings of its skirts, by the sucked-on
lifelong kiss of its toppling motion,
by the viscose optics now extruded
now wizened instantaneously, by the
ridges grating up a food-path, by
the pop shell in its nick of dry,
by excretion, the earthworm coils, the glibbing,
by the gilt slipway, and by pointing
perhaps as far back into time as
ahead, a shore being folded interior,
by boiling on salt, by coming uncut over
a razor’s edge, by hiding the Oligocene
underleaf may this and every snail sense
itself ornament the weave of presence.
Cattle Egret
Our sleep-slow compeers, red and dun,
wade in their grazing, and whirring lives
shoal up, splintering, in skitters and dives.
Our quick beaks pincer them, one and one,
those crisps of winnow, fats of air,
the pick of chirrup – we haggle them down
full of plea, fizz, cark and stridulation,
our white plumes riffled by scads going spare.
Shadowy round us are lives that eat things dead
but life feeds our life: fight is flavour,
stinging a spice. Bodies still electric play for
my crop’s gravel jitterbug. I cross with sprung tread
where dogs tugged a baa-ing calf’s gut out, fold on fold.
Somewhere may be creatures that grow old.
The Snake’s Heat Organ
Earth after sun is slow burn
as eye scales darken.
Water’s no-burn.
Smaller sunlives all dim slowly
to predawn invisibility
but self-digesters constantly glow-burn.
Their blood-coals fleet
glimmering as I spin
lightly over textures.
Passenger of my passage
I reach round upright leaf-burners, I
reach and follow under rock balances,
I gather at the drinking margin.
Across the nothing there
an ardency
is lapping blank, which segments serially up
beneath the coruscating braincakes
into the body,
three skin-sheddings’ length of no-burn negatively
coiled in a guttering chamber:
a fox,
it is pedalling off now,
a scintillating melon,
gamboge in its hull
round a dark seed centre
and hungry as the sun.
Great Bole
Needling to soil point
lengthens me solar,
my ease perpendicular
from earth’s mid ion.
Health is hold fast,
infill and stretch.
Ill is salts lacking,
brittle, insect-itch.
Many leaves numb
in tosses of sear,
bark split, fluids caramelled,
humus less dear,
barrel borer-bled.
Through me planet-strain
exercised by orbits.
Then were great holding,
earth-give and rain,
air-brunt, stonewood working.
Elements water brought
and solar, outwards sharing
its all-pollen of heats
enveloped me, spiralling.
In no one cell
for I am centreless
pinked a molecule
newly, and routines
so gathered on
that I juice away all
mandibles. Florescence
suns me, bees and would-bes.
I layer. I blaze presence.
Echidna
Crumpled in a coign I was milk-tufted with my suckling
till he prickled.
He entered the earth pouch then
and learned ant-ribbon,
the gloss we put like lightning on the brimming ones.
Life is fat is sleep. I feast life on and sleep it,
deep loveself in calm.
I awaken to spikes of food-sheathing, of mulling fertile egg,
of sun, of formic gravels,
of worms, dab hunting, of fanning under quill-ruff when budged:
all are rinds, to sleep.
Corner-footed tongue-scabbard, I am trundling doze
and wherever I put it
is exactly right. Sleep goes there.
Yard Horse
Ripple, pond, liftoff fly. Unlid the outswallowing snorter
to switch at fly. Ripples over day’s gigantic peace.
No oestrus scent, no haem, no pu
ng of other stallion,
no frightening unsmell of sexless horses,
the unbearable pee-submissive ones who are not in instinct.
Far off blistering grass-sugars. Smoke infinitesimal in air
and, pond gone, his dense standing now would alert all mares
for herded flight. Fire crowds up-mountain swift as horses,
teeters widening down. Pond to granite to derelict
timber go the fur-textures. Large head over wire
contains faint absent tastes, sodichlor, chaff, calc.
The magnified grass is shabby in head-bowed focus, the earth
it grows from only tepidly exists, blots of shade are abyssal.
In his mind, fragments of rehearsal: lowered snaking neck
like goose-speech, to hurry mares; bounced trot-gait of menace
oncoming, with whipping headshake; poses, then digestion.
Moment to moment, his coat is a climate of mirrorings
and his body is the word for every meaning in his universe.
The Octave of Elephants
Bull elephants, when not weeping need, wander soberly alone.
Only females congregate and talk, in a seismic baritone:
Dawn and sundown we honour you, Jehovah Brahm,
who allow us to intone our ground bass in towering calm.
Inside the itchy fur of life is the sonorous planet Stone
which we hear and speak through, depending our flugelhorn.
Winds barrel, waves shunt shore, earth moans in ever-construction
being hurried up the sky, against weight, by endless suction.
We are two species, male and female. Bulls run to our call.
We converse. They weep, and announce, but rarely talk at all.
As presence resembles everything, our bulls reflect its solitude
and we, suckling, blaring, hotly loving, reflect its motherhood.
Burnt-maize-smelling Death, who brings the collapse-sound bum-bum,
has embryos of us on its free limbs: four legs and a thumb.
From dusting our newborn with puffs, we assume a boggling pool
into our heads, to re-silver each other’s wrinkles and be cool.
The Masses
The masses encroach on all of bare, and grow
down every side of earth, and into shadow.
To fit more bodies, we sprout in two dimensions.
The rest of air-life is islanded in our extensions.
We thicken by upper grazing, fatten palely under dung,
we burn to spring innumerable – only water is so sprung.
Blindly we invented space from denial of height
and colonisation was the true mass movement.
Massing held water. We calmed cataclysm to green.
Short rebound of raindrops, we make of our deaths a sun screen,
of our sex we make darts, glue, drunken cities. Tied in fasces,
dead, living, still we rule. No god is bowed to like grass is.
That Evolution Proceeds by Charity and Faith
Not bowing, but a full thrown back upreach
of desperate glorying totter took a fibre-scabbed
ravenous small lizard out to a hold on the air
beyond possibility.
Which every fledgeling re-attains
and exceeds, past the spills it recalls from that forebear
but soon beats down under memory, breaking out
into the sky opening
– though it will groggily cling
a few times yet, as if listening to the far genetic line
confirm the presented new body-idea first embraced
that noon, the epoch-lurch of it, all also still plotted there.
Queen Butterfly
In his frenzy to use
what I am to refuse
from a belly-puff he strews
fine powder on my joins
which, filtering inside, coins
a splendour more eye-bugged than the three
deaths I have died had ever given me:
sweller than digestion, flitter than wings
or witting as selves all glitterings
in the coloured perfumes of panoply –
while the liquid rings
he is threading bend
his body at my breeding end.
Pigs
Us all on sore cement was we.
Not warmed then with glares. Not glutting mush
under that pole the lightning’s tied to.
No farrow-shit in milk to make us randy.
Us back in cool god-shit. We ate crisp.
We nosed up good rank in the tunnelled bush.
Us all fuckers then. And Big, huh? Tusked
the balls-biting dog and gutsed him wet.
Us shoved down the soft cement of rivers.
Us snored the earth hollow, filled farrow, grunted.
Never stopped growing. We sloughed, we soughed
and balked no weird till the high ridgebacks was us
with weight-buried hooves. Or bristly, with milk.
Us never knowed like slitting nor hose-biff then.
Not the terrible body-cutting screams up ahead.
The burnt water kicking. This gone-already feeling
here in no place with our heads on upside down.
The Cows on Killing Day
All me are standing on feed. The sky is shining.
All me have just been milked. Teats all tingling still
from that dry toothless sucking by the chilly mouths
that gasp loudly in in in, and never breathe out.
All me standing on feed, move the feed inside me.
One me smells of needing the bull, that heavy urgent me,
the back-climber, who leaves me humped, straining, but light
and peaceful again, with crystalline moving inside me.
Standing on wet rock, being milked, assuages the calf-sorrow in me.
Now the me who needs mounts on me, hopping, to signal the bull.
The tractor comes trotting in its grumble; the heifer human
bounces on top of it, and cud comes with the tractor,
big rolls of tight dry feed: lucerne, clovers, buttercup, grass,
that’s been bitten but never swallowed, yet is cud.
She walks up over the tractor and down it comes, roll on roll
and all me following, eating it, and dropping the good pats.
The heifer human smells of needing the bull human
and is angry. All me look nervously at her
as she chases the dog me dream of horning dead: our enemy
of the light loose tongue. Me’d jam him in his squeals.
Me, facing every way, spreading out over feed.
One me is still in the yard, the place skinned of feed.
Me, old and sore-boned, little milk in that me now,
licks at the wood. The oldest bull human is coming.
Me in the peed yard. A stick goes out from the human
and cracks, like the whip. Me shivers and falls down
with the terrible, the blood of me, coming out behind an ear.
Me, that other me, down and dreaming in the bare yard.
All me come running. It’s like the Hot Part of the sky
that’s hard to look at, this that now happens behind wood
in the raw yard. A shining leaf, like off the bitter gum tree
is with the human. It works in the neck of me
and the terrible floods out, swamped and frothy. All me make the Roar,
some leaping stiff-kneed, trying to horn that worst horror.
The wolf-at-the-calves is the bull human. Horn the bull human!
But the dog and the heifer human drive away all me.
Looking back, the glistening leaf is still moving.
All of dry old me is crumpled, like the hills of feed,
and a slick me like a huge calf is coming out of me.
The carrion-stink
ing dog, who is calf of human and wolf,
is chasing and eating little blood things the humans scatter
and all me run away, over smells, toward the sky.
MeMeMe
Present and still present don’t yet add up to time
but oscillate at dew-flash speed, at distance speed. Me me me
a shower of firetail (me me) finches into seed grass
flickers feeding (me) in drabs and red pinches of rhyme.
All present is perfect: an eye on either side
of hard scarlet nipping the sexual biscuits of plants,
their rind and luscious flour. It is a heart-rate of instants,
life with no death, only terror, no results, just prudence –
all vacuumed back up, onto low boughs, by a shift in shimmer,
present and still-present bringing steps that mute crickets’ simmer.
Puss
I permit myself to be
neither ignored nor understood.
The shivered sound you tin-belching giant cloth birds
sometimes point at me unnatures me. I’m both your sexes to you.
I tread the thin milk of sentiment
out of you, I file off your most newly-dried skins –
but electric with self-possession
I must then turn over inside my own skin to be free of you.
One passion at a time, and your dry-licking one suddenly
sickens me, till next time. I go to rehearse my killing.
I pose on long wood to groove on one crazy food-tin:
a real blood rabbit, hunched throbbing
round his knotty vegetable tube!
Aaa, the peaks of his dying, neck-bitten. The ripping hind feet
slowing to automatic. Dirt not being washed from his stare –
This loveliness scoots my body up indoor stumps, spilling smashers,
my every move paced
to the cat who is always everywhere.
Shellback Tick
Match-head of groins
nailhead in fur
blank itch of blank
the blood thereof
is the strength thereof is
the jellied life-breath is O the
sweet incision so the curdy reed
floodeth sun-hot liquor the only ichor the only
thing which existeth wholly alley-echoing
