by Les Murray
could either: I won’t give you away.
But now you join hands, exchanging
the vows that cost joyfully dear.
They move you to the centre of life
and us gently to the rear.
CRANKSHAFT
Buildings, like all made things
that can’t be taken back
into the creating mind,
persist as reefs of the story
which made them, and which someone
will try to drive out of fashion.
On a brown serpentine road,
cornice around a contour
into steep kikuyu country,
the Silver Farm appears
hard-edged on its scarp of green
long-ago rainforest mountain.
All its verandahs walled in,
the house, four-square to a pyramid
point, like an unhit spike head
bulks white above the road
and the dairy and cowyard
are terraced above, to let
all liquid waste good spill down
around windowless small sheds, iron
or board, alike metallised with silverfrost,
to studded orange trees, hen-coops,
wire netting smoky with peas,
perched lettuce, tomato balconies.
The story that gathers into
such pauses of shape isn’t often
told to outsiders, or in words.
It might be poisoned by your hearing it,
thinking it just a story.
It is for its own characters
and is itself a character.
The Silver Farm has always been
self-sufficient, ordering little in.
Two brothers and respective wives
and children, once, live there quietly
in the one house. At dawn,
the milking done, the standing wife
knits by the roadside, watching
small spacy-eyed caramel Jersey
cows graze the heavy verges,
and the sitting wife, on a folding stool
hidden by her blanket, reads
two turns of the road further on.
Men, glimpsed above in the dairy,
flit through the python fig tree.
A syphoned dam, a mesh room –
and the Silver Farm closes
behind a steep escutcheon pasture
charged with red deer. New people:
unknown story. Past there
is where the lightning struggled
all over the night sky like bared Fact
ripping free of its embodiments, and
pronged the hillside, turning
a rider on his numbed horse
to speechless, for minutes, rubber.
Above is a shrine house, kept
in memory of deep childhood
whitewash-raw, as it always was
despite prosperity. No stories
cling to the mother, many
to the irascible yeoman heir
blown by a huff, it seems his own,
a lifetime’s leap from Devonshire:
Quiet, woman, I am master here!
No high school for our boys:
it would make them restless.
Children of this regimen,
touchy well-informed cattlemen
and their shrine-tending sister
remember their father’s pride
in knowing all of Pope by heart:
Recited those poems till he died!
The proper study of mankind
is weakness. If good were not
the weaker side, how would
we know to choose it?
Shrine-houses are common here,
swept on visits, held
out of time by feeling.
I leave this one’s real story
up its private road, where
it abrades and is master.
I’m glad to be not much deeper
than old gossip in it. Fiction-deep.
A reverence for closed boxes is returning.
Left standing, still grouped readably
in the countryside, with trees,
they may be living communities.
How does the house of the man
who won his lands in a card game
come to have the only slate roof
in all these hills? Was it
in hopes of such arrived style
that when the cards’ leadlight smile
brightened, his way, his drawl didn’t
waver, under iron and tongue-and-groove?
No one knows. He attracted no yarns.
Since all stories are of law, any
about him might have rebounded,
like bad whisky, inside the beloved losers.
Keenly as I read detective fiction
I’ve never cared who done it.
I read it for the ambiences:
David Small reasoning rabbinically,
Jim Chee playing tapes in his tribal
patrol car to learn the Blessing Way,
or the tweed antiquaries of London,
fog from the midriff down,
discoursing with lanthorn and laudanum.
I read it, then, for the stretches
of presence. And to watch analysis
and see how far author and sleuth
can transcend that, submitting
to the denied whole mind, and admit it,
since the culprit’s always the same:
the poetry. Someone’s poem did it.
This further hill throws another
riffle of cuttings, and a vista
sewn with fences, chinked with dams
and the shed-free, oddly placed
brick houses of the urban people
who will be stories if they stay.
There’s a house that was dying
of moss, sun-bleach and piety –
probate and guitar tunes revived it.
Down the other way, seawards, dawn’s way,
a house that was long alive
is sealed. Nailgunned shut
since the morning after its last day.
And it was such an open house:
You stepped from the kitchen table’s
cards and beer, or a meal of ingredients
in the old unmixed style, straight
off lino into the gaze of cattle
and sentimental dogs, and beloved
tall horses, never bet on. This was
a Turf house: that is, it bet on men.
Men sincere and dressy as detectives
who could make time itself run dead.
Gaunt posthumous wood that supported
the rind-life of trees still stands
on that property. The house is walled
in such afterlife sawn. Inside it
are the afterlives of clothes, of plates,
equestrienne blue ribbons, painted photos,
of childlessness and privacy.
Beef-dark tools and chain out in the sheds
are being pilfered back into the present.
Plaintive with those she could
make into children, and shrewd
with those she couldn’t, the lady
sits beautifully, in the pride
of her underlip, shy of naming names
as that other lot, the Irish, she canters
mustering on Timoshenko with a twig of leaves.
When urban dollars were already
raining on any country acre, her husband
with the trickle of smoke to his wall eye
from his lip-screw of tobacco
sold paddocks to a couple of nephews.
The arm a truck had shattered
to a crankshaft long ago trembled,
signing. He charged a fifth of what
he could have. A family price,
and used the grazing rights,
which
we had thrown in, to make sure
we didn’t too greatly alter
their parents’ landscape till he
and she were finished with it.
Now they, who were cool midday East
to my childhood, have moved on into
the poem that can’t be read
till you yourself are in it.
THE FAMILY FARMERS’ VICTORY
FOR SALVATORE ZOFREA
White grist that turned people black,
it was the white cane sugar
fixed humans as black or white. Sugar,
first luxury of the modernising poor.
It turned slavery black to repeat it.
Black to grow sugar, white to eat it
shuffled all the tropic world. Cane sugar
would only grow in sweat of the transported.
That was the old plantation,
blackbirding ship to commissar.
White teeth decried the tyranny of sugar –
but Italian Australians finished it.
On the red farm blocks they bought
and cleared, for cane-besieged stilt houses
between rain-smoky hills on the Queensland shore,
they made the black plantation obsolete.
When they come, we still et creamed spaghetti cold, for pudding,
and we didn’t want their Black Hand on our girls.
But they ploughed, burnt, lumped cane: it shimmied like a gamecock’s tail.
Then the wives come out, put up with flies, heat, crocodiles, Irish clergy,
and made shopkeepers learn their lingo. Stubborn Australian shopkeepers.
L’abito, signora, voletelo in sargia, do you?
Serge suits in Queensland? Course. You didn’t let the white side down.
Shorts, pasta, real coffee. English only at school. But sweet biscuits,
cakes, icing – we learnt all that off the British and we loved it!
Big families, aunts, cousins. You slept like a salt tongue, in gauze.
Cool was under the mango tree. Walls of cane enclosed us and fell:
sudden slant-slashed vistas, burnt bitter caramel. Our pink roads
were partings in a world of haircut. I like to go back. It’s changed now.
After thirty years, even Sicilians let their daughters work in town.
Cane work was too heavy for children
so these had their childhoods
as not all did, on family farms,
before full enslavement of machines.
But of grown-up hundreds on worked estate
still only one of each sex can be adult.
Likewise factory, and office, and concern:
any employee’s a child, in the farmer’s opinion.
A BRIEF HISTORY
We are the Australians. Our history is short.
This makes pastry chefs snotty and racehorses snort.
It makes pride a blood poppy and work an export
and bars our trained minds from original thought
as all that can be named gets renamed away.
A short history gets you imperial scorn,
maintained by hacks after the empire is gone
which shaped and exiled us, left men’s bodies torn
with the lash, then with shrapnel, and taught many to be
lewd in kindness, formal in bastardry.
Some Australians would die before they said Mate,
though hand-rolled Mate is a high-class disguise –
but to have just one culture is well out of date:
it makes you Exotic, i.e. there to penetrate
or to ingest, depending on size.
Our one culture paints Dreamings, each a beautiful claim.
Far more numerous are the unspeakable Whites,
the only cause of all earthly plights,
immigrant natives without immigrant rights.
Unmixed with these are Ethnics, absolved of all blame.
All of people’s Australia, its churches and lore
are gang-raped by satire self-righteous as war
and, from trawling fresh victims to set on the poor,
our mandarins now, in one more evasion
of love and themselves, declare us Asian.
Australians are like most who won’t read this poem
or any, since literature turned on them
and bodiless jargons without reverie
scorn their loves as illusion and biology,
compared with bloody History, the opposite of home.
WHERE HUMANS CAN’T LEAVE AND MUSTN’T COMPLAIN
FOR BECKI AND CLARE
Where humans can’t leave and mustn’t complain
there some will emerge who enjoy giving pain.
Snide universal testing leads them to each one
who will shrivel reliably, whom the rest will then shun.
Some who might have been chosen, and natural police,
do routine hurt, the catcalling, the giving no peace,
but dull brilliance evolves the betrayals and names
that sear dignity and life like interior flames.
Hormones get enlisted, and consistency rehearsed
by self-avengers and failures getting in first,
but this is the eye of fashion. Its sniggering stare
breeds silenced accomplices. Courage proves rare.
This models revolution, this draws flies to stark pools.
This is the true curriculum of schools.
GREEN ROSE TAN
Poverty is still sacred. Christian
and political candles burn before it
for a little longer. But secretly
poverty revered is poverty outlived:
childhoods among bed-ticking midnights
blue as impetigo mixture, through the grilles,
cotton-rancid contentments of exhaustion
around Earth’s first kerosene lamp
indoors out of wet root-crop fields.
Destitution’s an antique. The huge-headed
are sad chaff blown by military bohemians.
Their thin metal bowls are filled or not
from the sky by deodorised descendants
of a tart-tongued womb-noticing noblesse
in the goffered hair-puddings of God’s law
who pumped pioneer bouillons with a potstick,
or of dazzled human muesli poured from ships
under the milk of smoke and decades.
The mass rise into dignity and comfort
was the true modern epic, black and white
dwarfing red, on the way to green rose tan.
Green rose tan that the world is coming to,
land’s colour as seen from space
and convergent human skin colour, it rises
out of that unwarlike epic, in the hours
before intellect refracts and disdains it,
of those darker and silver-skinned, for long ages
humbly, viciously poor, our ancestors,
still alive in India, in Africa, in ghettoes.
Ancestors, ours, on the kerb in meshed-glass towns.
THE SAY-BUT-THE-WORD CENTURION ATTEMPTS A SUMMARY
That numinous healer who preached Saturnalia and paradox
has died a slave’s death. We were manoeuvred into it by priests
and by the man himself. To complete his poem.
He was certainly dead. The pilum guaranteed it. His message,
unwritten except on his body, like anyone’s, was wrapped
like a scroll and despatched to our liberated selves, the gods.
If he has now risen, as our infiltrators gibber,
he has outdone Orpheus, who went alive to the Shades.
Solitude may be stronger than embraces. Inventor of the mustard tree,
he mourned one death, perhaps all, before he reversed it.
He forgave the sick to health, disregarded the sex of the Furies
when expelling them from mind
s. And he never speculated.
If he is risen, all are children of a most high real God
or something even stranger called by that name
who knew to come and be punished for the world.
To have knowledge of right, after that, is to be in the wrong.
Death came through the sight of law. His people’s oldest wisdom.
If death is now the birth-gate into things unsayable
in language of death’s era, there will be wars about religion
as there never were about the death-ignoring Olympians.
Love, too, his new universal, so far ahead of you it has died
for you before you meet it, may seem colder than the favours of gods
who are our poems, good and bad. But there never was a bad baby.
Half of his worship will be grinding his face in the dirt
then lifting it to beg, in private. The low will rule, and curse by him.
Divine bastard, soul-usurer, eros-frightener, he is out to monopolise hatred.
Whole philosophies will be devised for their brief snubbings of him.
But regained excels kept, he taught. Thus he has done the impossible
to show us it is there. To ask it of us. It seems we are to be the poem
and live the impossible. As each time we have, with mixed cries.
DEAD TREES IN THE DAM
Castle scaffolding tall in moat,
the dead trees in the dam
flower each morning with birds.
It can be just the three resident
cormorants with musket-hammer necks, plus
the clinician spoonbill, its long pout;
twilight’s herons who were almost too lightfoot
to land; pearl galahs in pink-fronted
confederacy, each starring in its frame,
or it may be a misty candelabrum
of egrets lambent before saint Sleep –
who gutter awake and balance stiffly off.
Odd mornings, it’s been all bloodflag
and rifle green: a stopped-motion shrapnel
of kingparrots. Smithereens when they freaked.
Rarely, it’s wed ducks, whose children
will float among the pillars. In daytime
magpies sidestep up wood to jag pinnacles
and the big blow-in cuckoo crying
Alarm, Alarm on the wing is not let light.
This hours after dynastic charts of high
profile ibis have rowed away to beat
the paddocks. Which, however green, are
always watercolour, and on brown paper.
ROCK MUSIC
Sex is a Nazi. The students all knew
this at your school. To it, everyone’s subhuman
