by Les Murray
for parts of their lives. Some are all their lives.
You’ll be one of those if these things worry you.
The beautiful Nazis, why are they so cruel?
Why, to castrate the aberrant, the original, the wounded
who might change our species and make obsolete
the true race. Which is those who never leave school.
For the truth, we are silent. For the flattering dream,
in massed farting reassurance, we spasm and scream,
but what is a Nazi but sex pitched for crowds?
It’s the Calvin SS: you are what you’ve got
and you’ll wrinkle and fawn and work after you’re shot
though tears pour in secret from the hot indoor clouds.
THE ROLLOVER
Some of us primary producers, us farmers and authors
are going round to watch them evict a banker.
It’ll be sad. I hate it when the toddlers and wives
are out beside the fence, crying, and the big kids
wear that thousand-yard stare common in all refugees.
Seeing home desecrated as you lose it can do that to you.
There’s the ute piled high with clothes and old debentures.
There’s the faithful VDU, shot dead, still on its lead.
This fellow’s dad and grandad were bankers before him, they sweated
through the old hard inspections, had years of brimming foreclosure,
but here it all ends. He’d lent three quarters and only
asked for a short extension. Six months. But you have to
line the drawer somewhere. You have to be kind to be cruel.
It’s Sydney or the cash these times. Who buys the Legend of the Bank
any more? The laconic teller, the salt-of-the-earth branch accountant
it’s all an Owned Boys story. Now they reckon he’s grabbed a gun
and an old coin sieve and holed up in the vault, screaming
about his years of work, his identity. Queer talk from a bank-johnny!
We’re catching flak, too, from a small mob of his mates,
inbred under-manager types, here to back him up. Troublemakers,
land-despoiling white trash. It’ll do them no good. Their turn
is coming. They’ll be rationalised themselves, made adapt
to a multinational society. There’s no room in that for privileged
traditional ways of life. No land rights for bankers.
LATE SUMMER FIRES
The paddocks shave black
with a foam of smoke that stays,
welling out of red-black wounds.
In the white of a drought
this happens. The hardcourt game.
Logs that fume are mostly cattle,
inverted, stubby. Tree stumps are kilns.
Walloped, wiped, hand-pumped,
even this day rolls over, slowly.
At dusk, a family drives sheep
out through the yellow
of the Aboriginal flag.
CORNICHE
I work all day and hardly drink at all.
I can reach down and feel if I’m depressed.
I adore the Creator because I made myself
and a few times a week a wire jags in my chest.
The first time, I’d been coming apart all year,
weeping, incoherent; cigars had given me up;
any road round a cliff edge I’d whimper along in low gear
then: cardiac horror. Masking my pulse’s calm lub-dup.
It was the victim-sickness. Adrenalin howling in my head,
the black dog was my brain. Come to drown me in my breath
was energy’s black hole, depression, compère of the predawn show
when, returned from a pee, you stew and welter in your death.
The rogue space rock is on course to snuff your world,
sure. But go acute, and its oncoming fills your day.
The brave die but once? I could go a hundred times a week,
clinging to my pulse with the world’s edge inches away.
Laugh, who never shrank around wizened genitals there
or killed themselves to stop dying. The blow that never falls
batters you stupid. Only gradually do
you notice a slight scorn in you for what appals.
A self inside self, cool as conscience, one to be erased
in your final night, or faxed, still knows beneath
all the mute grand opera and uncaused effect –
that death which can be imagined is not true death.
The crunch is illusion. There’s still no outside world
but you start to see. You’re like one enthralled by bad art –
yet for a real onset, what cover! You gibber to Casualty,
are checked, scorned, calmed. There’s nothing wrong with your heart.
The terror of death is not afraid of death.
Fear, pure, is intransitive. A Hindenburg of vast rage
rots, though, above your life. See it, and you feel flogged
but like an addict you sniffle aboard, to your cage,
because you will cling to this beast as it gnaws you,
for the crystal in its kidneys, the elixir in its wings,
till your darlings are the police of an immense fatigue.
I came to the world unrehearsed but I’ve learned some things.
When you curl, stuffed, in the pot at rainbow’s end
it is life roaring and racing and nothing you can do.
Were you really God you could have lived all the lives
that now decay into misery and cripple you.
A for adrenalin, the original A-bomb, fuel
and punishment of aspiration, the Enlightenment’s air-burst.
Back when God made me, I had no script. It was better.
For all the death, we also die unrehearsed.
SUSPENDED VESSELS
FOR JOANNA GOODING AND SIMON CURTIS
Here is too narrow and brief:
equality and justice, to be real,
require the timeless. It argues
afterlife even to name them.
I’ve thought this more since that morning
in barren country vast as space-time
but affluent with cars
at the fence where my tightening budget
denied me basket-room
under the haunches of a hot-air balloon
and left thirteen people in it,
all ages, teens to grans,
laughing excitedly as the dragon nozzle
exhaled hoarse blazing lift, tautening it,
till they grabbed, dragged, swayed
up, up into their hiatus.
Others were already aloft
I remember, light bulbs against the grizzled
mountain ridge and bare sky,
vertical yachts, with globe spinnakers.
More were being rigged, or offering
their gape for gusts of torch.
I must have looked away –
suddenly a cry erupted everywhere:
two, far up, lay overlapping,
corded and checked as the foresails of a ship
but tangled, and one collapsing.
I suppress in my mind
the long rag unravelling, the mixed
high voice of its spinning fall,
the dust-blast crash, the privacies
and hideous equality without justice
of those thirteen, which running helpers,
halting, must have seen
and professionals lifted out.
Instead, I look at coloured cash and plastic
and toddlerhood’s vehement equities
that are never quite silenced.
Indeed, it prickles, and soon glares
if people do not voice them.
THE WATER COLUMN
We had followed the catwalk upriver
by flowe
ring trees and granite sheer
to the Basin park crying with peacocks.
After those, we struck human conversation.
A couple we’d thought Austrian proved to be
Cape Coloured. Wry good sense and lore
and love of their strange country
they presented us with, cheerfully.
They were eager ‘to get home for the riots’.
As we talked, shoes dreamily, continually
passed above us on the horizontal chairlift.
It was Blundstones and joggers that year,
cogwheel treads with faces between them.
That was also the year I learned
the Basin was a cold crater lake:
swimmers whacking above ancient drownings –
‘it’s never been plumbed, in places’.
I thought of a rock tube of water
down, down levels too frigid for upwelling,
standing at last on this miles-deep
lager head, above a live steam layer
in impossible balance, facing
where there can’t be water, the planet’s
convecting inner abortive iron star.
THE BENEFICIARIES
Higamus hogamus
Western intellectuals
never praise Auschwitz.
Most ungenerous. Most odd,
when they claim it’s what finally
won them their centuries-
long war against God.
THE MAENADS
Four captured a man. When he grasped what they meant to do,
he stole the one’s credit card and hid it in his shoe –
by which they were traced, after their butchery and howls,
and given a housewifely twenty years folding towels.
THE PORTRAIT HEAD
FOR JONATHAN HIRSCHFELD
How Jews may have pioneered sculpture under Pharaoh’s knout:
how atheism is sometimes a greater strictness about
the Second Commandment – ideas the massed green Tuileries
heard us stroll with, amid family lore, values by Worth and fooleries,
pooped after your third session of translating my head into clay
preparatory to bronze. Not as Nature will do it someday.
Your intent travel through my features, transposing them to wet,
had half detached me from them. But I wouldn’t start a new set
in that late headhunting capital. We came then to a netting-and-lath
builders’ yard full of pedestals, giant jardinières, torsoed wrath,
marble nymphs acid-eaten to plaster, bare matte heroes
standing whitely to reason, or weeping into their elbows.
It was so forlorn we couldn’t help grinning. Poor cracked
discards of the ambient gloire, removed and stacked.
Did all universals, still expounding themselves with a clenched,
didactic or flat upsloped hand, get trucked there when retrenched,
to be one with lopped heads, trophies of arms, carven terebinths?
There were no portraits in that corral of plinths.
No gargoyles either. Leaf-roofed, walled in high iron bars,
the grand dank gardens released us by a river of cars
streaming and cross-eddying, with sunk water in stanzas between.
Itching from the Shakespeare bookshop, I paused. Evolution seen
end on is creation. As often, every object seemed a case:
the great Louvre. Leash-dogs fighting. Six p.m. Back, impaled
in your studio, bulked our unbloodied milk-cocoa work face.
IN PHRYGIA, BIRTHPLACE OF EMBROIDERY
When Midas, no less deserving of mercy or better for
being a king dope, had lost all faith in the gods,
either they or their haughty absence sent him metaphor,
an ever-commencing order that can resemble a philosophy
but is more charming faster, like a bird that stars into flight,
like rhyme, its junior, like edgings of the clinker-built sea –
The gold was a symbol, like a need to prize things. I’m smarter
now! he cried. I’m enlightened, as befits a great king!
My silver age will not seize the taramosalata!
But his court worked like stuff he’d learned through nonhuman ears
and like a gold effigy entitled The Hug his first daughter
stood in the strongroom. Age was like age, tears like tears,
his palace equalled his design for it, and looked no nobler tiled,
his desire for slave girls was like when he could slake it,
his wife was like an aged queen, and his heir like a child.
LIKE WHEELING STACKED WATER
Dried nests in the overhanging limbs
are where the flood hatched eggs of swirl.
Like is unscary milder love. More can be in it.
The flood boomed up nearly to the door
like a taxiing airliner. It flew past all day.
Now the creek is down to barley colour
waist deep on her, chest on him,
wearing glasses all around them, barely pushing.
Down under stops of deadwood pipe in living
branches, they move on again. The bottom
is the sunk sand cattle-road they know
but hidden down cool, and mincing
magically away at every step, still going.
The wide creek is a tree hall decorated
with drowned and tobacco ribbons,
with zippy tilting birds, with dried snakes hanging
over the doorways everywhere along.
They push on. Say this log I’m walking
under the water’s a mast like off a
olden day ship – . Fine hessian shade
is moistening down off cross-trees,
and like wings, the rocking waterline
gloving up and down their bodies
pumps support to their swimmy planet steps.
They’ve got a hook and bits
of bluebottle line from salt holidays.
They had a poor worm, and crickets automatic in a jar
but they let all them off fishing.
They’re taking like to an adventure instead,
up past there where the undercut bank
makes that bottling noise, and the kingfisher’s
beak is like the weight he’s thrown by
to fly him straight.
By here, they’re wheeling stacked-up water.
It has mounted like mild ice bedclothes to
their chest and chin. They have to tiptoe
under all the white davits of the bush.
But coming to the island, that is like the pupil
in acres of eye, their clothes pour water
off like heavy chain. They toil, and lighten
as they go up on it. All this is like the past
but none of it is sad. It has never ended.
THE SAND COAST SONNETS
Wallis Lake Estuary
FOR VALERIE
A long street of all blue windows,
the estuary bridge is double-humped
like a bullock yoke. The north tide
teems through to four arriving rivers,
the south tide works the sinus channel
to the big heart-shaped real estate lake.
Both flood oyster farms like burnt floor joists
that islands sleep out among like dogs.
Glorious on a brass day the boiling up
from the south, of a storm above these paddocks
of shoal-creamed, wake-dolphined water.
Equally at dusk, when lamps and pelicans
are posted, the persistence of dark lands
out there on the anodised light void.
Twin Towns History
The northern shore used to be framed up
in shipbuilding’s tap-tap and tar.
/> South across the wide celeste gap
where Lipariote fishermen, Fazio and Sciacca
bagged nets, were a beacon, more shops, scallop
arches of a lattice pub, in another shire.
The Colonial Secretary, way back, gave not a rap
for that side’s name, the Learning Place – blacks, hey? –
and wrote in his own name on the map,
but Pacific men, who’d built the North Coast railway
became Koori there, warned off Town Beach by the cop.
On a punt like a fruit crate braced with wire
cars would balance for the crossing trip,
but the north side kept its name: Fish Shoaling in the Bay.
The Sand Dingoes
Long before bridges, the old men who are hills now
were woken by the mopoke owl. And each had become an island,
ringed salt-white, like the bora. ‘Older sister, younger sister,’
they sang out, ‘you have drowned all our eastern country!’
‘Yes, that Mopoke raped us! We turned him into a night bird
and dug up the salt water.’ The old men started whistling
and big sandy dingoes ran down from the blue plateau
far south, beyond the Wattagan. They streamed out past Barrenjoey
and swam all up the new coast. They yarded that wild ocean
to be lakes and swamps for the people’s fishing, they lay down
around the old men on a cold night and still sleep there,
being new country in their pelts of tea-tree and palm,
there east of Left Hand, and Mixing Bowl, up east of Brisbane.
Those blue south mountains were halved in height, and the sisters
took their sea-digging sticks and camped with the Cross in the sky.
On Home Beaches
Back, in my fifties, fatter than I was then,
I step on the sand, belch down slight horror to walk
a wincing pit edge, waiting for the pistol shot
laughter. Long greening waves cash themselves, foam change
sliding into Ocean’s pocket. She turns: ridicule looks down,
strappy, with faces averted, or is glare and families.
The great hawk of the beach is outstretched, point to point,
quivering and hunting. Cars are the surf at its back.
You peer, at this age, but it’s still there, ridicule,
