by Les Murray
Could I ever rejoice!
It’s war, alas – and unbearable pain
If any think it my choice!
AUSTRALIAN LOVE POEM
FOR JENNIFER STRAUSS
A primary teacher taking courses,
he loved the little girls,
never hard enough to be sacked:
parents made him change schools.
When sure this was his life sentence,
he dropped studies for routine:
the job, the Turf papers, beer,
the then-new poker machine.
Always urbane, he boarded happily
among show-jump ribbons, nailed towels,
stockwhip attitudes he’d find reasons for
and a paddock view, with fowls.
Because the old days weren’t connected
the boss wouldn’t have the phone.
The wife loved cards, outings, Danny Boy,
sweet malice in a mourning tone.
Life had set his hosts aside, as a couple,
from verve or parenthood.
How they lived as a threesome enlivened them
and need not be understood.
Euchre hands that brushed away the decades
also fanned rumour
and mothers of daughters banned the teacher
in his raceday humour,
but snap brim feigning awe of fat-cattle brim
and the henna rinse between them
enlarged each of the three to the others, till
the boss fell on his farm.
Alone together then, beyond the talk,
he’d cook, and tint, and curl,
and sit voluble through rare family visits
to his aged little girl.
As she got lost in the years
where she would wander,
her boy would hold her in bed
and wash sheets to spread under.
But when her relations carried her,
murmuring, out to their van,
he fled that day, as one with no rights,
as an unthanked old man.
INSIDE AYERS ROCK
Inside Ayers Rock is lit
with paired fluorescent lights
on steel pillars supporting the ceiling
of haze-blue marquee cloth
high above the non-slip pavers.
Curving around the cafeteria
throughout vast inner space
is a Milky Way of plastic chairs
in foursomes around tables
all the way to the truck drivers’ enclave.
Dusted coolabah trees grow to the ceiling,
TVs talk in gassy colours, and
round the walls are Outback shop fronts:
the Beehive Bookshop for brochures,
Casual Clobber, the bottled Country Kitchen
and the sheet-iron Dreamtime Experience
that is turned off at night.
A high bank of medal-ribbony
lolly jars presides over
island counters like opened crates,
one labelled White Mugs, and covered with them.
A two-dimensional policeman
discourages shoplifting of gifts
and near the entrance, where you pay
for fuel, there stands a tribal man
in rib-paint and pubic tassel.
It is all gentle and kind.
In beyond the children’s playworld
there are fossils, like crumpled
old drawings of creatures in rock.
EACH MORNING ONCE MORE SEAMLESS
Mother and type of evolution,
the New Testament of the scholars
may be likened to a library catalogue
of the old type, a card index console
of wooden drawers, each a verse.
And you never know which ones are out,
stacked up, spilt, or currently back
in, with some words deleted
then restored. And it never ends.
Reputations slide them out,
convictions push them in.
Speculations look backwards once
and stiffen to salt-crystal proofs.
Dates grow on palms in the wilderness
and ferment in human minds –
and criticism’s prison for all poems
was modelled on this traffic.
Most battered of all are the drawers
labelled Resurrection, The.
Bashed, switched, themselves resurrected
continually. Because it is impossible,
as the galaxies were, as life was,
as flight and language were. The impossible,
evolution’s prey, shot with Time’s arrow.
But this one is the bow of time.
Shadowy at a little distance tower
other banks of card-index drawers,
other myriad shelves, jammed with human names.
Some labelled in German are most actively
worked over, grieved, and reinserted.
More stretch away in Eastern scripts,
scarcely visited. Dust softens their headwords.
Yet the only moral reason to leave any
in silence fragments and reassembles
in the swarmed over, nagged, fantasised
word-atoms of the critics’ testament.
CONTESTED LANDSCAPE AT FORSAYTH
The conquest of fire-culture
on that timber countryside
has broadcast innumerable
termite mounds all through
the gravel gold rush hills
and the remnant railhead town,
petrified French mustards
out of jars long smashed.
Train platform and tin Shire
are beleaguered in nameless cemetery.
Outworks of the Dividing range
are annulled under Dreaming-turds.
It’s as if every place a miner
cursed, or thought of sex,
had its abraded marker. Mile
on mile of freckled shade,
the ordinary is riddled by
cylinder-pins of unheard music.
On depopulated country
frail billions are alive
in layered earthen lace.
Their every flight is
a generation, glueing towers
which scatter and mass
on a blind smell-plan.
Cobras and meta-cobras
in the bush, immense black vines
await monsoon in a world
of clay lingam altars.
Like the monuments to every
mortal thing that a planet without God
would require, and inscriptionless
as rage would soon weather those,
the anthills erupt on verges,
on streets, round the glaring pub,
its mango trees and sleeping-fridges,
an estuary of undergrounds,
dried cities of the flying worm.
THE SHIELD-SCALES OF HERALDRY
Surmounting my government’s high evasions
stands a barbecue of crosses and birds
tended by a kangaroo and emu
but in our courts, above the judge,
a lion and a unicorn still keep
their smaller offspring, plus a harp,
in an open prison looped with mottoes.
Coats of arms, plaster Rorschach blots,
crowned stone moths, they encrust Europe.
As God was dismissed from churches
they fluttered in and cling to the walls,
abstract comic-pages held by scrolled beasts,
or wear on the flagstones underfoot.
They pertain to an earlier Antichrist,
the one before police. Mafiose citadels
made them, states of one attended family
islanded in furrows. The oldest
are the simplest. A cross, some coins,
&nbs
p; a stripe, a roof tree, a spur rowel,
bowstaves, a hollow-gutted lion,
and all in lucid target colours.
Under tinned heads with reveries tied on,
shields are quartered and cubed by marriage
till they are sacred campaign maps
or anatomy inside dissected mantling,
glyphs minutely clear through their one
rule, that colour must abut either
gold or silver, the non-weapon metals.
The New World doesn’t blazon well –
the new world ran away from blazonry
or was sent away in chains by it –
but exceptions shine: the spread eagle
with the fireworks display on its belly
and in the thinks-balloon above its head.
And when as a half-autistic
kid in scrub paddocks vert and or
I grooved on the cloisons of pedigree
it was a vivid writing of system
that hypnotised me, beyond the obvious
euphemism of force. It was eight hundred
years of cubist art and Europe’s dreamings:
the Cup, the Rose, the Ship, the Antlers.
High courage, bestial snobbery,
neither now merits ungrace from us.
They could no longer hang me,
throttling, for a rabbit sejant.
Like everyone, I would now be lord
or lady myself, and pardon me
or myself loose the coronet-necked hounds.
THE YEAR OF THE KILN PORTRAITS
I came in from planting more trees.
I was sweating, and flopped down aslant
on the sofa. You and Clare were sitting
at the lunch table, singing as you do
in harmony even I hear as beautiful,
mezzo soprano and soprano,
for anything Arno. You winked at me
and, liquescent as my face was,
I must have looked like the year
you painted all our portraits, lovingly,
exquisitely, on ceramic tiles
in undrying oil, just one
or at most two colours at a time
and carried them braced oblique, wet,
in plastic ice-cream boxes to town.
It was encaustic painting,
ancient Rome’s photography, that gets
developed in successive kiln firings
till it lives, time-freed, transposed
in behind a once-blank glaze.
Afterwards, you did some figured tiles
for our patchwork chimney, then stopped.
In art, you have serious gifts. But it’s
crazy: you’re not driven. Not obsessive.
UNDER THE BANANA MOUNTAINS
At the edge of the tropics
they cut on the hills
raw shapes of other hills
and colour them banana.
One I used to see towering
each time I came away
climbed up and up, dressed in
a banana-tree beach shirt
with bush round its shoulders
like thrown-back jersey sleeves
and the rimmed sea below
drawing real estate to it.
Two islands were named Solitary
and the town wharf was crumbling
but surfers climbed sea-faces
on their boards, hand over hand.
The perched banana farms
mounted thousandfold stands
of room-long Chinese banners
or green to yellow lash-ups
of quill pens, splitting-edged,
their ink points in scrap vellum
each time I came away,
shiplapped fruit in blue mantles
all gaslit by the sun
and men drove tractors sidelong
like fighter planes, round steeps
worse than killed Grace Kelly.
Their scale came down to us
or caught round high-set houses.
I had shining hospitality
in dimmed subtropic rooms,
I unveiled a pastel school
and swift days keep passing
since I came away.
A STAGE IN GENTRIFICATION
Most Culture has been an East German plastic bag
pulled over our heads, stifling and wet,
we see a hotly distorted world
through crackling folds and try not to gag.
Sex, media careers, the Australian republic
and recruited depression are in that bag
with scorn of God, with self-abasement studies
and funding’s addictive smelling-rag.
Eighty million were murdered by police
in the selfsame terms and spirit which nag
and bully and set the atmosphere
inside the East German plastic bag.
It wants to become our country’s flag
and rule by demo and kangaroo court
but it’s wearing thin. It’ll spill, and twist
and fly off still rustling Fascist! Fascist!
and catch on the same fence as Hitler, and sag.
EARTH TREMOR AT NIGHT
Stopped by an earthquake on the North Coast line
in moonless dark, and thrumming, between Mount George
and Charity Creek, passengers become neighbours, worry,
peer out through mirrored selves. Opened doors reveal
steep winter canebrakes and the wide skinned scent
of the upper Manning River in a time of drought.
At the train’s lit head, talk clangs like obscure tools.
Away over past a window is Kimbriki,* tribal estate
of one dignified slim old man and the farm of another,
my great great grandfather. Both occupied the same land
amicably. Smoke rose beside separate bark roofings.
In the next generation, no tribal heir appeared.
What you presume concerning this will tell you
the trend of your life. The sky is bumper with stars:
each like a snowflake, if seen through reading glasses.
The crew still knocking out words up along the train,
the people beg for radios, telephones. It’s an earthquake!
Miles out to the south my family already has news
but here we’re baulked of action. All dark hills, no road.
Alarm is like childhood, when love was from before thinking.
Beyond choice, we see our loves as indigenes see land.
* Kimbriki: pronounced KIM-brik-ai
WAKING UP ON TOUR
Almost surprised to have been
delivered to the same house
as I went to sleep in, I unglue
my mouth, and flap back the bedclothes.
Brickwork is dawning, and pooled streets
which are floors of that red sea.
Time enough, for descending stair-depths
on a smile, dispelling hosts’ privacy.
The salmon were scabbard and blade
in the delis of Ireland;
mist formed like manna on dusk fields.
Glassed prison cells jutted singly
there, nuclei filled with soldiers
inside cubed membranes of mesh.
Wales was reached across tuned
high strings, and the proud black red cream
towns of England go orange at nightfall,
still being rammed by lorries,
all those cities that exiled and hanged
the present, when it was their future.
TYMPAN ALLEY
Adult songs in English,
avoiding schmaltz,
pre-twang:
the last songs adults sang.
When roles and manners wore
their cuffs as shot as Or-
tega y Gasset’s,
soloists sang
as if
a jeweller raised
pinches of facets
for hearts as yet unfazed
by fatty assets.
Adult songs with English;
the brilliantine long-play
records of the day
sing of the singlish,
the arch from wry to rue,
of marques and just one Engel,
blue, that Dietrich played;
euphemism’s last parade
with rhymes still on our side
unwilling to divide
the men from the poise,
of lackadays and lakatois –
and always you,
cool independent You,
unsnowable, au fait,
when Us were hotly two,
not lost in They.
A LEGO OF DRIVING TO SYDNEY
Dousing the campfire with tea
you step on the pedal and mount
whip-high behind splashboard and socket.
Your burnished rims tilt and rebound
among bristling botany. Only
a day now to the Port,
to bodices in the coffee palace,
to metal-shying razors in suits
and bare ships towing out, to dress
and concentrate in the wind.
Motoring down the main roads,
fenced wheeltrack-choices in forest,
odd scored beds of gravel,
knotwood in the ground –
you will have to wrestle
hand and foot to reach Sydney
and win every fall.
River punts are respites.
Croak-oak! the horsedung roads
aren’t scented any more, but tasted.
Paved road starts at Chatswood:
just one ferry then, to stringing
tramcars and curl the mo,
to palms in the wonderful hotels.
Blazing down a razorback
in slab dark, in a huge
American car of the chassis age
to rescue for pleated cushions
a staring loved one who’ll sway
down every totter of the gangway
on cane legs. Petrol coupons
had to be scrounged for this one:
they have seen too much railway.
Queuing down bloody highways
all round Easter, crawling in
to the great herbed sandstone bowl
of tealeaf scrub and suburbs,
hills by Monier and Wunderlich
in kiln orange, with cracks of harbour,
coming down to miss the milking
on full board, with baked Sundays,
life now to be neat and dry eyed,
coming down to be gentrified.
