Collected Poems
Page 40
One long glide down the freeway
through aromatic radar zones,
soaring Egyptian rock cuttings
bang into a newsprint-coloured
rainstorm, tweeting the car phone
about union shares and police futures.
Driving in in your thousands
to the Show, to be detained
half a lifetime, or to grow rental
under steel flagpoles lapping
with multicoloured recipes.
BURNING WANT
From just on puberty, I lived in funeral:
mother dead of miscarriage, father trying to be dead,
we’d boil sweat-brown cloth; cows repossessed the garden.
Lovemaking brought death, was the unuttered principle.
I met a tall adopted girl some kids thought aloof,
but she was intelligent. Her poise of white-blonde hair
proved her no kin to the squat tanned couple who loved her.
Only now do I realise she was my first love.
But all my names were fat-names, at my new town school.
Between classes, kids did erocide: destruction of sexual morale.
Mass refusal of unasked love; that works. Boys cheered as seventeen-
year-old girls came on to me, then ran back whinnying ridicule.
The slender girl came up on holidays from the city
to my cousins’ farm. She was friendly and sane.
Whispers giggled round us. A letter was written as from me
and she was there, in mid-term, instantly.
But I called people ‘the humans’ not knowing it was rage.
I learned things sidelong, taking my rifle for walks,
recited every scene of From Here to Eternity, burned paddocks
and soldiered back each Monday to that dawning Teen age.
She I admired, and almost relaxed from placating,
was gnawed by knowing what she came from, not who.
Showing off was my one social skill, oddly never with her
but I dissembled feelings, till mine were unknown to me too
and I couldn’t add my want to her shortfall of wantedness.
I had forty more years, with one dear remission,
of a white paralysis: she’s attracted it’s not real nothing is enough
she’s mistaken she’ll die go now! she’ll tell any minute she’ll laugh –
Whether other hands reached out to Marion, or didn’t,
at nineteen in her training ward she had a fatal accident
alone, at night, they said, with a lethal injection
and was spared from seeing what my school did to the world.
THE LAST HELLOS
Don’t die, Dad –
but they die.
This last year he was wandery:
took off a new chainsaw blade
and cobbled a spare from bits.
Perhaps if I lay down
my head’ll come better again.
His left shoulder kept rising
higher in his cardigan.
He could see death in a face.
Family used to call him in
to look at sick ones and say.
At his own time, he was told.
The knob found in his head
was duck-egg size. Never hurt.
Two to six months, Cecil.
I’ll be right, he boomed
to his poor sister on the phone
I’ll do that when I finish dyin.
o
Don’t die, Cecil.
But they do.
Going for last drives
in the bush, odd massive
board-slotted stumps bony white
in whipstick second growth.
I could chop all day.
I could always cash
a cheque, in Sydney or anywhere.
Any of the shops.
Eating, still at the head
of the table, he now missed
food on his knife side.
Sorry, Dad, but like
have you forgiven your enemies?
Your father and all of them?
All his lifetime of hurt.
I must have (grin). I don’t
think about that now.
o
People can’t say goodbye
any more. They say last hellos.
Going fast, over Christmas,
he’d still stumble out
of his room, where his photos
hang over the other furniture,
and play host to his mourners.
The courage of his bluster
firm big voice of his confusion.
Two last days in the hospital:
his long forearms were still
red mahogany. His hands
gripped steel frame. I’m dyin.
On the second day:
You’re bustin to talk but
I’m too busy dyin.
o
Grief ended when he died,
the widower like soldiers who
won’t live life their mates missed.
Good boy Cecil! No more Bluey dog.
No more cowtime. No more stories.
We’re still using your imagination,
it was stronger than all ours.
Your grave’s got littler
somehow, in the three months.
More pointy as the clay’s shrivelled,
like a stuck zip in a coat.
Your cricket boots are in
the State museum! Odd letters
still come. Two more’s died since you:
Annie, and Stewart. Old Stewart.
On your day there was a good crowd,
family, and people from away.
But of course a lot had gone
to their own funerals first.
Snobs mind us off religion
nowadays, if they can.
Fuck thém. I wish you God.
OPENING IN ENGLAND
All days were work days on the farm:
respite and dreaming were in them,
so holidays, I reasoned in childhood
must be hollow-days. Which people filled
with hotels, cars, wincing parade sand.
Now my plane is keening in to land
from Hollywood, supreme human judging-ring.
I only looked. Poets are nothing
in that profit vortex. Entertainment
and all the decorations of satiety
were craft, but poetry was a gent
always, regaled with gifts, not money.
Ancient shame, to pay for love or the sacred.
Deny the sacred, and we are owed pay.
Wage justice for poets, a living
like that of all who live off our words:
surreal notions from the lecture I’m giving
uphill from the concrete Liver birds –
then, feasted by kind hosts, I’m away
under Springtime’s wind-hoed Mersey
to make holiday amid the ballpoint Spires
for new friends and hearers, be well dined
in an ormolu hall, with more good talk in London
till I die of reaction. Not theirs: mine.
Rising, I unzip more high-speed shires,
tour a mansion lovely as an unenraged mind,
nod with narrowboat windows and dipped tyres
and surface with my family near the Wye, at Hay.
MY ANCESTRESS AND THE SECRET BALLOT
1848 AND 1851
Isabella Scott, born eighteen-oh-two,
grows gaunt in a cottage on Cheviot side,
the first and last house in Scotland, its view
like a vast Scottish flag, worn linen and blue
with no warmth in it. When her man died
it’s what she and ten children could afford,
out of the village, high in the wind.
Five years before, in Paterson town,
a corpse stains the dust on
voting day.
Rioters kicked him to death for the way
he was known to vote; more were struck down.
The way you voted being known
can get you sacked and driven away.
The widened franchise is a fizzer, folk say.
Isabella Scott, when Scotch wives kept
their surnames, has letters from her cousin
in New South Wales, Overseer of Free Men:
Send me your grown lads. If they adapt
to here, come out yourself with the children.
In those sunburnt colonies, in more than one mind,
how to repair the ballot’s been divined.
Put about, wee ship, on your Great Circle course,
don’t carry Bella’s Murray daughter and boys
to the British Crown’s stolen Austral land.
In ten years the Secret Ballot will force
its way into law in those colonies.
If the poor can just sit on their non-smoking hand
till they’re old, help will come from Labor policies
and parties, sprung worldwide from that lag idea
which opens, by evading duellisms of the soul,
the only non-murderous route to the dole.
Don’t sail, don’t sail, Great-grannie(cubed) dear:
wait just a century and there’ll be welfare
in full, and you won’t play the Settler role.
The polling booth will be a closet of prayer.
COMETE
Uphill in Melbourne on a beautiful day
a woman was walking ahead of her hair.
Like teak oiled soft to fracture and sway
it hung to her heels and seconded her
as a pencilled retinue, an unscrolling title
to ploughland, edged with ripe rows of dress,
a sheathed wing that couldn’t fly her at all,
only itself, loosely, and her spirits.
A largesse
of life and self, brushed all calm and out,
its abstracted attempts on her mouth weren’t seen,
nor its showering, its tenting. Just the detail
that swam in its flow-lines, glossing about –
as she paced on, comet-like, face to the sun.
DRY WATER
My sleep, that had gone astray,
flying home, turned up at last,
developing in the brain’s red room
like film of crowding and woollies,
but builders were tapping the house
and I couldn’t lie down, not
while they worked. I still can’t
do privilege. So I fed the fowls
and pottered round the dead-tree dam
which lay stilled under water fern,
matte as the rough side of masonite
with trails of swimming birds
through it like fading tyre-tracks
and gaps re-coalescing. The cud
of azolla, scooped up, was tiny green
rockery plants, brown only in total.
Wind impulses quivering the water
were damped under that blanket level
which would floor it till next flood.
It made me think of other
dry water. Dry bath water
magicked out of lustrous fine gravel
in the Roman military museum
at Caerleon, in Old South Wales.
The mealiness and illusory slick
of minute stones there evoke steam,
soldier-scrapings and olive oil
worked to motionless ripples, as they fill
the excavated real masonry pools.
Sunproofed water, safety water – yawn.
Imprisoning the actual in commentary:
will that get us sex after death?
Our one-eyed fowl lay on his side
to peck at grain in two dimensions
and, still nailing the house’s scansions
and line lengths, the only people
who abash me – Not a working model,
our bloke! No. – kept me from bed,
atoning for poetry’s slight sacredness
and the deep shame of achievement.
LIFE CYCLE OF IDEAS
An idea whistles with your lips,
laughs with your breath.
An idea hungers for your body.
An alert, hot to dissemble and share,
it snatches up cases of its style
from everywhere, to start a face.
An idea is a mouth that sells
as it sucks. It lusts to have
loomed perpetual in the night colours:
an idea is always a social climb.
Whether still braving snorts,
ordering its shootings, or at rest
among its own charts of world rule,
a maturing idea will suddenly want
to get smaller than its bearers.
It longs to be a poem:
earthed, accurate immortal trance,
buck as stirrups were,
blare as the panther.
Only art can contain an idea.
COTTON FLANNELETTE
Shake the bed, the blackened child whimpers,
O shake the bed! through beak lips that never
will come unwry. And wearily the iron-
framed mattress, with nodding crockery bulbs,
jinks on its way.
Her brothers and sister take
shifts with the terrible glued-together baby
when their unsleeping absolute mother
reels out to snatch an hour, back to stop
the rocking and wring pale blue soap-water
over nude bladders and blood-webbed chars.
Even their cranky evasive father
is awed to stand watches rocking the bed.
Lids frogged shut, O please shake the bed,
her contour whorls and braille tattoos
from where, in her nightdress, she flared
out of hearth-drowse to a marrow shriek
pedalling full tilt firesleeves in mid air,
are grainier with repair
than when the doctor, crying Dear God, woman!
No one can save that child. Let her go!
spared her the treatments of the day.
Shake the bed. Like: count phone poles, rhyme,
classify realities, bang the head, any
iteration that will bring, in the brain’s forks,
the melting molecules of relief,
and bring them again.
O rock the bed!
Nibble water with bared teeth, make lymph
like arrowroot gruel, as your mother grips you
for weeks in the untrained perfect language,
till the doctor relents. Salves and wraps you
in dressings that will be the fire again,
ripping anguish off agony,
and will confirm
the ploughland ridges the gum joins
in your woman’s skin, child saved by rhythm
for the sixty more years your family weaves you
on devotion’s loom, rick-racking the bed
as you yourself, six years old, instruct them.
THE TRANCES
We came from the Ice Age,
we work for the trances.
The hunter, the Mother,
seers’ inside-out glances
come from the Ice Age,
all things in two sexes,
the priest man, the beast man,
I flatten to run
I rise to be human.
We came from the Ice Age
with the walk of the Mothers
with the walk of the powers
we walked where sea now is
we made the dry land
we told it in our trances
we burnt it with our sexes
but the tongue it is sand
see it, all dry taste buds
lapping e
ach foot that crosses
every word is more sand.
Dup dup hey duhn duhn
the rhythm of the Mothers.
We come from the Ice Ages
with the tribes and the trances
the drum’s a tapped drone
dup dup hey duhn duhn.
We come from the Ice Age,
poem makers, homemakers,
how you know we are sacred:
it’s unlucky to pay us.
Kings are later, farmers later.
After the Ice Age, they
made landscape, made neuter,
they made prose and pay.
Things are bodied by the trances,
loved, analysed and scorned:
a true priest’s loved in scorn,
how you know he is sacred.
We’re gifted and pensioned.
Some paid ones were us:
when they got their wages
ice formed in their mouths
chink chink, the Ice Age.
A prose world is the Ice Age
it is all the one sex
and theory, that floats land
we came over that floe land
we came from the Ice Age
we left it by the trances
worlds warm from the trances
duhn duhn hey dup dup
it goes on, we don’t stop
we walk on from the Ice Age.
THE DEVIL
I must have heard of the Devil
in our splintery church
but the earliest I remember him
is when, as a bullocky’s child
in a clan of operatic swearers,
I first essayed the black poetry.
My mouth-farting profanities
horrified Barney McCann,
the Krambach carpenter staying
with us to rebuild our bails:
Lord, I won’t sleep on that verandah
where you sleep! Not tonight.
After what you just said
the old Devil’s sure to come for you.
O he’s bad, with his claws and tail.
My parents smiled uneasily.
Bats flitted, the moon shone in.
Will the old Devil get me?
I quavered, four years old, through the wall,
Will he get me? The agile long-boned man
of pure horror, clinging to the outside
weatherboards like the spur-shouldered
hoatzin bird in my mother’s
encyclopedia books. Not if you
knock off swearing. Go to sleep, Leslie.
But the carpenter was soldering iron
gutterings, dipping flux with a feather
from a yellow bottle. Spirits of salts:
it’ll eat through everything. Only