by Les Murray
this bottle can hold it. A drop
on your head would sizzle right down
through you, burn on into the ground –
fearful stuff. Then he flicked the feather
at me, and leaned away with a grin
from my wept hysteric shower of oaths.
That’s it! I won’t sleep in your house now.
He’ll take everybody tonight.
I was cured. It became a funny yarn.
But over the next years
I sneaked back, in daylight first,
to the insulted people’s language
that made me feel so thrillingly
alone and empty of heart
that the church’s doctrines and
the snootiest dismissals of them
would both need to be true
at once, to come near it.
It fitted the future easily.
THE NEARLY DEPARTED
TRANSLATED FROM THE GERMAN OF HEINRICH HEINE 1797–1856
In my breast I’ve seen expire
every worldly vain desire,
even, among things dead in there,
hatred of evil, likewise any care
for my or others’ hour of need –
only Death lives in me indeed.
The curtain falls, the play is done,
and my dear German public as one
saunters yawning in homeward throngs.
The good folk, enjoying laughs and songs
aren’t such fools, I have to allow,
supping and boozing and making a row –
It’s true, that speech of the noble hero’s
long ago in the book Homeros:
the lot of the meanest live Philistine
in Stuttgart-on-Neckar is happier than mine,
I, son of Peleus, dead champ whose shade is
prince of shadows in gloomy Hades.
THE WARM RAIN
Against the darker trees or an open car shed
is where we first see rain, on a cumulous day,
a subtle slant locating the light in air
in front of a Forties still of tubs and bike-frames.
Next sign, the dust that was white pepper bared
starts pitting and re-knotting into peppercorns.
It stops being a raceway of rocket smoke behind cars,
it sidles off foliage, darkens to a lustre. The roof
of the bush barely leaks yet, but paper slows right down.
Hurrying parcels pearl but don’t now split
crossing the carparks. People clap things in odd salute
to the side of their heads, yell wit, dance on their doubles.
The sunny parallels, when opposite the light, have a flung look
like falling seed. They mass, and develop a shore sound;
fixtures get cancelled, the muckiest shovels rack up.
The highway whizzes, and lorries put spin on vapour;
soon puddles hit at speed will arch over you like a slammed sea.
I love it all, I agree with it. At nightfall, the cause
of the whole thing revolves, in white and tints, on TV
like the Crab nebula; it brandishes palm trees like mops,
its borders swell over the continent, they compress the other
nations of the weather. Fruit bumps lawn, and every country dam
brews under bubbles, milky temperas sombering to oils.
Grass rains upward; the crêpe-myrtle tree heels, sopping crimson,
needing to be shaken like the kilt of a large man.
Hills run, air and paddocks are swollen. Eaves dribble like jaws
and coolness is a silent film, starring green and mirrors.
Tiny firetail finches, quiet in our climber rose, agree to it
like early humans. Cattle agree harder, hunched out in the clouds.
From here, the ocean may pump up and up and explode
around the lighthouses in gigantic cloak sleeves, the whole book
of foam slide and fritter, disclosing a pen shaft. Paratroops
of salt water may land in dock streets, skinless balloons
be flat out to queue down every drain, and the wind race
thousands of flags. Or we may be just chirpings, damped
under calm high cornfields of pour, with butter clearings
that spread and resume glare, hiding the warm rain
back inside our clothes, as mauve trees scab to cream
and grey trees strip bright salmon, with loden patches.
DEMO
No. Not from me. Never.
Not a step in your march,
not a vowel in your unison,
bray that shifts to bay.
Banners sailing a street river,
power in advance of a vote,
go choke on these quatrain tablets.
I grant you no claim ever,
not if you pushed the Christ Child
as President of Rock Candy Mountain
or yowled for the found Elixir
would your caste expectations snare me.
Superhuman with accusation,
you would conscript me to a world
of people spat on, people hiding
ahead of oncoming poetry.
Whatever class is your screen
I’m from several lower.
To your rigged fashions, I’m pariah.
Nothing a mob does is clean,
not at first, not when slowed to a media,
not when police. The first demos I saw,
before placards, were against me,
alone, for two years, with chants,
every day, with half-conciliatory
needling in between, and aloof
moral cowardice holding skirts away.
I learned your world order then.
DEAF LANGUAGE
Two women were characters, continually
rewriting themselves, in turn, with their hands
mostly, but with face and torso too
and very fast, in brushwork like the gestures
above a busy street in Shanghai.
REVERSE LIGHT
Man was a mug, really,
to give them his right age:
I could have gone on
being the lighthouse keeper
for another ten years. Fishing,
lighting her, keeping her clean,
end-for-ending the tablecloth.
A small whale beached below
once. I cut it up for the dogs.
It was good out on the bo’sun’s
chair, slathering on paint
with my safety ladder going up,
thinking about cows, and seals,
sand dollars and my wives and stuff.
Queerest thing about the job,
the light that jabs away out
at night, and rides the horizons
comes out of just a bulb
inside this turntable rack
of like thick glass saucers.
When I’d switch her off
of a summer morning
and polish those ridgy lenses
I had to draw the curtains
round the windows facing inland
or else the sun could spike in
through them, the lenses, and make
rays, and set all the bush alight.
THE GENETIC GALAXY
FOR SIR JOHN GUISE, FIRST GOVERNOR GENERAL OF PAPUA NEW GUINEA
A chart, wider than the world
which would diagram with sober truth
the parentage of everyone, named
and linked with their real kin
across all of time and space:
Strips and fragments of this chart
are the snigger of community
often waved at Identity overdone,
thst is, underdone with intent –
wives have hung them out with the smalls.
Plenty, could they get this chart,
would
display it entire
to howls of revised posh, burning wills,
unspoken people, death rays
of Whititude and Negritude,
anguish of men out of whose children
other men peer innocently,
shock historical non-maternities
and the stratosphere-tightening
gasp at incest seen in full.
Glorious to see a hero car-bomber
or kulak-shooter sunk by wrong ancestry,
a Klan klutz awed by his colours of descent
and much sheer joy of disinheritance.
Sadder, an adoptee’s frantic name-thirst,
but a million years’ unreachable blamed dead
might stun revenge, sheer wealth of tangents
swamp destiny and victimhood,
Aborigines in the House of Windsor
and of Worth, where they always belonged.
Names rising from deep time
by the new propulsion of anecdote,
all descent-lines nine tenths tribesfolk
then odder that reincarnation’s princess-tales
and far wilder than the genome
which may be their first rough lens.
When complete the Chart will need
to hang in space, to be safe from us
like the relativised stars
once also made by love.
BLOWFLY GRASS
The houses those suburbs could afford
were roofed with old savings books, and some
seeped gravy at stitches in their walls;
some were clipped as close as fury,
some grimed and corner-bashed by love
and the real estate, as it got more vacant
grew blady grass and blowfly grass, so called
for the exquisite lanterns of its seed
and the land sagged subtly to a low point,
it all inclined way out there to a pit
with burnt-looking cheap marble edges
and things and figures flew up from it
like the stones in the crusher Piers had
for making dusts of them for glazes:
flint, pyroclase, slickensides, quartz, schist,
snapping, refusing and spitting high
till the steel teeth got gritty corners on them
and could grip them craw-chokingly to grind.
It’s their chance, a man with beerglass-cut arms
told me. Those hoppers got to keep filled. A girl,
edging in, bounced out cropped and wrong-coloured
like a chemist’s photo crying. Who could blame her
among in-depth grabs and Bali flights and phones?
She was true, and got what truth gets.
DREAMBABWE
Streaming, a hippo surfaces
like the head of someone
lifting, with still entranced eyes,
from a lake of stanzas.
BELOW BRONTE HOUSE
The children pouring down,
supervised, into the ravine
and talking animatedly all over
each other like faces in a payout
of small change, now come in
under a vast shadowy marquee
of native fig and tree of heaven.
In their indigo and white
they flow on down, glimpsed
between the patisserie trunks
of green coral trees, and as
they go on towards the ocean
they are still tangling and grabbing
at an elusive bright string
that many want to pick off others
and off themselves. It is
of course childhood, which they
scorn as a disabling naïveté
as they approach where waves
of sand bulge up through shaved grass.
THE HEAD-SPIDER
Where I lived once, a roller coaster’s range
of timber hills peaked just by our backyard cliff
and cars undulated scream-driven round its seismograph
and climbed up to us with an indrawn gasp of girls.
Smiles and yelling could be exchanged as they crested
then they’d pitch over, straining back in a shriek
that volleyed as the cars were snatched from sight
in the abyss, and were soon back. Weekdays they rested,
and I rested all days. There was a spider in my head
I’d long stay unaware of. If you’re raped you mostly know
but I’d been cursed, and refused to notice or believe it.
Aloof in a Push squat, I thought I was moral, or dead.
Misrule was strict there, and the Pill of the day only ever
went into one mouth, not mine, and foamed a Santa-beard.
I was resented for chastity, and slept on an overcoat.
Once Carol from upstairs came to me in bra and kindness
and the spider secreted by girls’ derision-rites to spare
women from me had to numb me to a crazed politeness.
Squeals rode the edge of the thrill building. Cartoonist Mercier
drew springs under Sydney. Push lovers were untrue on principle.
It’s all architecture over there now. A new roller coaster
flies its ups and downs in wealth’s face like an affront.
I’ve written a new body that only needs a reader’s touch.
If love is cursed in us, then when God exists, we don’t.
AMANDA’S PAINTING
In the painting, I’m seated in a shield,
coming home in it up a shadowy river.
It is a small metal boat lined in eggshell
and my hands grip the gunwale rims. I’m
a composite bow, tensioning the whole boat,
steering it with my gaze. No oars, no engine,
no sails. I’m propelling the little craft with speech.
The faded rings around my loose bulk shirt
are of five lines each, a musical lineation
and the shirt is apple-red, soaking in salt birth-sheen
more liquid than the river. My cap is a teal mask
pushed back so far that I can pretend it is headgear.
In the middle of the river are cobweb cassowary trees
of the South Pacific, and on the far shore rise
dark hills of the temperate zone. To these, at this
moment in the painting’s growth, my course is slant
but my eye is on them. To relax, to speak European.
ONE KNEELING, ONE LOOKING DOWN
Half-buried timbers chained corduroy
lead out into the sand
which bare feet wincing Crutch and Crotch
spurn for the summer surf’s embroidery
and insects stay up on the land.
A storm engrossing half the sky
in broccoli and seething drab
and standing on one foot over the country
burrs like a lit torch. Lightning
turns air to elixir at every grab
but the ocean sky is untroubled blue
everywhere. Its storm rolls below:
sand clouds raining on sacred country
drowned a hundred lifetimes under sea.
In the ruins of a hill, channels flow,
and people, like a scant palisade
driven in the surf, jump or sway
or drag its white netting to the tide line
where a big man lies with his limbs splayed,
fingers and toes and a forehead-shine
as if he’d fallen off the flag.
Only two women seem aware of him.
One says But this frees us. I’d be a fool –
Say it with me, says the other. For him to revive
we must both say it. Say Be alive. –
But it was our own friends who got
him with a brave shot, a clever shot. –
Those are our equals: we scorn them
; for being no more than ourselves.
Say it with me. Say Be alive. –
Elder sister, it is impossible. –
Life was once impossible. And flight. And speech.
It was impossible to visit the moon.
The impossible’s our summoning dimension.
Say it with me. Say Be alive again. –
The younger wavers. She won’t leave
nor stop being furious. The sea’s vast
catchment of light sends ashore a roughcast
that melts off every swimmer who can stand.
Glaring through slits, the storm moves inland.
The younger sister, wavering, shouts Stay dead!
She knows how impossibility
is the only door that opens.
She pities his fall, leg under one knee
but her power is his death, and can’t be dignified.
BOTTLES IN THE BOMBED CITY
MANCHESTER 1996
They gave the city a stroke. Its memories
are cordoned off. They could collapse on you.
Water leaks into bricks of the workers’ century
and every meaning is blurred. No word in Roget
now squares with another. If the word is Manchester
it may be Australia, where that means sheets and towels.
To give the city a stroke, they mixed a lorryload
of henbane and meadowsweet oil and countrified her.
Now Engels supports Max, and the British Union
of beautiful ceramics is being shovelled up,
blue-green tiles of the Corn Exchange,
umber gloss bricks of the Royal Midlands Hotel.
Unmelting ice everywhere, and loosened molecules.
When the stroke came, every bottle winked at its neighbour.
THE MARGIN OF DIFFERENCE
One and one make two,
the literalist said.
So far they’ve made five billion,
said the lateralist, or ten
times that, if you count the dead.
A RETICENCE
After a silver summer
of downpour, cement-powder autumn
set in its bag. Lawns turned crunchy
but the time tap kept dribbling away.
The paddocks were void as that evening
in early childhood when the sun
was rising in the west,
round and brimming as the factory furnace door,
as I woke up after sickness.
Then it was explained to me
