by Les Murray
that I’d slept through from morning
and I sobbed because I’d missed that day,
my entire lovely day.
Without you, it might have been a prophecy.
TRAVELS WITH JOHN HUNTER
We who travel between worlds
lose our muscle and bone.
I was wheeling a barrow of earth
when agony bayoneted me.
I could not sit, or lie down,
or stand, in Casualty.
Stomach-calming clay caked my lips,
I turned yellow as the moon
and slid inside a CAT-scan wheel
in a hospital where I met no-one
so much was my liver now my dire
preoccupation. I was sped down a road
of treetops and fishing-rod lightpoles
toward the three persons of God
and the three persons of John Hunter
Hospital. Who said We might lose this one.
Twenty days or to the heat-death
of the Universe have the same duration:
vaguely half an hour. I awoke
giggling over a joke
about Paul Kruger in Johannesburg
and missed the white court stockings
I half remembered from my prone
still voyage beyond flesh and bone.
I asked my friend who got new lungs
How long were you crazy, coming back?
Five days, he said. Violent and mad.
Fictive Afrikaner police were at him,
not unworldly Oom Paul Kruger.
Valerie, who had sat the twenty days
beside me, now gently told me tales
of my time-warp. The operative canyon
stretched, stapled, with dry roseate walls
down my belly. Seaweed gel
plugged views of my pluck and offal.
Some accident had released flora
who live in us and will eat us
when we stop feeding them the earth.
I’d rehearsed the private office of the grave,
ceased excreting, made corpse gases
all while liana’d in tubes
and overseen by cockpit instruments
that beeped or struck up Beethoven’s
Fifth at behests of fluid.
I also hear when I lay lipless
and far away I was anointed
first by a mild metaphoric church
then by the Church of no metaphors.
Now I said, signing a Dutch contract
in a hand I couldn’t recognise,
let’s go and eat Chinese soup
and drive to Lake Macquarie. Was I
not renewed as we are in Heaven?
In fact I could hardly endure
Earth gravity, and stayed weak and cranky
till the soup came, squid and vegetables,
pure Yang. And was sane thereafter.
It seemed I’d also travelled
in a Spring-in-Winter love-barque of cards,
of flowers and phone calls and letters,
concern I’d never dreamed was there
when black kelp boiled in my head.
I’d awoken amid my State funeral,
nevermore to eat my liver
or feed it to the Black Dog, depression
which the three Johns Hunter seem
to have killed with their scalpels:
it hasn’t found its way home,
where I now dodder and mend
in thanks for devotion, for the ambulance
this time, for the hospital fork lift,
for pethidine, and this face of deity:
not the foreknowledge of death
but the project of seeing conscious life
rescued from death defines and will
atone for the human.
DROUGHT DUST ON THE CROCKERY
Things were not better
when I was young:
things were poorer and harsher,
drought dust on the crockery,
and I was young.
THE HARLEYS
Blats booted to blatant
dubbin the avenue dire
with rubbings of Sveinn Forkbeard
leading a black squall of Harleys
with Moe Snow-Whitebeard and
Possum Brushbeard and their ladies
and, sphincter-lipped, gunning,
massed leather muscle on a run,
on a roll, Santas from Hell
like a whole shoal leaning
wide-wristed, their tautness stable
in fluency, fast streetscape dwindling,
all riding astride, on the outside
of sleek grunt vehicles, woman-clung,
forty years on from Marlon.
AURORA PRONE
The lemon sunlight poured out far between things
inhabits a coolness. Mosquitoes have subsided,
flies are for later heat.
Every tree’s an auburn giant with a dazzled face
and the back of its head to an infinite dusk road.
Twilights broaden away from our feet too
as rabbits bounce home up defiles in the grass.
Everything widens with distance, in this perspective.
The dog’s paws, trotting, rotate his end of infinity
and dam water feels a shiver few willow drapes share.
Bright leaks through their wigwam re-purple the skinny beans
then rapidly the light tops treetops and is shortened
into a day. Everywhere stands pat beside its shadow
for the great bald radiance never seen in dreams.
BEST WESTERN
The calm couple have no objection
and the baby, he looks keen
to see a smoker hunch in from the snow
and fatten a patchwork quilt in the straw
of their kerbsite Nativity scene.
THE INSTRUMENT
Who reads poetry? Not our intellectuals;
they want to control it. Not lovers, not the combative,
not examinees. They too skim it for bouquets
and magic trump cards. Not poor schoolkids
furtively farting as they get immunized against it.
Poetry is read by the lovers of poetry
and heard by some more they coax to the cafe
or the district library for a bifocal reading.
Lovers of poetry may total a million people
on the whole planet. Fewer than the players of skat.
What gives them delight is a never-murderous skim
distilled, to verse mainly, and suspended in rapt
calm on the surface of paper. The rest of poetry
to which this was once integral still rules
the continents, as it always did. But on condition now
that its true name is never spoken: constructs, feral poetry,
the opposite but also the secret of the rational.
And who reads that? Ah, the lovers, the schoolkids,
debaters, generals, crime-lords, everybody reads it:
Porsche, lift-off, Gaia, Cool, patriarchy.
Among the feral stanzas are many that demand your flesh
to embody themselves. Only completed art
free of obedience to its time can pirouette you
through and athwart the larger poems you are in.
Being outside all poetry is an unreachable void.
Why write poetry? For the weird unemployment.
For the painless headaches, that must be tapped to strike
down along your writing arm at the accumulated moment.
For the adjustments after, aligning facets in a verb
before the trance leaves you. For working always beyond
your own intelligence. For not needing to rise
and betray the poor to do it. For a non-devouring fame.
Little in politics resembles it: perhaps
the Australian
colonists’ re-inventing of the snide
far-adopted secret ballot, in which deflation could hide
and, as a welfare bringer, shame the mass-grave Revolutions,
so axe-edged, so lictor-y.
Was that moral cowardice’s one shining world victory?
Breathing in dream-rhythm when awake and far from bed
evinces the gift. Being tragic with a book on your head.
OUR WEEK IN GRAND LUXE
After Waterloo, the Channel
Tunnel was eventless experience:
we sloped down out of a Picardy
called Kent, talked beside blur
and emerged in a Kent called Picardy
but then the train began
to outrun nearby cars and
stop aeroplanes in the sky.
It began flying on earth
towards the portals of Paris
and everything, hamlets, trees, fields
was left in an arrowy fallback
that only the suburbs could restrain.
Then we tumbled in a valse
à mille temps across the city,
paid off the taxi and rolled out
on a wingless plane for Avignon
over prairies and bisected hills
and sat up for hours where nothing
could join us from outside
without killing us, till we were in
the Province where pale rock has windows
and mortise-holes for coffins in it
and bubble-powdered speedy water
is guttered to carry cool through towns
built in a language they’ve stopped speaking.
There was knocking of steel boules
in shade until, in gloved unison,
domes of polished metal were raised
on Sèvres of festivity, on picnics
with galantines and counter-tenor,
on buses up a teetering road
to the high mountaintop where Petrarch,
first to climb a mountain just to write of it,
glimpsed the vision of tourism
and down to an evening-green
roof of fruiting cherry branches,
dense-spattered in human grazing reach
before more ortolans, more cabernets.
There was never snobbery, from our expert
carers. Friendly and artisanal,
their menus carried credits like films.
And when it was all achieved,
laudations, responses, evening brain-fag
from speaking literary languages,
we saw the Popes’ emptied donjon and
St Bénézet’s bridge, that stops short.
SPITAL TOWER
I.M. SORLEY MACLEAN 1911–96
A cloister below
the Cheviot Hills
once sheltered lepers
but the Church dissolved
and the lepers died.
All over Northern Europe
the helpless died.
The cloister reared up
on end, against raiders,
then sank to a farmstead.
Murrays were in it
but poverty blew us
out of peasanthood
toward the Antipodes.
To no part of Europe
is our country antipodal:
its counter-foot
is the mid-Atlantic.
Where the great Gaelic poet
has gone, that’s Antipodes,
Antipodes to everywhere.
Horror to the fortunate,
to the helpless, harbour:
death makes us all emigrants.
I pray where he is
excels modern doctrine
as his lines left on earth
out-glory his Spain.
I mourn, MacGillEain,
that my sleep under scalpels
meant I missed reading with you.
Now turning your pages
will be as if I riffled
the Northern Lights
and heard their language.
RODD ISLAND WEDDING
On your wedding day, women were seated
on the Harbour, resting their oars.
Single sculls, in the grace of that spelling,
their canoes, slim as compass needles
pointed at sandstone black with water,
at balconies and wharves and houses,
at sunny bays and lawn-set madhouses,
those chateaux of the upper Harbour,
at the tensioned bridges and their opposites.
Aqaba! A snorkel cleared its throat
and there you were, facing castanets of focus
on your wedding island. Since you’d become happy,
you told me, you’d stopped writing poems.
I should wish you a long silence. I do,
I do, if you mean it. The ribbed iron
feast-hall cruised through courses and clapping
like an airship under fans. The sportswomen
bent, and reached for distance like thistledowns.
MUSIC TO ME IS LIKE DAYS
Once played to attentive faces
music has broken its frame
its bodice of always-weak laces
the entirely promiscuous art
pours out in public spaces
accompanying everything, the selections
of sex and war, the rejections.
To jeans-wearers in zipped sporrans
it transmits an ideal body
continuously as theirs age. Warrens
of plastic tiles and mesh throats
dispense this aural money
this sleek accountancy of notes
deep feeling adrift from its feelers
thought that means everything at once
like a shrugging of cream shoulders
like paintings hung on park mesh
sonore doom soneer illy chesh!
they lost the off switch in my lifetime
the world reverberates with Muzak
and Prozac. As it doesn’t with poe-zac
(I did meet a Miss Universe named Verstak).
Music to me is like days
I rarely catch who composed them
if one’s sublime I think God
my life-signs suspend. I nod
it’s like both Stilton and cure
from one harpsichord-hum:
penicillium –
then I miss the Köchel number.
I scarcely know whose performance
of a limpid autumn noon is superior
I gather timbre outranks rhumba.
I often can’t tell days apart
they are the consumers, not me
in my head collectables decay
I’ve half-heard every piece of music
the glorious big one with voice
the gleaming instrumental one, so choice
the hypnotic one like weed-smoke at a party
and the muscular one out of farty
cars that goes Whudda Whudda
Whudda like the compound oil heart
of a warrior not of this planet.
COOLONGOLOOK TIMBER MILL
Down a road padlocked now
steel discs and weeds sprawled
in a room whose rusty hair
was iron cornrows, and its brow
a naily timber lintel
under which I’d gaze across
the river at Midge Island
as the tide turned on its pintle
and atoms would be dancing
like mayflies in the dusk
at the exact same speed as
gold roubles once spread glancing
around inch-freeboard puntloads
of sleepers axe trimmed
for Wittgenstein and Company
building the Siberian railroads
and black saws’ sharkmouth edges
kept pipe-stuffers careful
up skids from sawdust-siz
ed
shimmering of midges
then living drills were screwed
from punk wood to eat
by men wearing genitals; their
fish spears twitched like sedges
and the ocean sprawled in sight
gull-squealing, then weeks away
and the night sky quivered
with the vanished river’s fleet
– a city man bought
the mill land for ten times
its price, and let the mill
fall down. But I have kept it.
INCUNABULAR
Tom Fisher was my Grail King:
he endowed the Gothic library
to which my life had been pointing.
His high sandstone box held the Culture
bush folk were scorned for lacking.
On its milk-glass stack levels I still
hear stiletto heels clacking,
glass floors for the light to perfuse,
not for voyeurs: you could only
make out the sex of shoes.
The lipsticked gargoyle downstairs
kissed much social ascent.
Above, I’d browse beside the point
power made, for the points it didn’t.
Reflex, more than intent.
The reading-room beam supported heraldry
and a roof like a steep tent.
Mine was a plan-free mass querying
of condensed humans off the shelves,
all numbered, the tribal, the elderly.
Knowledge was the gait of compressed selves
and poetry seemed windows of italic
inset in grievous prose
which served it and mastered it:
few grapes for many rows.
Students murmured airily of the phallic
they were going to be marked by
but the shelvers book-trolleys were parked by
closed gaping tomes and stood them drily back,
vogue, value, theory.
The stacks clanged down metal stairs
to floors below reality,
to books in dragon-buckram, books like dreams,
antiphonaries and grimoires,
philologies with pages still uncut:
my blade made a sound like rut.
I never used the catalogue,
it held no serendipities.
The lateral book’s the tip: it is
the seminal one near the one set.
You must range real shelves to find it.
Continuous assessment could have
excluded me; soon it did weed out my sort.
Critique closed over poetry,
the hip proved very straight.
What our donjon of kisses and cribs held
