by Les Murray
they say now will go on line.
This does not light my taper.
Others may have my joys at home? Fine.
But I surfed the true paper.
A DEPLOYMENT OF FASHION
In Australia, a lone woman
is being crucified by the Press
at any given moment.
With no unedited right
of reply, she is cast out
into Aboriginal space.
It’s always for a defect in weeping:
she hasn’t wept on cue
or she won’t weep correctly.
There’s a moment when the sharks are
still butting her, testing her protection,
when the Labor Party, or influence,
can still save her. Not the Church,
not other parties. Even at that stage
few men can rescue her.
Then she goes down, overwhelmed
in the feasting grins of pressmen,
and Press women who’ve moved
from being owned by men
to being owned by fashion,
these are more deeply merciless.
She is rogue property,
she must be taught her weeping.
It is done for the millions.
Sometimes the millions join in
with jokes: how to get a baby
in the Northern Territory? Just stick
your finger down a dingo’s throat.
Most times, though, the millions
stay money, and the jokes
are snobbish media jokes:
Chemidenko. The Oxleymoron.
Spittle, like the flies on Black Mary.
After the feeding frenzy
sometimes a ruefully balanced last lick
precedes the next selection.
PRIME NUMBERS
What are you doing now, Les?
Normally I live in the country,
work, garden, parry thrusts from the Herald,
but two days a week I fly in
to a cubicle in the Stacked City,
an every-coloured brick university
that is built on top of itself
like a brain’s lobes and evolutionary layers
on the last rock before Botany Bay.
The inner streets of this oppidum
are paved with grey carpet, and inmates
lie on them for cool negotiations
or to write in big pads. Footsteps with vocal
animate the stairs and little squares;
odd walls not yet built over
catch sun and frecklings of leaves;
a coffee shop may form round a stairwell.
My cubicle briefly bears my name
but no dates yet. Today I compose
in there about a former madhouse,
still meshed and brass-keyed when I met
all three of a shattered great poet.
He died before they let the mad out
to home like themes in family novels,
to swap locked for liberated hells.
Now the place is ochre, after cream,
and writers read there, beneath airliners
that brew up from under the horizon
and score prodigious hyphens through poems.
My dapper friend Philip appeared there,
nine years up-ramp in his wheelchair
from a stroke, to a dry chin, to language,
to his first new poem, just written.
The same week, a boy-man who didn’t
speak for years told me Cars in the mirror
drive on the right, the noon sun’s south:
mirrors are like the Northern hemisphere.
A million self-rescues so vertical
don’t multiply. Each one is the shining one.
Love poured out on them also doesn’t
subtract from the numbers they’ve attained.
Back above the racehorse-named streets
in Overlap City, I’m really a specimen,
a mountain to geographers. But Louise’s friend
Sarah yarned with me, Annette too (God and Mary to her!)
and poet Hazel, and Peter the biographer –
all these the day after the burial
of Mother Theresa, whose real grace
lay in knowing how little to generalise.
TO ME YOU’LL ALWAYS BE SPAT
Baby oyster, little grip,
settling into your pinch of shape
on a flooded timber rack:
little living gravel
I’m the human you need,
one who won’t eat you,
not with much relish, even
when you’re maturely underexercised
inside your knuckle sandwich.
Bloodless sheep’s eye, never
appear in a bottle. Always bring
ice, lemon and your wonky tub.
You have other, non-food powers:
your estuaries are kept clean as crystal,
you eat through your jacuzzi,
you make even the non-sexy
think of a reliable wet
machine of pleasure,
truly inattentive students
of French hope they heard right,
that you chant in the arbours.
Commandant-of-convicts Wallis
who got the Wallis name unfairly
hated, had you burnt alive
in millions to make mortar.
May you now dance in the streets
and support a gross of towns!
THE DISORDERLY
We asked How old will you be
in the year Two Thousand?
Sixty two. Sixty. Fifty nine.
Unimaginable. We started running
to shin over the sliprails
of a wire fence. You’re last! –
It’s all right: I’ll be first in Heaven!
and we jogged on to school
past a yellow-flowering guinea vine.
Cattle stood propped on the mountain.
We caught a day-blind glider possum
and took him to school. Only later
at the shoe-wearing edge of our world
did we meet kids who thought everything
ridiculous. They found us incredible.
Cream-handed men in their towns
never screamed Christ-to-Jesus! at the hills
with diabetes breath, nor talked fight
or Scotch poetry in scared timber rooms.
Such fighters had lost, we realised
but we had them to love
or else we’d be mongrels.
This saved our souls later on,
sometimes, crossing the cousinless
detective levels of the world
to the fat-free denim culture,
that country of the Attitudes.
FIVE POSTCARDS
Having run herself up out of
plush, the white-cheeked wallaby
sits between her haunches
like an old-country tailor behind
her outstretched last yard, her tail,
and hems it with black fingers.
o
Cosmic apples by Cézanne:
their colours, streaming, hit
wavelengths of crimson and green
in the yellowy particle-wind.
Slant, parallel and pouring,
every object’s a choke-point of speeds.
o
The kitchens of this 18th century
Oxford college are ten metres high
by the squinch-eyed cooks basting
tan birds spiked in hundreds all over
the iron griddle before hellfire.
Below high lozengy church windows
others flour, fill, pluck. And this too
was the present once, that absolute of fools.
o
1828. Timber slums of the future
top a ship of the line, which receives
>
more who might have stormed St James’s.
Cheery washing lines signal they’re bound
for the world’s end, to seize there
the lands of unclothed aristos
rich in myth and formal grammar.
o
A mirrory tar-top road across
a wide plain. Drizzling sky.
A bike is parked at a large book
turned down tent-fashion on the verge.
One emerging says I read such crazy
things in this book. ‘Every bird
has stone false teeth and enters
the world in its coffin.’ That’s in there.
THE INTERNATIONALE
Baron Samedi, leaving the House of Lords,
shrugs on his shoulders and agrees to come.
Have you observed, he asks, dat a tarantula
is built like, but nimbler than, a Rugby scrum?
The Manche blows East like a billion tabloid pages,
annoying the Baron: Sheer prose, dese Narrow Seas!
but a cohort of Lundys leaps out of Leemavaddy
on an intricate tuning of spring steel in their knees.
Mardi, now svelte, hoists up a horizontal ballad
and ascends its couplets because the fire’s at the top
but Macready with a wheedle of a reedy pitch-pipe conjures
the cobra whose head will fit his wet eye-socket. Pop!
Jeu d’Esprit and Jeu de Paume grace our company
and the Countess von Dredy informs us with some pain
that in Gold-Orange-Land is now the sour gherkin season.
She’d rather complete a Seminar than a Semaine.
Yall need some time on the low horse! Mardi cries
as they all skip around us with Sha-na-na and Boom!
Our energy shorten your lease of joy, cries the Baron.
But having summoned we, do you wish we trudge in gloom?
MORE THAN AN OBITER DICHTER
FOR PETER PORTER
Peter, you’re in the dictionary!
It doesn’t say what you mean
but you’re noted for urbane wit in
the Macquarie, second edition.
Another friend’s daughter found my
name in there, and the year I died
already past. With that behind me,
hey, I’m invincible, I cried.
It’s right, as you know: our true
poetry follows our deaths.
It’s fun to write the rest alive, though,
bibbling among the shibboleths,
weaving between our epitaphs.
Like a fast waterbird leading the dawn
in a string of musket-flashes across Garda
what we have written we have drawn.
May you reach your own century from this one.
Thank you for much hospitality.
A pillar of good talk all night
you were, and of company by day.
Master poet, Peter, you’re this rock
tickled by roses in their climb;
you’re our blue-edged flag, our fore-runner
first off the adzed blocks of home.
Be Italy and music for all readers:
Australia’s no place to be Australian.
Let’s tussle in a jar again sometime.
Thank you for my start in London.
THE WATER PLOUGH
That was the Iron Age all right.
I’m glad it’s in the museum.
Like that iron dam-sinking scoop
the weight of an Indian Chief motorbike
in there, from back before dozers.
I trained on that, cleaning dams.
Every five or ten years
you had to scoop out the silt
and stinking slop from a dam
or you’d have a paddy, not a pond.
First thing, you’d break through the wall
and let the water go like a culvert
you hoped you could seal up again.
The horse you yoked for the scooping
had to be a goer, but smart
enough to stop short at a word.
The trace-chains came off a swingle-tree
way ahead at his heels, and the timber
steering-shafts stretched you like flying,
your hands were so far apart.
You’d skim round the edges first,
shaving off the lashes of reeds
and dumping them with a twist over
and a twist back to keep the chains
uncrossed. And then you’d face
the dam bottom, the eel jelly.
What you did in there wasn’t walk
nor swim, it was trail belly-down
with stabs for purchase with your boots
and curses and sprawls and swerving
as your big two-handed cruet
filled and piled and overflowed
and you’d lie down on the shafts
to keep its front edge up and clear
and swim it out to the paddock
to spill there, and the eels kicking
like nerves in it, biting at the dogs.
And that was when it went right.
However it went, you’d come up
out of the lost bedsteads and bones
with a suit of slime all over you
the colour of a Box Brownie photo
and thick as beef, smelling aluminium,
or yellow pug with leeches hooked like bait to you.
You’d glop around, weighing tons.
No hose, no showers then. A mate
or your wife might bucket your face
clear for tea and a smoke
as you caked and stiffened, then back:
Into it, son: you wasn’t born dry!
Making the dams in the first place,
that was the bastard of a job.
You’d be stagger-walking, on dry land
at least, but the scoop might
stop curling the dirt and nosedive
for Hell any minute, and stick
and break the harness or your shoulders.
A quick enough kick-up of the shafts
could toss you over them like over
the horns of a bullock at the Show
and it was iron, that ridge ground.
The edge of a dragline scoop got
so sharpened, grinding gravel and stone,
it could have cut a man in two
easily if he got in front of it.
No wonder it glided purring through
spewy stuff, and snoring through
the better loam and clay, and left them
all polished like tiles, on a good day.
Butchered like shellholes on a bad day
groaning and screaming like them, too.
From the off you had to keep separate
the loam and leaf-mould so they didn’t
get into the clay wall that you keyed,
levelled with just your eye, which is water
after all, and walked the horse over
and over, and hand-rammed, and hoped would hold
and half the time it didn’t hold.
You got the blind staggers from tiredness
but I admit I liked the work, odd times,
spreading the hard knuckles of ridges
to fit a dam between, or giving
full play to a soak. Building with the country,
not on it. Building and reshaping it,
cuttings and bywashes and ramps,
finding the walls it would agree to,
stopping the chainsaws of erosion-water,
arresting them to spoons of sky light
for cattle and dingoes and birds
and turtles and blue lilies with leaves
like the tin stump-caps of houses.
Now the green bulldozer dams everywhere
are lakes to the puddleholes we made.
Fly over the countr
y with the sun low
and it’s all like gripped with fingernails:
gleams hang up on every allotment
to be some family’s park pond
but it’s still our idea
of making flood rain stay and perform
before it got off the continent
or deep into it, to the great still swirls.
THE GREAT HALL OF CHLORINE
It is the great hall of Chlorine,
the Aquatic Centre. Light shaking all over the walls,
people of bleach and biscuit pad on raw feet
and children splat diamante. Many intently surge
out of deep trampolines of wavering.
Women adjust harness, some karate-chop at speed;
men exude their inner showers on the sauna’s wooden shelves.
Heads are calm in the laundry-boiling of the spa
and a rare drip falls bling!
from the loose leaves of the ceiling.
A nonwhite family comes in, and glances vaguely,
aware some may still notice. The mother
picks at her plastic wrist-tie, her entry ticket.
Hardly anyone looks; no children do,
but through being of an age, or an education,
a few are subtly forced to notice. Many
of the white people, so called, are darker, from the sun,
but this is Race. This carries accusation.
Intellectuals invented race, and for centuries supplied
the terrible theory which deflected chains and conquest
away from the Modern, onto Primitives.
Now they turn the same weapon on their poor relations.
Anything these brown folk say, any hurt in their eyes
may be used against us.
Imagery has stopped. We’re furtive in our minds.
What reaches of Gondwanaland are ancestral to these
I don’t know. Whatever Race is, I read it poorly.
If their forebears once stood behind trees on their shore
watching nightmare develop like a Polaroid from seaward, what
stopped them charging, burning its stores, clubbing, killing
in that last window moment? That it was also riveting?
Occasionally some were decisively conservative
but it always came to that same moment again:
you had been after game, or making men, and the
excreting spirits were back, with their offering hands.
When the Martians come, they’re like a university.
Their genes wink to instinct, their flashes shiver the gods.
Every mind intuits its escape from a perfect world.
But it goes on. The Martians are setting exams
in their own language. The Fail mark is terrible: epidemic,
