Collected Poems

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,