by Les Murray
treat me right; I could give you a job.
But someone who sought other favour
or had their own notions of class
sidled round in the Bald Nob barroom
and got their hand near Tommy’s glass.
The spiked drink that sent Tommy reeling
across the dray road to fall down
gave him visions of two troopers gloating
You look a real black now, you clown!
Tom McPherson was never seen working;
he rode a high horse like a lord,
so the police who never worked either
had arranged, and now shared, a reward.
One put a bullet through a lung:
That’s for the times you got off! –
This is for Yugilbar sports day!
Tom’s wit drowned in his agonised cough.
As half of New England bewailed him,
diggers, carriers and Cobb and Co men
with relations and none declared Bald Nob Hotel
black, in the new jargon of then.
It broke and killed licensee McCormick,
it half starved his children and wife.
The tribal spouse Tommy had fought for
had more backup in her widowed life.
I was thinking about New England,
of the Buggs, the Wards and the Wrights,
how they’d all conjured gold from that country
by their different methods and lights.
I was thinking this when my credit cards
came up empty, and I was eyed
with that narrowed no-human-kin look
that would discount anything I tried.
All the gold I’d spun out of country
was imagery, remotely extolled,
but Tommy McPherson sported his with an air,
a black cousin with literal gold.
THE ICE INDIGENE
Prone on its wrists, beige Bear
chins the ice, its shoulders a roll bar.
Its grand wheel-arch hindquarters
are flexed to propel this fur car
at you in a gallop
or bouncing in a lope
after oil seals who die for you.
Snow-mortared intelligent loner,
dope-eyed, with hair in his fur.
Abhor his sleeves upraised in preaching!
Arctos can drive on water
or canter the tilting platforms
amassed on the dome of ocean.
On the whitening blue-white, where landmarks
aren’t made of land, and vanish,
she can live without help.
She wakes to motherhood. Gaffs
tip her gloves. Her diet is
all meat, with guts for vegetables.
She can wrest a red whale off Inuit,
appal their harpoons,
leave them Nunuvut.
Berg drifted to a grass shore, she’d
raven on Norsemen, those poetic terse men.
Caught flatfooted, the snowdrift garbageman
may totter cavern-voiced,
tall as tractor cabins
in the aurora’s scope light,
then hibernate between divorcing
continents, in a helicopter sling.
He can be simple anywhere he’s going.
THE DAY I SLEPT LIKE A DOLPHIN
The day I slept like a dolphin
I’d flown the Atlantic twice over
and come down in snow-rimmed Denver.
There I filled in both entry papers
and got called back: Hey! You, Buddy!
You didn’t fill these out right!
It was true. Only the right hand
side of the Immigration form
and of the Customs form had writing.
I could explain that to you, I marvelled,
as he impatiently did not,
he of La Migra.* But I’d bore you,
I added, and filled in the left questions.
Under an Atlantic of fatigue
one half of my brain had been sleeping
as the other kept watch and rose to breathe.
Next time, I’ll peep, and get
a second, waking view of my dreams.
* La Migra: Mexican slang for the US Immigration Service.
THE ROTTERDAM FLIGHT CAGE
Unexpected among Rotterdam’s
steel-decked architectural cargo:
a flight cage three storeys high
built inside a theatre complex
and glazed on its snow-weather side.
It held a confetti of parrots
when I was there. Not burly
captains’-shoulder models, but small
taut pastel and nibble-mouthed Australians,
momentary foliage to polished stick boughs,
corellas, leeks, rosellas, budgerigars
which rose and jinked and showered
down again like crystalline themes
of badinage taken up and dropped
inside their day-and-night cylinder.
Well fed and I imagine all
European born, they were hardly
more imprisoned than most
little seed birds in the wild,
those whose aviary moves about
because it is the flock,
or ones whose whole life-territory
ranges from the verandah edge out
to the gloss-cardboard loquat tree,
or is two marsh fields a planet apart.
Safe from being frittered, in the powder
light of their deep tower they composed
in kinks, wing-leaves and creamy streaks
impressions of their inherent country,
like the stylised African moves
most humans now consciously do,
we being an African species.
SMALL FLAG ABOVE THE SLAUGHTER
Perhaps a tribal kinship,
some indigenous skinship
is equivalent to the term our neighbour saw
fit to award his amiable then-fit successor,
now sick, whom he nurses:
He is my husband-in-law.
DOWNHILL ON BORROWED SKIS
White mongrel I hate snow
wadded numbing mousse
grog face in a fur noose
the odd miraculous view
through glass or killing you
the only time I skied
I followed no skilled lead
but on parallel lent boards
fell straight down a hill
fell standing up by clenched will
very fast on toe-point swords
over logshapes and schist
outcrips crops it was no piste
nor had I had any drinks
wishing my ankles steel links
winging it hammer and Shazam
no stocks in afternoon mirk
every cloud-gap royally flash
like heading into a car crash
ayyy the pain! the paperwork!
my hands I didn’t flail them
though neither left nor right
neither schuss nor slalom
my splitting splay twinned sled
pumping straining to spread
to a biplane wreck of snapped ligaments
all hell played with locked joints
but still I skidded down erect
in my long spill of grist
blinded hawk on a wrist
entirely unschooled unchecked
the worst going on not and not
happening no sprawl no bone-shot
till I stood on the flat
being unlatched and exclaimed at.
THE HOLY SHOW
I was a toddler, wet-combed
with my pants buttoned to my shirt
and there were pink and green lights, pretty
in the day, a Christmas-tree party
up the back of the village store.
I ran towards it, but big sad people
stepped out. They said over me It’s just, like,
for local kiddies and but let him join in;
the kiddies looked frightened
and my parents, caught off guard
one beat behind me, grabbed me up
in the great shame of our poverty
that they talked about to upset themselves.
They were blushing and smiling, cursing me
in low voices Little bugger bad boy!
for thinking happy Christmas undivided,
whereas it’s all owned, to buy in parcels
and have at home; for still not knowing
you don’t make a holy show of your family;
outside it, there’s only parry and front.
Once away, they angrily softened to
me squalling, because I was their kiddie
and had been right about the holy show
that models how the world should be
and could be, shared, glittering in near focus
right out to the Sex frontier.
THE GOOD PLATES
On the day of babyhood
the Christmas guest would come,
a soldier back from the war,
someone single, or far from home.
After new toys and ice cream,
midmorning those hot Decembers,
the family would turn ideal,
polite even to its members.
Still home, but genial, drought-free,
as the good plates came out;
angry topics winked as if forgiven
over cordials and Sheaf stout.
When all the Good Luck toasts failed
we in turn played guest
to old people in dark parlours
serving up their calm best,
then photos often show this person
among family, and loyal,
but chatting with some visible stranger
to mitigate the festival.
Passover night, Jews set a place
for Elijah the prophet.
If more than a twosome, perhaps,
no human circle is complete,
and one more’s a way out of too many.
Come spirit, come witness:
family love’s the point, or childhood,
but the guest is Christmas.
A VERB AGREEMENT
After a windstorm, the first man
aloft in our broad silky-oak tree
was Andrew Lansdown the poet,
bearded and supple, nimbly
disinvolving wrecked branches
up where I couldn’t clamber.
He asked for our chainsaw, but I
couldn’t let him hazard an iamb or
a dactyl, nor far worse his
perched body of value and verses;
showering rubies were an image to terrify
even about an imagist so spry.
So, above my scattered choppings, he
hawked with a handsaw west-and-southerly
and went home to Susan with our thanks,
God-spared from caesuras or endstoppings.
The tree has twice since become
a Scala of ginger balconies, a palladium
as it does every October.
Birds with skin heads like the thumb
on a black hand interrogate its bloom
with dulcet commentary till it’s sober
but, bat-nipped gold or greening out blue,
it glories like the kingdom within Andrew.
AT THE SWAMPING OF CATEGORIES
WITH THANKS AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS TO IRIS CHANG
When the flag of the pool of blood
came up the Yangtze Valley
its soldiers were licensed to flow
into a great space of cruelty.
They filled canals with working men;
they transmitted their own DNA
then slaughtered the women who got it;
they widened the littlest girls
and halved them after with swords.
When the flag of the clot of blood
came up the Yangtze Valley
it flew above a tsunami
God waited for inertia or humans
to arrest, as with a wave of ocean.
When the red-dyed rice ball of the poor
fluttered below the walls of Nanjing
seven hundred thousand people
cowered, reassuring one another
as their own collapsed army changed clothes.
The Purple Mountain was burning
and the Emperor’s troops entered the city
behind tracked one-eyed steel cars
that busted all bodies they reached
and the many more being made running.
This was old atomic war: humans as the atoms.
Of twenty seven Westerners in the city
most were missionaries. Of YH God.
To head-severing contests, to mass shootings,
to screaming flagrante with impalements
these opposed a refusal of awe.
With nonbelievers and mild Christmas-keepers,
armed only with prestige and shouts
they patrolled the two-square-mile bounds
of the Safety Zone Wilson Mills devised.
They ran between machine guns and ranked men;
their eyes were the Vietnam TV
of thirty years later, to Christmas bayonets.
Pure bluff, scorned at first, the Zone grew real:
some pronounced the reason faith, some face,
but John Rabe’s swastika arm
day and night shielded a multitude.
Among Nazis, Oskar Schindler saved his thousand
and the Rabes their scores of thousands.
When the flag of the soldier’s slapped face
sanctioned gut-pulling military dogs
Minnie Vautrin whose battery torch
was a light-sword to hack rapes apart,
James McCallum of the ambulance ploy,
Lewis Smythe, John Wilson the one surgeon,
these fought in the Iliad of peace,
Ernest Forster, John Magee who filmed it:
they were jostled, shot near, pitched down
HQ stairs, but their fiction held
the half of Nanjing that would survive
its slashed frosted-earth weeks of delirium.
Though all of Nanjing’s twenty seven
were prosperous, in ways snobbish, and white,
they kept alive three hundred thousand
people seen then as not their colour,
got them mouthfuls, and their plight to the world.
Trade, ideological war, and the A-bomb
have buried the International Committee
but, each against armed lewd thousands,
by such very odds,
they turned a glamorous rage back into water.
A RIDDLE
The tall Wood twins
grip each other everywhere:
‘It’s all right, we’re only
standing in for Lady Stair.’ *
* Answer: a ladder
SOUND BITES
Attended by thousands, the Sun is opening
o
it’s a body-prayer, a shower: you’re
in touch all over, renewing, enfolded in a wing –
o
My sorrow, only ninety-five thousand
welcomes left in Scots Gaeldom now.
o
Poor cultures can afford poetry, wealthy cultures can’t.
o
Sex is the ever-appeased class
system that defeats Utopias …
o
but I bask in the pink that you’re in (Repeat)
o
one day, as two continents are dividing
the whole length of a river turns salt.
o
What’s sketched at light speed
th
under must track, bumbling, for miles
o
If love shows you its terrible face
before its beautiful face, you’ll be punished.
o
People watching with their mouths
an increasing sky-birth of meteors
o
Y chromosomes of history, apologise to your Xes!
o
YOUNG GENERAL MACARTHUR IN A COONSKIN COAT
Douglas MacArthur in a raccoon coat,
the Boy Brigadier with slackened cap-seam,
the Fighting Dude, his thin trench whip
and ten-foot scarf strike an English note:
he’s the folksiest prince on this troopship.
Nothing here is irony. No returning to the grind
and camping up the glory one last drag time.
His eyes on the camera, his lips twinkle for them.
He’ll always be a portrait disguised as a figure;
here he sails to the Jazz Age as the doughboys snigger.
He’ll drive them from DC when their need scares him,
‘It’s the orders you disobey that make your reputation!’
yet be sparing with their sons in his bigger war.
As a remake of the Sun God he’ll remake Japan,
demand another victory and get made an old man.
You can’t see MacArthur past his MacArthur life.
We look from the future. It makes him monochrome
but he’s just seen the Elephant, without reversal
and it’s confirmed his genius: total rehearsal.
With himself on each arm he is Hero and Wife.
IN THE COSTUME OF ANDALUSIA
Traditional costume puts you
anywhere in its span:
was it in the eighteenth
or the twentieth century
you were photographed, in colour,
at noonday in Seville?
Strolling with your sister
or your schoolfellow, perhaps,
and wearing for your paseo
the sash of a horsewoman,
the cropped black coatee
and the levelled flat hat.
That day was your perfection,
your tan face unwrinkled
as the rain-coloured skin
of the tiny pearls that buttoned
your ears and white collar.
You were photographed by a man,
a personable foreigner.
The total attention
in your olive eyes,
the stilled line of your mouth
all equally reveal it.
The windows of your perfectly
