by Les Murray
vertical nose inhale man
but you evince none
of the arts of cliché.
Your gaze photographs
the effect of his gaze and yours.
If you had a name, we might
imagine you strolling on
into all your private pictures,
the Sierra, the Range Rover,
into time’s minute razors.
Here, where you still are
as you were then, briefly being
the temper of a people,
you don’t know when you’re kissed
or when your burnished horse
was brought, block by block,
shuddering happily in the sun.
CHANSON
The sun tunes out stars
when it shines the air blue
but the stars burn all day
and you’re in their view
the star in your window
among the bow sashes
would itself be a beau
with glitter and dashes
he’d swim in through panes
framed up like the turrets
of old bombing planes
he’d intrude on your merits
as light on a diamond
of VVS grade
diamond’s tender to light
brick and wool they are hard –
he’s a daylight star though
from far back in time and
those vanish in sun-bleach
so he’s all blast and reach
in illimitable night
he’d rather be a highlight
the stars burn beyond day
and you’re in their view
THE LONG WET SEASON
Poetry is apt to rise in you
just when you’re on the brink
of doing something important,
trivially important, like flying
across the world tomorrow –
while here our paddock, waterlogged
from features and supplements of rain
smells to be making dark beer
out of rock oils afloat round its grass.
Paperbark trees sleep their lives here.
One supports a flowering constrictor
vine fit to muscle over a rainforest:
that tree’s been allowed decades
of half life, being all the vine found,
and the ownerless local flock
of geese, spooked by something, all
glide off like Chinese pottery
spoons, rotating gloved feet.
Out of the sky, crackling and folding
like a spread of the Australian
a snowy egret arrives to spike water.
Nature, getting around like word.
AUTUMN CELLO
Driving up to visit April
who lives on the Tableland
we were sorry for russet beef cattle
deciduous on pasture hills.
We’d had to shower off summer
to climb to the Tableland
where April would be breezily
scuffing her yellow shoes.
As we crossed the caramel river
that is walled in nettle trees
and drove up through black rainforest
the moon was in our mind
it being the dark of the moon
all day, as we went up to April,
the fat moon who saw it is children
who bring death into the world
and was exiled to the sky for it
before there was any April
to plant elm trees, or touch
amber glasses with a spoon.
Next night, the moon would rise
asleep in his brilliant rim
of cradle above bared trees
and April, having forgotten
she was once herself a moon
would feed cognac-coloured rosin
to her cello bow, and read us
story-feeling without the stories
and straight depth with no sides,
all from her tilted quatrain
of strings with its blunt prong
in her Wilton rug on the Tableland.
THE NEW HIEROGLYPHICS
In the World language, sometimes called
Airport Road, a thinks balloon with a gondola
under it is a symbol for speculation.
Thumbs down to ear and tongue:
World can be written and read, even painted
but not spoken. People use their own words.
Latin letters are in it for names, for e.g.
OK and H2SO4, for musical notes,
but mostly it’s diagrams: skirt-figure, trousered figure
have escaped their toilet doors. I (that is, saya,
ego, watashi wa) am two eyes without pupils;
those aren’t seen when you look out through them.
You has both pupils, we has one, and one blank.
Good is thumbs up, thumb and finger zipping lips
is confidential. Evil is three-cornered snake eyes.
The effort is always to make the symbols obvious:
the bolt of electricity, winged stethoscope of course
for flying doctor. Pram under fire? Soviet film industry.
Pictographs also shouldn’t be too culture-bound:
a heart circled and crossed out surely isn’t.
For red, betel spit lost out to ace of diamonds.
Black is the ace of spades. The king of spades
reads Union boss, the two is feeble effort.
If is the shorthand Libra sign, the scales.
Spare literal pictures render most nouns and verbs
and computers can draw them faster than Pharaoh’s scribes.
A bordello prospectus is as explicit as the action,
but everywhere there’s sunflower talk, i.e.
metaphor, as we’ve seen. A figure riding a skyhook
bearing food in one hand is the pictograph for grace,
two animals in a book read Nature, two books
inside an animal, instinct. Rice in bowl with chopsticks
denotes food. Figure 1 lying prone equals other.
Most emotions are mini-faces, and the speech
balloon is ubiquitous. A bull inside one is dialect
for placards inside one. Sun and moon together
inside one is poetry. Sun and moon over palette,
over shoes etc. are all art forms – but above
a cracked heart and champagne glass? Riddle that
and you’re starting to think in World, whose grammar
is Chinese-terse and fluid. Who needs the square-
equals-diamond book, the dictionary, to know figures
led by strings to their genitals mean fashion?
just as a skirt beneath a circle means demure
or a similar circle shouldering two arrows is macho.
All peoples are at times cat in water with this language
but it does promote international bird on shoulder.
This foretaste now lays its knife and fork parallel.
ON THE BORDERS
We’re driving across tableland
somewhere in the world;
it is almost bare of trees.
Upland near void of features
always moves me, but not to thought;
it lets me rest from thinking.
I feel no need to interpret it
as if it were art. Too much
of poetry is criticism now.
That hawk, clinging to
the eaves of the wind, beating
its third wing, its tail
isn’t mine to sell. And here is
more like the space that needs
to exist around an image.
This cloud-roof country reminds me
of the character of people
who first encountered roses in soap.
THE ANNALS OF SHEER
&n
bsp; Like a crack across a windscreen
this Alpine sheep track winds
around buttress cliffs of sheer
no guard rail anywhere
like cobweb round a coat
it threads a bare rock world
too steep for soil to cling,
stark as poor people’s need.
High plateau pasture must be great
and coming this way to it
or from it must save days
for men to have inched across
traverses, sometime since the ice age,
and then with knock and hammer
pitching reminders over-side
wedged a pavement two sheep wide.
In the international sign-code
this would be my pictograph for
cold horror, but generations
have led their flocks down and up
this flow-pipe where any spurt
or check in deliberate walking
could bring overspill and barrelling
far down, to puffs of smash, to ruin
which these men have had
the calm skills, on re-frozen
mist footing, to prevent
since before hammers hit iron.
ERNEST HEMINGWAY AND THE LATEST QUAKE
In fact the Earth never stops moving.
Northbound in our millimetric shoving
we heap rainy Papua ahead of us
with tremor and fumarole and shear
but: no life without this under-ruckus.
The armoured shell of Venus doesn’t move.
She is trapped in her static of hell.
The heat of her inner weight feeds enormous
volcanoes in that gold atmosphere
which her steam oceans boil above.
Venus has never known love:
that was a European error.
Heat that would prevent us gets expressed
as continent-tiles being stressed and rifted.
These make Earth the planet for lovers.
If coral edging under icy covers
or, too evolutionary slow
for human histories to observe it, a low
coastline faulting up to be a tree-line
blur landscape in rare jolts of travel
that squash collapsing masonry with blood
then frantic thousands pay for all of us.
THE IMAGES ALONE
Scarlet as the cloth draped over a sword,
white as steaming rice, blue as leschenaultia,
old curried towns, the frog in its green human skin;
a ploughman walking his furrow as if in irons, but
as at a whoop of young men running loose
in brick passages, there occurred the thought
like instant stitches all through crumpled silk:
as if he’d had to leap to catch the bullet.
A stench like hands out of the ground.
The willows had like beads in their hair, and
Peenemünde, grunted the dentist’s drill, Peenemünde!
Fowls went on typing on every corn key, green
kept crowding the pinks of peach trees into the sky
but used speech balloons were tacky in the river
and waterbirds had liftoff as at a repeal of gravity.
ROOMS OF THE SKETCH-GARDEN
FOR PETER AND CHRISTINE ALEXANDER
Women made the gardens, in my world,
cottage style full-sun fanfares
netting-fenced, of tablecloth colours.
Shade is what I first tried to grow
one fence in from jealous pasture,
shade, which cattle rogueing into
or let into, could devour
and not hurt much. Shelter from glare
it rests their big eyes, and rests in them.
A graphite-toned background of air
it features red, focusses yellow.
Blue diffusing through it rings the firebell.
Shade makes colours loom and be thoughtful.
It has the afterlife atmosphere
but also the philosophic stone cool.
It is both day and night civilised,
the colour of reading, the tone
of inside, and of inside the mind.
I could call these four acres Hanlin
for the Chinese things they have nourished,
loquat, elm, mulberry, the hard pear
er ben lai. But other names would fit: Klagenfurt,
Moaner’s Crossing, for the many things that die,
for worn-out farm soil, for the fruit fly.
Cloud shadows walking our pencilled roof
in summer sound like a feasting chook
or Kukukuku on about duk-duk
and this sketch garden’s a retina for chance:
for floodwaters backing into the lower
parterres like lorryloads of mercury
at night, or level sepia by day,
for the twenty-three sorts of native vines
along the gully; for the heron-brought
igniting propane-blue waterlily,
for the white poplars’ underworld advance
on the whole earth, out of my ignorance.
Tall Australians stand east of the house
and well north. The garden’s not nationalist:
Australians burn, on winds from the west.
No birds that skim-drink, or bow
or flower in our spaces are owned now.
Jojo burrs make me skid my feet on lawn
being wary of long grass, like any bushman.
Begged and scavenged plants survived dry spells
best, back when I’d to garden in absentia:
Dad wouldn’t grow flowers, or water ornamentals.
He mounded for the Iroquois three sisters,
corn beans and squash. And melons, and tomatoes.
Those years we’d plant our live Christmas tree
in January when it shed its brittle bells
and the drought sun bore down like dementia.
Now bloom-beds displace fox-ripped rooster plumes
in from paddocks, in our cattle-policed laager;
trampled weeds make wharves for the indigo waterhen.
ANGOPHORA FLORIBUNDA
That country seemed one great park
in which stood big bridal trees
raining nectar and white thread
as native things ate their blossom
like hills of wheaten bread
and we called them Apple trees
our homesickness being sore
if you took up land where they grew
it kept your descendants half poor …
but farmers rarely cut them down.
They survive from the Eden of the country
because the wood’s useless and rots fast
and because they’re the Eden of the country.
Slashed leaves feed stock in a drought
and the tree, in its dirt-coloured bark
and snakes-and-laddery branchage
often grows aslant, heeled over
like an apple-pie schooner aground
on the shores of a North Coast pig farm.
Aged ones get cancerous
with humps of termite nest.
They shed their rotted limbs
to lie around them like junk
which only decay can burn.
A chewed-paper termite city
set alight in an Apple trunk
will rage all night and never
ignite its crucible of wood.
A veteran may drop most of itself
in one crash autumn, and re-grow from its boot.
Uselessness, sprawl and resurrection
are this apple’s fruit.
AT THE FALLS
High mountain plateau edged
with vertical basalt cliffs
like black hung chain, like sprockets
conveying a continual footage
&n
bsp; of water, abruptly curved
and whitening down into clouds.
On a damp earth track
to other viewing points, a
young wife twists her ankle.
She falls painfully. Her husband,
his eyes everywhere like a soldier,
mutters Get up! in a panic voice,
Quick! There are people coming.
She struggles up, furious,
spurning his hand. A cloud
like steam rises out of the gorge.
Over years, this memory
will distil its essence: fear
of the house her eccentric man
inhabits, and what is done
there, or away from there.
That she is the human he has married.
TRUE YARN
A man approaches the edge
of his life, which has miscarried.
He looks down the enormous wall
of rock to the ocean-boulders
far below. They seem the teeth
in a white-green tidal blender
that won’t fail him. He launches
off, just as the mightiest wave
ever recorded at Sydney gathers
lift in the chimney of the Gap like
a freight elevator, like the swelling
fore-smoke of a ballistic missile silo,
like a foam-faced cosmic air bag
that receives him, then drops back
so fast he not only can’t sink
but has to cling to its narrowing
thunder-roof of drowning seagulls
and the collapse is so abundant
that, storeys above the death-studs,
he is surfed away in the wash
a mile clear of the cliffs
and left to the fast life boat.
More failure? Yet his rescue looked
like a wrathful peremptoriness.
AN AUSTRALIAN LEGEND
It is the time of day
when shadows come in like animals
and shelter under their trees
when shade also tightens
in along the web of gullies
rehearsing old treelines and flood
all this drainage stops short
at a country of salt marsh
plodded in by dipping birds
this is the ancient sea shore
where the Aunt in her magic-propelled
boat carried off the younger brother
from the big island of men
to the island of left-handed women
who kill men on sight
wild mirror-image fighters
their arm doesn’t cross their breasts
