by Les Murray
they strike from your own right side
it took obedience and discipline
for Younger Brother to hide prone in the boat
all day, then creep ashore at night,
lie pretending sleep and be felt
by furtive right hands, and so win
wives for his brother and himself
Bro, these people are called Women
people started to be born after that
along the coast here this happened
THE ENGINEER FORMERLY KNOWN AS STRANGELOVE
Mein Führer, they called me Doctor Strangelove
in the 1960s. This now they’d dare not do.
Right and Left then thought in Perverts, like you
but now it’s Doctor Preference, Doctor Paralimbic –
I’ve also quit the White race. The ac-
cident of pallor became not worth the flak.
I won’t join another. Race is decadent.
I lay this wreath on your unknown grave, mein Führer.
In my third sunrise century, Germany
has re-conquered Europe on her knees.
Fighter planes still pull gravities, not levities
but the flag of the West is now a gourmet tablecloth.
The Cold War is a Dämmerung long since of dead Götter
but I am still in cutting-edge high tech.
In a think-tank up to my neck
I rotate, projecting scenarios.
In one, nearly every birth’s a clone
of Elvis, of Guevara, of Marilyn
and many later figures. Few new people get born
then nostalgia for nostalgia collapses.
Of your own copies, one is a Trappist, to atone;
the other went through school and never heard of you.
He helps creased, off-register people who fade as they relax.
They are tourists travelling on the cheap, by 3D fax.
Marxists will resurge by squaring sex with equality.
Every wallflower will be subject to compulsory
fulfilment by the beautiful: deprivation makes Tory.
Evolution likewise, that condones and requires
extinctions will trip the moral wires
of Green thought and become a fascist outlaw.
Darwin will be re-read in tooth and claw.
In another projection, most of life goes Virtual.
War is in space, in the trenches, in chain armour:
for peace, just doff the Tarnhelm. But some maniac
will purloin a real nuke for his psychodrama –
and not the slow old-tech sort you developed, mein Führer.
In that model, too, the screen replaces school
and language (alas, English) regains the flavourful
and becomes again inventive, once post-intellectual.
Media story-selection and, in the end, all commentary
will be outlawed as censorship. Like fashion
they will be aspects of the crime Assault.
Direct filming of our underlit dreams will replace them
and poverty, sedulously never called a fault
will be stamped out by the United World Mafia.
Generals and tycoons will be excised like tumours
if they try to impede the conversion to consumers
of all their billionfold peons and garbage-sorters.
To forestall migration, all places will be Where the Action Is.
People will wear their showers, or dress in light and shade.
Australians will learn moral courage, disease will be cured –
Here the Doctor wallowed, and his speech became obscured.
THE TIN CLOTHES
This is the big arrival.
The zipper of your luggage
growls valise round three sides
and you lift out the tin clothes.
THE SUCCESSIVE ARMS
A drunk man in a rank shirt
unsteadily walks the street
begging, and arms flick up
dismissing him: Piss off!
Piss off mate. He recedes
far along, still groggily
reviewing backhand salutes
till you can trace him only
by the erupting stoic arms.
JUDGED WORTH EVACUATING
Vertical war, north of my early childhood:
in pouring high forest, men labour,
deadly furniture in hand, on mud footholds.
They eye a youth strapped between shafts
and blanched with agony, being tenderly
levered down past them by Papuans.
A hammer of impatiens flowers got him.
THE MOON MAN
Shadowy kangaroos moved off
as we drove into the top paddock
coming home from a wedding
under a midnightish curd sky
then his full face cleared:
Moon man, the first birth ever
who still massages his mother
and sends her light, for his having
been born fully grown.
His brilliance is in our blood.
Had Earth fully healed from that labour
no small births could have happened.
SUCCOUR
Refugees, derelicts – but why classify
people in the wreck of their terms?
These wear mixed and accidental clothing
and are seated at long tables in rows.
It’s like a school, and the lesson
has moved now from papers to round
volumes of steaming food
which they seem to treat like knowledge,
re-learning it slowly, copying it
into themselves with hesitant spoons.
PREDAWN IN HEALTH
The stars are filtering through a tree
outside in the moon’s silent era.
Reality is moving layer over layer
like crystal spheres now called laws.
The future is right behind your head;
just over all horizons is the past.
The soul sits looking at its offer.
THE ANTIPODES OF INDIA
NORTH QUEENSLAND, DRY SEASON 1994
Out in country like a Lincolnshire
under Divine punishment, there was swimming
with harmless crocodiles in a sheathed
lava flume, the Copperfield River,
after which antique wooden carriages
lengthened on over jade and straw plain
volcano-shot with blackened boulders.
By next afternoon, the air was layered
with heat so ashen that liquids
weren’t wet on cardboard lips.
Into that evening, the train
toiled up-range towards the lights of its own
weary loco. This was point-upwards India,
back of the Wet Tropics, and almost
unpeopled. Where town lights next flared
seemed a vacated maidan of the Raj.
ROBERT FERGUSSON NIGHT
FOR THE COMMEMORATION AT ST ANDREWS UNIVERSITY, OCTOBER 2000
All the Fergussons are black
I’ve heard said in the Outback.
Sub rosa, the Scots empire ranged wide.
I hope Scotland proportions her pride
now to the faith her lads kept with
all the subject folks they slept with.
I know for you this wasn’t an issue.
Madness made a white man of you
disastrously young. You stayed alive
just long enough to revive
from Scottish models and kings
such mediaeval things
as documentary verse-television
and writing in Scots for the brain.
In that, you set the great precedent
for every vernacular and variant
the world-reach of English would present.
Now you’re two hundred and fifty
and
gin some power the giftie
gied ye of a writership-in-revenance
you’d find a death-cult called Romance
both selling and preserving a scrubbed Reekie
and the now-posh Highlands. Very freaky.
You might outdo Dr Johnson in polite
St Andrews now, that Reformation bombsite.
I fear you mightn’t outdraw golf there:
golf keeps from the door the wolf there –
but no one does what you showed some aversion
to already in your time, poetical inversion.
Metrics too, now, are Triassic pent amateur
and ‘Rhyme is for Negroes’, I heard in Berlin:
the speaker was a literary Finn.
Such talk, now at last, is a sin
in place of much that wasn’t. Madness
for instance. The Bedlams yielded to medicine:
even madness has, a little. Madness:
would you rise from the grave back through madness?
It took you and left us Burns
of the Night. Many jubilant returns:
this at last is Robert Fergusson Night.
TO DYE FOR
A razor whetting silt and alluvium
off a neck in a mirror-doubled room
of soak and frizz and conversation
piling curlers and the hush-hush spray
and with the wide canny old shop broom
the work-experience schoolgirl hourly
angles and felts together
the one uncontentious human flag,
grey ginger lilac buff
black blonde and coherent brown.
TOUCHDOWN
The great airliner has been filled
all night with a huge sibilance
which would rhyme with FORTH
but now it banks, lets sunrise
in in freak lemon Kliegs,
eases down like a brushstroke
onto swift cement, and throws out
its hurricane of air anchors.
Soon we’ll all be standing
encumbered and forbidding in the aisles
till the heads of those farthest forward
start rocking side to side, leaving,
and that will spread back:
we’ll all start swaying along as
people do on planks but not on streets,
our heads tick-tocking with times
that are wrong everywhere.
THE CUT-OUT
In the shed it’s bumped verticals,
tin and planking the colour of rain.
The sheep left their cloud inside
and two men lie wringing wet.
One man owns the flock, but neither
expects to wear the suitings.
The indoor storm of their work
earns a bit more survival, near home,
and each shearing-sling is a whale’s
joined jawbones, dangling from a spring.
HISTORY OF THE ENLIGHTENMENT
Faith was a dream technology
but one we couldn’t master, or do cold
and it soon became equivocal again.
Mountains got moved by money or the lash
and we started to insult faith
as if it might be piqued and after all
kick in that sacred phase-shift
where cancers vanish, and the
golden brown in their antique clothes
enlarge from photograph size, walking
toward us, all welcoming, with secrets
the day it is Dreamtime in our streets.
VISITOR
He knocks at the door
and listens to his heart approaching.
MYTHOLOGY
A stupefying peak crack
across boiling air miles,
instantaneously annulled. That
was one of the Lightning brothers.
Brilliant longer than their lifetimes
they exist in orgasm only.
Between, they’re air’s memory
of climax. Death rays hid in hum.
Who’ll fish the blind scrawl of lightning
out of Life’s mouth, that old clay golem?
Eye-jabbing forerunners of live wire
their yield’s that mirror perfume
mounting up to tame the Sun.
CLOTHING AS DWELLING AS SHOULDERED BOAT
Propped sheets of bark converging
over skin-oils and a winter fire,
stitched hides of a furry rug-cloak
with their naked backs to the weather,
clothing as dwelling as shouldered boat
beetle-backed, with bending ridgelines,
all this, resurrected and gigantic:
the Opera House,
Sydney’s Aboriginal building.
STARRY NIGHT
In the late Nineteenth century
one is out painting landscapes
with spiralling sky
and helicopter lights approaching.
THE KETTLE’S BUBBLE-MAKING FLOOR
Who remembers the bitter
smell of smoke still in the house
the sunny next afternoon?
So recently smoke was everyday.
Who remembers the woolly
pink inside a burning peat?
The taste of tank water boiled
in blanched, black-shelled cast iron?
The pucker of water heated with
ashy stones in a wooden dish?
BIG BANG
If everything is receding
from everything, we’re only
seeing the backs of the stars.
WORKER KNOWLEDGE
The very slight S of an adze handle
or broadaxe handle are cut off square.
When adzes stopped licking timber ships
they were stubbed to scrape rabbit-trap setts.
But the worker’s end of a felling axe
where the tapering upsweep levels down
to bulge, is cut slant, to the shape
of a thoroughbred’s hoof pawing the ground.
JELLYFISH
Globe globe globe globe
soft glass bowls upside down
over serves of nutty udder and teats
under the surface of the sun.
TO FLY IN JUST YOUR SUIT
Humans are flown, or fall;
humans can’t fly.
We’re down with the gravity-lumpers,
rare, thick-boned, often basso.
Most animals above the tides are airborne.
Typically tuned keen, they
throw the ground away with wire feet
and swoop rings round it.
Magpies, listening askance
for their food in and under lawn,
strut so hairtrigger they almost
dangle on earth, out of the air.
Nearly anything can make their
tailcoats break into wings.
THE GREAT CUISINE CLEAVER DANCE SONNET
Juice-wet black steel
rectangle with square bite
dock pork slice slice
candy pork mouth size
heel-and-toe work walk
thru greens wad widths
bloc duck bisect bone
facet glaze nick snake
slit wriggle take gallbladder
whop garlic shave lily-root
wham! clay chicken-crust
hiss wok plug flare
circling soy cringing prawn
blade amassing sideways mince.
LACE CURTAIN
All politeness, all endearments
are known as palaver
once you are inside that love.
It is a compound
to keep out the world, and nearly everyone
even within it has a contempt-name.
You are in on a stare,
a style of looking down,
and what is counted worth saying
i
s what has turned all stuff
that housefly colour.
CREOLE EXAM
How old were you when you first
lived in a weatherproof house?
THE HEWERS
He used the older Irish profanity:
the hammer wriggled its bottom,
the heavens wore skimpy garish clothes,
the science of physics cruised men
who ogled it out of slow cars –
he put no limit to the fabulous
variety of entities
that might offer sex for money.
LAGGAN CEMETERY
Sheep are like legal wigs
the colour of fissured cement
in that bleached country
and the few one-storey buildings
of the living can’t dwarf the
absorbed marble chess of the dead.
THE PAINT HOUSE
That house on the riverbank
below the high guillotine bridge
was of planking, but no light came out
through the joins. It didn’t draw.
It turned a back on us like cheering
heard differently from year to year.
Gloss black on gut-pink with chartreuse
patched over both, all ignoring its house-shapes:
some said whatever remained in paint tins
was the design principle. Decades before hippiedom.
Next year it might be lime and navy blue
invading the cherry roof to big extents.
It was my first half dozen abstract paintings.
I hear the man who owned it was a Bird.
HOON HOON
Hoon, hoon, that blowfly croon:
first a pimp and then a goon.
Sound of a prop plane crossing the moon.
The crack of noon from a can of beer
and a Viking is nothing but a rune hoon.
A COUNTRYMAN
On the long flats north of the river
an elder in a leather jacket
is hitchhiking to his daughter’s funeral.
