by Les Murray
THE END OF SYMBOL
From a cinder in the far blue
a wedgetail eagle used to magnify
down into arrival, into belief,
matching speeds with a boy as he
rode his bike through suburban Melbourne,
then it would fold double and alight
on his handlebars, its inarguable expression
never ruffled, but its flickknife pinions
dilating around curves, and it would
chicken-peep near inaudibly when he
caressed it beneath the flames of its neck.
THE SCORES
AUSTRALIA SINCE FEDERATION
1901
When we were all servants
scrubbing off Madam’s slurs
I gave up my baby
and the black girl kept hers.
When I got my own high horse
living things felt my spurs
and the flowers were all golden wattle.
1921
That weak word the Battlers:
I saw from the train
families punch hoods from wheat bags
to keep out the rain;
Tom said a seller’s market
made Australian girls vain
and for Tom the flowers were poppies.
1941
Ar there, Ginger Meggs:
was it Susso tea and suet
put those calipers on your legs?
If Sister Kenny could do it
you’d walk again like a trooper,
left-right and left-right
and the wreaths would be Singapore orchids.
1961
We came because here were no politics
said your in-laws. Sweet monotonous languor!
and a pill was a sexless bore at school
but one brought bassinettes under control;
you were young and free for longer:
somehow this caused great anger
and soon flowers came by wire from America.
1981
You rose climbing up,
you rose going down
as snide peace with few imports
hung on in your home town.
When green learned to rust iron
dinners dared not be brown
and the flowers were flung gladioli.
2001
Fashion ruled, but another queen reigned.
Some flickers of nonsense remained:
It’s evening here, Nonna, so hey!
The world won’t be ending today.
One last war-trip, and none of ours killed!
Collective rights alone were instilled;
the singular was gagged and at bay
and the flowers were Olympic Gold roses.
RECLAIM THE SITES
We are spared the Avenues of Liberation
and the water-cannoned Fifths of May
but I tire of cities clogged with salutes
to other cities: York, Liverpool, Oxford Streets
and memorial royalty: Elizabeth,
Albert, William, unnumbered George.
Give me Sallie Huckstepp Road, ahead of
sepia Sussex, or Argyle, or Yankee numbering
– and why not a whole metropolis
street-signed for its own life and ours:
Childsplay Park and First Bra Avenue,
Unsecured Loan, the Boulevard Kiss,
Radar Strip, Bread-Fragrance Corner,
Fumbletrouser, Delight Bridge, Timeless Square?
THE CLEAR SALINE OF THEORY
Theory has done this:
orphans are filing into school
in the tropical 1940s
and every one of them has parents
living, who try to write to them.
Successive tides of theory
flood the poorest faces with salt.
THE FAIR GO
A ginger-biscuit kelpie dog,
young, abandoned off the highway
up a gravel road. Livestock
and rifle country, so the big
harp of ribs in its mouth
as its start in life is
butcher-cut. To prove innocence.
THE BELLWETHER BRUSH
As the painter Sali Herman discerns
and captures the iron-lace character
of what are still called slums then
he’s unaware the bright haze his brush
confers is called Billions;
he delightedly thinks Beauty, Truth,
but fashion turns its head, and starts
walking clap-clap in the footsteps,
clap-clap, of his easel,
walking in twos, as coppers used to,
till the salt of the earth accept
hot offers for their bijou homes.
IN A TIME OF CUISINE
A fact the gourmet
euphemism can’t silence:
vegetarians eat sex,
carnivores eat violence.
UPLANDS
Across silvering cobble
into white-ant stump country.
Hills lie where they fell;
boulders sultana their steeps.
Smoke wanders up from a couple of far places.
Crested trees pour their shade
to one side on the ground.
Unplugging their weight,
kangaroos hoist up, and bounce.
A hill’s front becoming its back
takes the sun all day.
Forest up some slopes,
thin enough to see grass under.
Getting well out now
back into the high country.
Mountains pregnant with hills in a white skim sky.
THE PAY FOR FOSTERAGE
The carpenter could have stayed
hunched over, at work on his chagrin,
left everything to the hush-ups
and stone-evadings of women.
He could have escaped the thousands
of years of speculation. The horns.
But all that weakness was behind him.
The courteous presence had spoken
unearthly sense to its equal,
himself. As he would be from now
on into the world to come.
THE MYRIADS
Resolute, you come to a cell
and its powers are all wrong.
It can never make your great tree
with you. And it was your chance.
Pine pollen on the water
making sallow jade islands
in the evening sun.
A STUDY OF THE NUDE
Someone naked with you
will rarely be a nude.
A nude is never with just one.
Nude looks back at everyone
or no one. Aubergine or bluish rose,
a nude is a generalization.
Someone has given their name
and face to be face all over,
to be the face of something
that isn’t for caressing
except with the mind’s hand.
Nude is the full dress of undressing.
IGUASSU
Shallow at brinks
with pouring tussocks
a bolt of live tan water
is continuously tugged
off miles of table
by thunderous white claws.
PIETÀ ONCE ATTRIBUTED TO COSME TURA
This is the nadir of the story.
His mother’s hairpiece, her sheitel,
is torn away, her own cropped hair looks burnt.
She had said the first Mass
and made Godhead a fact
which his strangeness had kept proving,
but what of that is still true
now, with his limp weight at her knee?
Her arms open, and withdraw,
and come back. That first eucharist
she could have been stoned to death for
is still alive in her body.
THE KNOCKDOWN QUESTION
Why does God not spare the innocent?
The answer to that is not in
the same world as the question
so you would shrink from me
in terror if I could answer it.
THE INSIDERS
What’s in who for you?
Who’s in you for himself?
THE ONSET
Rain. Its breath a liquid dust
ages the brooding European
overcoat movie in the pond,
then it prickles, across the deep
windows there, then blinks
with excited eyelids, pinging
all rings like the dimples
on a steel-band drum, and soon
the closed velvet doors
of the still theatre have vanished
under shoal like tin lids dancing
massed pinches of potato water.
THE DOG’S BAD NAME
My politics are like crop circles
that appear in angry wheat.
The sourest explanations of them
get force-fed to undefended minds.
I never know their outlines in advance;
all I know is, no group makes them.
What strikes me more is the frequent
wealth of the estates they afflict.
POP MUSIC
Empty as a country town street
after five. Two or three crisp
high-heel walkers, and a pair
of little girls in a station wagon,
one bunging a pop bottle boinc
against her head and bocc
against the wagon. The other blows
music into hers: Doe roe to hoe soon
but no throe for woe yet, moon!
THE BODY IN PHYSICS
The air has sides, in a house.
Birds, whacked from colliding, embrace
its sheer with umbrella-rib skiddings.
They gape silent death-cries when closed
in converging hands, or snatched out
of such parts of their theory as still fly.
Carried outside, they pause a beat
and drop upwards, into gravity that once more
blows as well as sucks. Fliers’ gravity.
FRUIT BAT COLONY BY DAY
High above its gloom
this forest is all hung
with head-down ginger bats
like big leather bees.
In sun to stay drowsy
daylong in slow dangle
chi-chi as monkeys
they blow on sad tin horns,
glide, nurture babies, sleep,
waiting for their real lives.
COOL HISTORY
Identity oversimplifies humans.
It denies the hybrid, as trees can’t.
Trees, which wrap height in pages
self-knitted from ground water and light
are stood scrolls best read unopened.
They lean to each other and away
in politics of sun-rivalry
or at knotted behests in the earth.
Billets cut from them are tight-bound
photocopies detailing food and ancestry.
Eons on, their concentric years
will be eloquent on suffering and old airs.
THE MACHINE-GUNNING OF CHARM
Happy the city that stayed poorish
or unbombed through the twentieth century
and never rebuilt itself then.
All centuries back to the tenth
in the West, could put up more humane
ordinary and pretty-good buildings:
undercrofts, fat colonnades, gingerbread,
crooked corridors with much later privy,
street fronts bluff as God Save the King.
The twentieth century grew such icy
ambition and scorn that it built marvels
or else crap. Over charm’s mass grave
its middle range gridded medicine’s extra
billions in a punitive mediocrity.
THE CLIMAX OF FACTORY FARMING
Farm gates were sealed with tape;
people couldn’t stop shaking their heads.
Out on the fells and low fields
in twilight, it was the Satanic mills
come again: the farm beasts of Britain
being burnt inside walls of their feed.
MASSACRE’S ALL-PARTY FUEL
The cones of the Wollemi pine
erupt at the ends of its branches
like the stars of the Eureka flag.
I grew up in the early country
and Libra put her sword up my nose
and taught me her values: on the
other hand, but then on the third hand …
But my nose still pointed and discerned.
When humans lay stuck to their blood
en masse, under birches, on cobbles
or vibrated with heat on bush timber,
I’d heard the cause yip in dance halls
and in national brigand lore: blurts,
then licensings, of underdog revenge.
FUSEE
A complex iron finial-head
still dazzling from the forge
smokes in its ash and sparkles
in the shadowy workshop –
but no:
in fact it’s a feathered
intricate protea bloom
haloed in a dusty ray of sun,
which in turn evades the stark
truth
that it’s an incandescent
missile tamped in the choke
of an 18th century mortar, aimed
to ignite a timber city.
D.C.
City where aircraft are hung
as art, and security admits people
to the colonnaded floors
of horizontal beige skyscrapers
haunted by ideals and vast men.
OUTSIDE OF THE IRON MASK
Was any ruler ever a twin?
Even now you never hear of it,
a consort suckling one infant
in tears, after successive labours
and the bundling out of linen
– O Madam, it is the State –
nor her comfort: a far apprentice
ribbed for his likeness to a coin.
THE POISONS OF RIGHT AND LEFT
You are what you have got
and: to love, you have to hate.
Two ideas that have killed and maimed
holocausts and myriads.
THE TOP ALCOHOL CONTENDER
An aircraft-engined kewpie doll
in chrome, with vast fat tyres,
stinks hotly of injection and rubdown
and little wheels splay at the far
end of its blood-red stick –
how else should it look,
the top alcohol contender?
APSLEY FALLS
Abounding white water
details each stratum
on basalt stratum
down hundreds and hundreds
like bands of washed linen,
this mummy standing up
the height of its mountain
in an ink-wet corridor.
TO ONE OUTSIDE THE CULTURE
Still ask me about adult stuff
when you want. But remember that day
in Madame Tussaud’s basement
when all the grownups looked careful
and some young ones had to smirk?
You were right to cry out in horror
at the cut-off heads there
and the rusty dried trickles
shocked out of their eyes and ears.
PORTRAIT OF A FELSPAR-COLOURED CAT
Plaintive, she named herself Min
in the reaching-down world.
Her texture manages itself;
her comet tail is Abyssinian.
All her intelligence
is elegance.
Never would soil she flicked up
persist in her belly fur.
MARS AT PERIGEE
An apricot star
glittering, like a drop of desert rain
on the east night sky,
that was Mars at perigee;
the acrid sweet pulp around
the seed of a red passionfruit
was its taste on the mind
before any airtank thoughts.
MORE PICTOGRAPHS
A beribboned question mark
is a riddle; one cut off sharp
and barbed is a trick question;
one bent over a magnifying glass
is inspection, or investigation
and one reversed is answer
but a tentacled octopus
with a human head
digesting life in its brain
is a mood. Which many have indulged
and there are hosts of words for
that mood, in the different lexicons.
REFLECTION IN A MILITARY CAP BADGE
A pair of breasts in a window
as the Grenadiers marched by,
but were those breasts being displayed
by their own hands?
EXPLAINING A CHEESE
Explaining a cheese
she spoke in Australian English
but her hands spoke Italian.
NATIONAL DRESS
Ceremonial and truly ethnic
clothes may almost escape fashion.
For centuries on end
the hemlines of national costume
could allow women feet.
Before the Party or tourism
