by Les Murray
‘national’ meant local and peasant,
and in kingdom, tsardom
or rzeczpospolita, who needed
goose-satire on the train of a skirt?
Back before Hitler gave Poland
to his lawyer as a fee
for shameful relief
and got the fellow hanged,
who then wore national costume
daily and who once a year
mattered, in ways now lost.
Today, it’s all identity,
all finery, with patterns a spring sun
might embroider in a park, and ribbons
in colours primary as principle,
but ancient mocking folk dance
sways in the light of forest
so deep it still breeds extinct
proto-cattle the shape of Lithuania.
A SHRINE HOUSE
The past lives in a timber house
in off the road. A shrine house.
Tenants have never been let in there
and the car outside comes rarely now.
Paint from the first modern year
still strokes the shadowy best room
and in the silent talk of young parents
a slow broom isn’t bunting cobwebs down.
AT UNIVERSITY
Puritans reckoned the cadavers
in Anatomy were drunks off the street;
idealists said they were benefactors
who had willed their bodies to science,
but the averted manila-coloured
people on the tables had pinned-back
graves excavated in them
around which they lay scattered in the end
as if exhumed from themselves.
THE YOUNG FOX
I drove up to a young fox
on the disused highway.
It didn’t scare, but watched me
roll up to it along the asphalt.
I got out. Any poultry it would kill
wouldn’t now be mine. No feud between us.
It watched quizzically, then bounded
away with an unmistakeable headshake
that says Play with me!
and stopped, waiting. I remember
how sharply perfumed the leaves were
that lay on the pavement in that world.
EXPERIENCE
I heard a cat bark like a fox
because the car’s larger purr
didn’t soothe her, locked in a cat-box
and the hitchhiker said We keep a snake
to eat our rats! For heaven’s sake.
I’ve heard a snake hiss like a man
I saw a goose sail like a bark
I heard a man wank like a goose.
THE BARCALDINE SUITE
High on mountains worldwide they blow
on long wood trumpets in tones of psalm
summoning weirdness or cattle or calm
or play a wood horse with a horsehair bow
and the didgeridoo, that lowland shofar,
throttles where dancing and secrets are –
Dance leaped from the Bang
finding orbital speeds
Life joined it underwater
brought it skyward as reeds
and half of dance air-dried
into carolling and birds
into drumming and howling
and the human song, words –
Musicians mug outwards
dancing with their instruments
or stare deeply inward
communing with their instruments,
displaying the catch
or listening for the prey –
The band vamped along
to music pince-nez’ed to a tuba
and this woman stood in tears.
It was sunny Europe to her
and a Pentecost of tones
came to ignition over towns
getting nubs and gists uttered
that talk had often spattered –
Music is the great nonsense poem
written, for recital if at all,
in the old bonding lingo of cry
that we translate experience into
dilly-O Johnny Ringo bye bye
to check with the tree-nests of Home.
Music is the vast nonsense poem
our precisions float out on with emotion
to change and get poignant as they drown;
la Musique: it needs no translation.
It can back up, or send up, any Line;
it makes even the thought-police hum.
Tart angel that never lost Heaven
O waly the faraway wine
music is the great nonsense poem,
the religion no hard nose rejects,
not trapped in the medium of critics.
O harmonium the zillion-armed Om –
Being deeply moved
stops movement. Voice would be fur –
The soul is open. Something
always knew its key –
laughter and crying at once,
or rapt, or fainting to sleep –
gooseflesh fades to shiver
as the modern resumes –
I thought of ambient sounds that music has dipped up
in its silver ladle: heartbeats and hoofbeats, and trains
volleying with tipplers and Dopplers, or blue in the night,
drips in echoey spaces, wind through frightful places,
factory-crash heavy metal, the strung pluck of bows,
bells, whistles, the clinker coming at you across everything,
peaks peaks peaks of murder. And crowds, and the ocean snore.
It’s a shortish list, even with the anvil and the cannon.
Has nobody scored the rippy un-tiling of a fish?
The colic in tennis courts? The blowfly race-call tune
that evokes no sex on a long flat saturday?
What about steamships, beyond the lorn siren to the barrel
and tumbledom of their nature, or the huge bulk gamelan
as hardwood logs collaborate into a keen sawmill?
Uneven steps rasping slowly, with rests, downhill?
The weight of our weight
the weight of our years –
I know the purist point isn’t wild sound being redeemed
up into music, but what of music’s own dimension
can be modulated into existence for the mind.
A body of its own for the mind, with no fixed visuals.
Without the beards and sweaters of hand-rolled wool
would work songs sound like politics? Would the symphonic,
without posh and penguin suits, still sound like a wall of money? –
The weight of our weight
the weight of our years
the said and the shed and the
stammered in tears
and always this broadcast
Otherworld at our ears –
Then, we’ll be a tune
they’ll put on and play
bits of and rarely
till our times pass away
and there’s no one on earth
who knew us by heart.
Obsolete for all time
and that’s just the start.
THE MEANING OF EXISTENCE
Everything except language
knows the meaning of existence.
Trees, planets, rivers, time
know nothing else. They express it
moment by moment as the universe.
Even this fool of a body
lives it in part, and would
have full dignity within it
but for the ignorant freedom
of my talking mind.
THE ABORIGINAL CRICKETER
MID-19TH CENTURY
Good-looking young man
in your Crimean shirt
with your willow shield
up, as if to face spears,
you’re inside their
men’s Law,
one church they do obey;
they’ll remember you were here.
Keep fending off their casts.
Don’t come out of character.
Like you, they suspect
idiosyncrasy of witchcraft.
Above all, don’t get out
too easily, and have to leave here
where all missiles are just leather
and come from one direction.
Keep it noble. Keep it light.
THE GYMNAST VALERIA VATKINA
Legs counterposed like six o’clock, her stretch
is bowstave, sky foot to ground foot. A point shoe tips each.
She leans out around herself then, and gazes
intently past her hand at what she blazes:
a switchback trail of rainbow ribbon
that climbs stairs of air to her whipped baton
and equally shimmies down landings of allure
right-left right-left like a Caliph’s signature.
THE AZTEC REVIVAL
Human sacrifice has come back
on another city-island
and bloodied its high stepped towers.
Few now think the blood’s redeemed
by red peppers, or turkey in chocolate.
Human sacrifice comes, now always,
in default of achievement,
from minds that couldn’t invent
the land-galaxies of dot painting
or new breakthrough zeroes, or jazz.
BRIEF, THAT PLACE IN THE YEAR
Brief, that place in the year
when a blossoming pear tree
with its sweet laundered scent
reinhabits wooden roads
that arch and diverge up
into its electronic snow city.
THE AVERTED
The one whose eyes
do not meet yours
is alone at heart
and looks where the dead look
for a comrade in his cause.
AT THE WIDENING OF A WAR
Everyone was frightened of the sky.
Each night, Mars emerged at the zenith.
A bleb of pure rage tore off the Sun.
For days, the living and the dead
hung in the air like dust
whirled aloft from tired roads.
The fuselage of a lobster lay abandoned.
The Isles of the Blest were receding
to their sailing distances
and the gunfire of tourist shoes was stilled.
Sports stadiums and crowds loomed from another age.
The blow struck now
would be weaker than the blow withheld.
THE MUDDY TRENCH
In the dream, Clarrie Dunn
sits naked with many thousands
in the muddy trench. He is saying
The true god gives his flesh and blood.
Idols demand yours off you.
– from The Boys who Stole the Funeral, Sonnet 88
THE HANGING GARDENS
High on the Gloucester road
just before it wriggles its hips
level with eagles down the gorge
into the coastal hills
there were five beige pea-chickens
sloping under the farm fence
in a nervous unison of head-tufts
up to the garden where they lived
then along the gutter and bank
adult birds, grazing in full serpent.
Their colours are too saturate and cool
to see at first with dryland eyes
trained to drab and ginger. No one here
believes in green deeply enough. In greens
so blue, so malachite. Animal cobalt too
and arrow bustles, those are unparalleled.
The wail lingers, and their cane
surrection of iridium plaques. Great spirits,
Hindoostan in the palette of New Zealand!
They don’t succeed at feral.
Things rush them from dry grass.
Haggard teeth climb to them. World birds,
human birds, flown by their own volition
they led us to palaces.
LEAF BRIMS
A clerk looks again at a photo,
decides, puts it into a file box
which he then ties shut with string
and the truth is years away.
A Naval longboat is rowed upstream
where jellied mirrors fracture light
all over sandstone river walls
and the truth is years away.
A one-inch baby clings to glass
on the rain side of a window as
a man halts, being led from office
but the truth is years away.
Our youngest were still child-size when
starched brims of the red lotus last
nodded over this pond in a sunny breeze
and the truth was years away.
AIRSCAPES
The air has states, not places.
On the outer of Earth, the
sky above darkens to blue matter.
Lower than where Space streaks in,
risen scents and particles plateau,
diffusing to go worldwide.
The chill slates of that year
which, blown out of Iceland volcanoes,
famined up the French Revolution
hung and globed out on these levels.
Cloud wisps are an instructor
chalking to proof! And here it’s true:
everyone has to have to.
THE STATISTICS OF GOOD
Chaplain General (R.C.)
Archbishop Mannix of Melbourne,
he who had a bog-oak footstool
so his slipper might touch Irish soil
first, when alighting from his carriage
saved, while a titular Major General
in the Australian Army, perhaps half
the fit men of a generation
from the shrapnelled sewer landscapes
of Flanders by twice winning close
referenda against their conscription.
How many men? Half a million? Who knows?
Goodness counts each and theirs.
Politics and Death chase the numbers.
TWELVE POEMS
That wasn’t horses: that was
rain yawning to life in the night
on metal roofs.
*
Lying back so smugly
phallic, the ampersand
in the deckchair of itself.
*
Fish head-down in a bucket
wave their helpless fan feet.
*
Spirituality?
she snorted. And poetry?
They’re like yellow and gold.
*
Being rushed through the streets
at dusk, by trees and rain, the
equinoctial gales!
*
The best love poems are known
as such to the lovers alone.
*
Creek pools, grown top heavy,
are speaking silver-age verse
through their gravel beards.
*
Have a heart: salted land
is caused by human tears.
*
Tired from understanding
life, the animals approach man
to be mystified.
*
A spider walking
in circles is celebrating
the birthday of logic.
*
To win me, they told me
all my bad attitudes
but they got them wrong.
*
Filling in a form
the simple man asks his mother
Mum, what sex are we?
TOO OFTEN ROUND THE GALLERIES
Blokes and sheilas, copping lip,
walk the national comic strip.
&
nbsp; Whitefellow art is half cartoons
and satire a picket-line of goons.
Ridicule trumps justice, possums!
TRAVELLING THE BRITISH ROADS
Climb out of mediaeval one-way
and roundabouts make knotted rope
of the minor British roads
but legal top speed on the rocketing
nickel motorway is a lower limit!
I do it, and lorries howl past me.
Sometimes after brown food
at a pub, I get so slow
that Highland trackways
only have one side
since they are for feet
and hoofs of pack horses
and passing is ceremony.
Nor is it plovers
which cry in the peopled glens
but General Wade’s chainmen
shouting numbers for his road
not in the Gaelic scores
but in decimal English.
Universal roads return as shoal
late in the age of iron rims.
Stones in the top layer to be
no bigger than would fit in your mouth,
smiles John McAdam. If in doubt
test them with your lips!
Highwaymen, used to reining in
thoroughbreds along a quag of track,
suddenly hang, along new carriageways
or clink iron on needy slave-ships,
but wagon horses start surviving
seven years instead of three
at haulage between new smoke towns.
Then railways silence the white road.
A horseman rides alone between villages;
the odd gig, or phaeton;
smoke and music of the bosh
rising out of chestnut shade:
Gypsies, having a heyday.
Post roads, drying out, seem strange
beaches, that intersect each other.
When housemaids uncovered their hair
at windows, and a newfangled
steam roller made seersucker sounds
there were swans on the healed canal,
and with the sun came the Queen’s
Horse Artillery in tight skeleton coats
to exercise their dubbined teams
watched by both fashionable sexes
in bloomer-like pedal pants.
I knew to be wary of the best dressed,
decent with the footsore,
but frontier-raffish with all
because the scripts they improvised from
