Collected Poems

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