by Les Murray
primed to judge, as it moves
through an endless exhibition.
*
Half the reason for streets,
they’re to walk in the buzz
the sexes find vim in,
pheromones for the septa
of men and of women.
*
If my daddy isn’t gone
and I smell his strength and care
I won’t grow my secret hair
till a few years later on
on Tasmania. Down there.
*
When I was pregnant
says your sister, my nose
suddenly went acute:
I smelled which jars and cartons
were opened, rooms away,
which neighbours were in oestrus,
the approach of death in sweat.
I smelt termites in house-framing
all through a town, that mealy taint.
It all became as terrible
as completely true gossip
would be. Then it faded,
as if my baby had learned
enough, and stopped its
strange unhuman education.
*
A teaspoon upside down
in your mouth, and chopping onions
will bring no tears to your cheeks.
The spoon need not be silver.
*
Draw the cork from the stoic age
and the nose is beer and whisky.
I’ll drink wine and call myself sensitive!
was a jeer. And it could be risky.
Wesleyans boiled wine for Communion;
a necked paper bag was a tramp;
one glass of sweet sherry at Christmas,
one flagon for the fringe-dwellers’ camp.
You rise to wine or you sink to it
was always its Anglo bouquet.
*
When we marched against the government
it would use its dispersant gas
Skunk Hour. Wretched, lingering experience.
When we marched on the neo-feudal
top firms, they sprayed an addictive
fine powder of a thousand hip names
that was bliss in your nostrils, in your head.
Just getting more erased our other causes
and it was kept illegal, to be dear,
and you could destroy yourself to buy it
or beg with your hands through the mesh,
self-selecting, as their chemists did say.
*
Mars having come nearest our planet
the spacecraft Beagle Two went
to probe and sniff and scan it
for life’s irrefutable scent,
the gas older than bowels: methane,
strong marker of digestion from the start,
life-soup-thane, amoeba-thane, tree-thane.
Sensors would screen Ares’ bouquet
for paleo- or present micro-fartlets,
even one-in-a-trillion pico-partlets,
so advanced is the state of the art.
As Mars lit his match in high darkness
Beagle Two was jetting his way.
*
In the lanes of Hautgout
where foetor is rank
Gog smites and Pong strikes
black septums of iron
to keep the low down.
Ride through, nuzzle your pomander:
Don’t bathe, I am come to Town:
Far ahead, soaps are rising,
bubble baths and midday soaps.
Death to Phew, taps for Hoh!
Cribs from your Cologne water.
*
Ylang ylang
elan élan
the nostril caves
that breathe stars in
and charm to Spring
the air du temps
tune wombs to sync
turn brut men on
Sir Right, so wrong –
scent, women’s sense
its hunters gone
not its influence!
nose does not close
adieu sagesse
FOR A CONVERT IN BOSTON
You’ve just resigned from judging
when trips to the night side of Venus
out of terror of her day,
and forgiveness of these, and concealment
while still saying Venus has a night side
have summoned the steel eagle-feathers
of antique armour to lisp
hotly through waxed rooms
of a pretend perfection.
But can you tell accused from victims?
As the broken faces come out,
aghast, through the pelting gauntlet,
they are added to the poor
and the night side of the poor.
THE NEWCASTLE ROUNDS
Tall sails went slack, so high did Nobbys stand
so they felled him in the surf to choke on sand
and convicts naked as legs in trousers
tunnelled for coal way below the houses.
Workers got wages and the Co-op Store,
wearing bowler hats as they waltzed through the door.
They danced in pumps and they struck with banners
and they ran us up a city with spans and spanners.
When Esssington Lewiss blew through his name
steel ran in rivers, coke marched in flame.
Wharfies handled wire rope bloody with jags
and took their hands home in Gladstone bags.
Then the town break-danced on earthquake feet
and tottered on crutches down every street.
We all sniffed coke back then, for pay,
but the city came up stately when the smoke blew away.
With horses up the valley and wines flowing down
clinking their glasses as a health to the town
freighters queued off the port at all times,
from pub to art show became a social sway,
the original people got a corner of a say
and the ocean spoke to surfers in whitecap rhymes.
THE HOUSE LEFT IN ENGLISH
The house has stopped its desperate travelling.
It won’t fly to New Orleans, or to Hungary again,
though it counts, and swears, in Magyar.
It is left in English with its life suspended,
meals in the freezer, clothes on airy shelves,
ski badges prickling a wall chart of the Alps.
The house plays radio, its lights clock on and off
but it won’t answer the phone, even in Swiss German.
Since the second recession of helped steps
the house quotes from its life and can’t explain:
dress-cutter’s chalk. Melbourne Cup day 1950.
Alphorn skullcaps. Wartime soy flour, with an onion!
All earlier houses and times, in black and white
are boxed by aged children visiting to dust this one
on its leafy corner and still, for a while, in colour.
YREGAMI
A warm stocking caught among limbs
evokes a country road
and tufted poodles growing out
on the paddocks sway like seared trunks.
Sliced whitefish bony with wind
and very high up recall an autumn day;
arrows showering far below them at a town
speed as flights of wires.
Glazed bush ballads rhymed in concrete
pose as modern office buildings
and a sated crowd leaving a ground
after a draw feels like a stage in love.
This horse seated on a chamber pot
swinging its head and forelock,
you’d swear it was a drunk old man.
UPRIGHT CLEAR ACROSS
FOR KAY ALDEN
It’s like when, every year, flooding
in our river would be first to cut
/> the two-lane Pacific Highway.
We kids would pedal down barefoot
to the long ripple of the causeway
and wade, deep in freezing fawn energy,
ahead of windscreens slashing rain.
We were all innocent authority.
The through traffic was mostly wise
enough not to try our back roads
so we’d draw the North Coast back together,
its trips, its mercy dashes, its loads,
slow-dancing up to our navel
maybe with a whole train of followers.
Each step was a stance, with the force
coming all from one side between shores.
Every landing brought us ten bobs and silver
and a facing lot with a bag on their motor
wanting us to prove again what we
had just proved, that the causeway was there.
We could have, but never did, lose our footing
or tangle in a drowning fence
from which wire might be cut for towing –
and then bridges came, high level,
and ant-logs sailed on beneath affluence.
GHOST STORY
Two cars, converging by chance
follow the same near-empty roads
into the city after midnight.
Suburban miles and the streetlamps
moon pearls, or at hot salute,
the traffic lights all on green.
Just before mobile phones
this is. They turn the same corners
all through the insider streets:
twice the far-back lights shorten
interval, but aren’t let overtake.
An hour, now, since the mountains.
The lead car does a sudden
sideslip, and swerves to the kerb,
at bay in a sleep avenue
of steeping houses. The other
slows past it, and itself turns
in at that exact driveway.
Open. Shut. Its driver climbs
the front yard terraces, not looking.
He keys the front door and goes in.
Light for a while deep inside.
The silhouetted sit, dimmed,
for a quarter of an hour,
then a shovelling of coral
from furtive downhill treads
till their motor starts starting.
THE SHINING SLOPES AND PLANES
Having tacked loose tin panels
of the car shed together
Peter the carpenter walks straight up
the ladder, no hands,
and buttons down lapels of the roof.
Now his light weight is on the house
overhead, and then he’s back down
bearing long straps of a wiry green
Alpine grass, root-woven, fine as fur
that has grown in our metal rain gutters.
Bird-seeded, or fetched by the wind
it has had twenty years up there
being nourished on cloud-dust, on washings
of radiant iron, on nesting debris
in which pinch-sized trees had also sprouted.
Now it tangles on the ground. And the laundry
drips jowls of coloured weight
below one walking stucco stucco
up and down overlaps, to fix
the biplane houses of Australia.
THE SUCCESSION
A llama stood in Hannover, with a man
collecting euros for its sustenance.
The camelid had a warm gaze. Its profound
wool was spun of the dry cloud of heaven.
My fingers ached with cold in October.
I had to fly on to Great Britain.
There the climate spared them, and Guy Fawkes
dotted on for weeks, pop, Somme and flare,
as if the wars of tabloid against Crown
were swelling up to a bitter day in Whitehall –
but battle never burst out from under the horizon.
Leaves and cock pheasants went dizzily to their fall:
the birds often stuck like eyebrows to the road.
They and grouse, shot, were four bob at the butchers
long ago when we’d wintered at Culloden.
Two and a scavenged swede, and we were fed.
Back then we weren’t quite foreign, and the Dole
called on us at home. Our own country’s hard welfare
made this a prodigy to us, like reverse arrest!
When the media are king, will only fear be civil?
A STAMPEDE OF THE SACRIFICE
ST VALENTINE’S DAY 1916
Starting to realise, blaming sergeant majordom
five thousand Light Horse recruits break camp
unarmed, but in their strapping uniform.
A raw division of infantry, augmenting hubbub
joins their tramp into Liverpool, the Army suburb.
It is ten months since the Gallipoli landing
but chevrons or shoulders exhorting or commanding
can’t restrain this khaki spasm.
Yelling rather than intelligible, mobs fall
on hotels and drink them, pump, keg and bottle.
From rattling glass, men fill their blue canteens
and, shouting endearments, surge to commandeer
steam trains to the city. Frightened women
crowd off, and hobble-run to hide in churches.
Reports of the day don’t allow individuals speech
as they rampage. But while all manhood can’t say
converges in a braying roar, it maintains purchase.
The strikers smash every foreign word on display:
Belgium, Diesel, lingerie, Rassmussen –
glass under hobnails, signs poxed of their enamel.
All this has been deleted from the legend.
MP whistles and an unrepeated fusillade
are noises off. Hansom cabs bolt. But the riot
starts collapsing from strain of too much meaning.
Men not finding their murderer start sightseeing.
A few who know they joined up lightly change
clothes in unguarded shops. But they’re likely few.
Most simply exhaust their range,
put things down, and start returning.
Slippage, plum jam, licked pencils of review.
The newspapers of then are quickly warned to silence.
Sentences re-emerge, not least through courts martial:
a thousand get sent home, or sent to gaol,
before the Trenches reconnect their ravenous cable.
Many of those dismissed will invent new names
and rejoin the shipped battalions urging forward
where private disaster is bestially swapped by men.
For fifty years, pubs will close at six against them.
THE OFFSHORE ISLAND
Terra cotta of old rock undergirds
this mile of haze-green island
whitening odd edges of the sea.
It is unbrowsed by hoofed beasts
and their dung has not been on it.
Trees of the ice age have stayed rare
though no more firesticks come out
from the long smoky continent
lying a canoe-struggle to the west.
The knee-high bush is silvered canes,
bracken, unburnt grasses, bitou.
Miners came, and ate the mutton birds.
Greeks camped out there in lean times
fishing. Their Greek islands lived in town
with their families. Now it’s National Park.
The world shrinks as it fills.
Outer niches revert to space, in which
to settle is soon too something.
AS NIGHT-DWELLING WINTER APPROACHES
Tree shadows, longer now, lie
across the roads all one way
but water goes fluently switchback,
<
br /> swelling left, unbuttoning right
over successive cement fords.
Cattle walk their egrets around
but other long-beaked pensive birds
of the low damp places
snatch off the ground, rise above
stress of the plovers, and start flying
north over the world to sing.
THE HOAXIST
Whatever sanctifies itself draws me.
Whether I come by bus or Net,
rage and fun are strapped around my body.
I don’t kill civilians. I terrorise
experts and their elites. I drink their bubbly,
I wander among their principles
then at a pull of my cord
I implode. And laughter cascades in,
flooding those who suddenly abhor me.
The media, who are Columbine
with their prom queens and jocks,
unsheathe their public functions
and prolong the drowning frenzy.
(Strange that the owners should want to
sell the Herald to the Baptist church).
Sometimes my cord has to be pulled
for me by others. Or I cut it off.
A buried hoax can be a career, a literature –
Ah Koepenick! Oh Malley! My Ossianic Celts
brought us the Romantic Era,
my Piltdowns can resurge as stars!
BARKER UNCHAINED
FOR IAN KEAST, TEACHER OF ENGLISH
Around the hilly roads
I thought of you delivering
Western culture day by day
into impassive mailboxes,
tinny tip-front ones, milk cans,
shot beer-fridges, hard stoic slots,
sweet pairs entwined at the leg.
Nothing of it was junk mail
at the moment of receipt,
though much would have short life;
there’d be odd bright returns,
though, and thank-you pumpkins.
I see you on very back roads
where tyres snore on gravel
and your propellant dust
catching up at every stop
enrolls you in a khaki furore.
But sling it all now. Park the van,
return the mailbags to prison
and post yourselves off to where
you’re a man of your own letters.
LIFESTYLE
In the stacked cities
they dance the Narrow Kitchen
barista, barista!
we go to wear black.
barista, barista!
will you cook in your kitchen?
