by Les Murray
It may even tell the truth
if truth is the cool story.
Any farmer who breaks
and suicides, some lot’s
politicians wanted him
o don’t say dead. Gone.
Dead doesn’t always die.
The folk novel’s eyes
did register the barbed wire
and how to get behind it.
Being in the novel helped
a lot in, it says. Some out.
A father jealous of one son’s
bush skills failed to prove
himself the better man, and caused
a younger son’s death trying.
When the skilled son complained
at being kept dependent
and dirt poor for punishment
only others listened
and others don’t back you
in plots not their own.
In theirs, they may be hero
even to acquaintances
but then if they rise
into notice, into print,
fellow convicts eye them.
The man next door
cursed our builders’ noise.
He was writing a book,
so we scoffed, through the hedge,
Shops would sell him a book!
The great feral novel
heaped up streetsful of flowers
for the faux-demure princess
then sniggered them away.
What survives survives this.
SCIENCE FICTION
I can travel
faster than light
so can you
the speed of thought
the only trouble
is at destinations
our thought balloons
are coated invisible
no one there sees us
and we can’t get out
to be real or present
phone and videophone
are almost worse
we don’t see a journey
but stay in our space
just talking and joking
with those we reach
but can never touch
the nothing that can hurt us
how lovely and terrible
and lonely is this.
ATLANTIC PAVEMENTS
In Rio, cobalt peaks wore
ochre suburbs and children
and stair-stepping samba
convoyed tipped nudes down.
In Lisbon, a singer
acknowledged (obrigada!)
coins plinked on the dado
(obrigada!) of her fado:
from no love again
men trailed back to ships
and the ropes they wing-walked
made a vast wind-lobed brain.
Black, chipper and white
street mosaics of Lisbon,
pavement-scrolls of Rio,
sargasso between.
REFUSING SAUL’S ARMOUR
I.M. LEX BANNING, POET, 1921–65
x times y marks the spot
where my maths hit the wall.
It was all x from there.
In my last school exam
I drew maths on the paper.
Degrees were critique
but my mind was a groover
and a fiver a week
postponed me as a lover.
That, and sexual catastrophe
my parents had taught me
by innocently mating
so I read unset books
slept in buildings and long grass
years before the Haight
I mean the Haight Ashbury
while faith, faith and tobacco
kept the Black Dog at bay.
When all turned to hope and blame
was his teeth-baring day
and our spastic model poet
agile in his narrow flat
showed us his sword collection.
Shame on bellies sucked in:
his stung blades knew their paladin.
OUR DIP IN THE RIFT VALLEY
FOR LASSE SÖDERBERG
We never heard what my mate heard
descending to the Dead Sea by bus:
a jet fighter far below him
streaking north Gomorrah and SDOM!
Our trip was nearly in peacetime.
I remember my surprise
at my first view of our goal,
not a white brine pan,
it twinkled cheerfully blue
like any sunny lake.
It wasn’t grey, or gelid.
I remember the stumps of pale
earth at the stop going down,
how I introduced the haughty
Russian lady to one: Mrs Rein,
meet Mrs Lot. The smile this got.
I recall us in our pallor
at the stand-offish kibbutz
on its narrow shelf of shore
past the Qumran scroll mines,
how they had fresh water
hoses afloat on the surface
to wash our mouths and eyes
if the clear Mars-gravity water
got into them, as we drifted
high as triremes. The appalling
caustic and thistlehead bite of it.
I’d forgotten the black mud
under water, but the natron
stench returns, and nearly refreshes!
Thanks for that day, from back
when an orange cost one shekel.
BROWN SUITS
Sorting clothes for movie costume,
chocolate suits of bull-market cut,
slim blade ties ending in fringes,
brimmed felt hats, and the sideburned
pork-pie ones that served them. I lived then.
The right grade of suit coat, unbuttoned
can still get you a begrudged free meal
in a café. But seat sweat off sunned vinyl,
ghostly through many dry-cleans
and the first deodorants. I lived then
and worked for the man who abolished
bastards. The prime minister who
said on air I’m what you call a bastard.
Illegitimate. And drove a last stake
through that lousiest distinction.
SOUTHERN HEMISPHERE GARDEN
This autumn grove, in the half world
that has no fall season, shows a mauve
haze all through its twig-sheaves
and over a rich spangled ground
of Persian leaves.
Inroads of sun
are razzle gold and textile blond
out to the greens and blady-grass baulks
mown in drought along the pond.
Thoth
the many ibis lift for the night perches,
the nankeen heron has moved to Japan
but ink-blue waterhens preen long feet
or, flashing undertail
like feathers of the queen protea, run
each other round the brimming rain dam
whose inner sky is black below shine
as if Space were closer, down.
Back this summer
of the out-of-season Christmas snow
that scotched the bushfires in Victoria
I was out under green leaf-tressed
deciduous, hooking a pole saw
high and snapping down water-stressed
abortive limbs from beneath China
and Europe and America.
Now lichens up
the yeast boughs of those trees are bazaar
trinkets on the belly-dance troupe
at the rural show, who circled sidestepping
to the tappets of a drum.
‘Sacred women’s business,’
they laughed after, adjusting coins
over their floured and bake-oil skins,
strolling, antique, unaccusingly bizarre.
THE SUSPECT CORPSE
The dead man lay, nibbled,
between
dark carriages of a rocky river,
a curled load of himself, in cheap
clothes crusted in dried water.
Noisy awe, nose-crimped, sent us up the
gorge, to jail, in case we were hoaxing.
Following us back down next morning
forensics mentioned his wish bone
but never could pry any
names from between his teeth,
not his own, nor who had lashed
his ankles, or put boulders in his clothes.
After three months, he could only
generalise, and had started smiling.
EUCALYPTS IN EXILE
They’ve had so many jobs:
boiling African porridge. Being printed on.
Sopping up malaria. Flying in Paris uprisings.
Supporting a stork’s nest in Spain.
Their suits are neater abroad,
of denser drape, un-nibbled:
they’ve left their parasites at home.
They flower out of bullets
and, without any taproot,
draw water from way deep.
Blown down in high winds
they reveal the black sun of that trick.
Standing around among shed limbs
and loose craquelure of bark
is home-country stuff
but fire is ingrained.
They explode the mansions of Malibu
because to be eucalypts
they have to shower sometimes in Hell.
Their humans, meeting them abroad,
often grab and sniff their hands.
Loveable singly or unmarshalled
they are merciless in a gang.
CHERRIES FROM YOUNG
Cherries from Young
that pretty town,
white cherries and black,
sun-windows on them.
Cherries from Young
the tastiest ever
grow in drought time
on farms above there.
One lip-teased drupe
or whole sweet gallop
poured out of cardboard
in whatever year,
cherries from Young.
All the roads back
go down into Young
that early town.
LUNAR ECLIPSE
Many birds were making outcry
at the rotting Satsuma-plum moon
rising above the ocean cliffs
stacked high as a British address.
Moon was queer, too, a burnt-sugar
apparition with clouds of its own
darkening its face above the city
but then two Tongan bouncers
from the club found the word:
foi’atelolo, a baked pig’s liver
fat with oil, a chief’s portion
or praise-name for a pretty woman –
At that, the round man of the sky
began to reveal his gold edge.
CROC
This police car with a checkered seam
of blue and white teeth along its side
lies in cover like a long-jawed
flat dog beside the traffic stream.
HIGH-SPEED BIRD
At full tilt, air gleamed –
and a window-struck kingfisher,
snatched up, lay on my palm
still beating faintly.
Slowly, a tincture
of whatever consciousness is
infused its tremor, and
ram beak wide as scissors
all hurt loganberry inside,
it crept over my knuckle
and took my outstretched finger
in its wire foot-rings.
Cobalt wings, shutting on beige
body. Gold under-eye whiskers,
beak closing in recovery
it faced outward from me.
For maybe twenty minutes
we sat together, one on one,
as if staring back or
forward into prehistory.
THE COWLADDER STANZAS
Not from a weather direction
black cockatoos come crying over
unflapping as Blériot monoplanes
to crash in pine tops for the cones.
Young dogs, neighbours’ dogs
across the creek, bark, chained
off the cows, choked off play, bark
untiring as a nightsick baby, yap
milking times to dark, plead,
ute-dancing dope-eye dogs.
Red-hot pokers up and out
of their tussock. Kniphofia flowers
overlapping many scarlet jubes
form rockets on a stick.
Ignition’s mimed by yellow petticoats.
Like all its kind
Python has a hare lip
through which it aims its tongue
at eye-bursting Hare.
Thinking up names
for a lofty farm: High Wallet,
Cow Terraces, Fogsheep,
Rainside, Helmet Brush,
Tipcamber, Dingo Leap.
My boyhood farm cousin spoke
French, and I understood fluently
but not in this world.
It happened just one time
in my early urban sleep.
I know – as they may prefer –
little of the beekeeper family
who’ve lived for years inside
tall kindling of their forest
in old car bodies, sheds
and the rotted like sailcloth
of their first shore day.
And the blue wonga pigeon
walks under garden trees
and pumpkins lean like wheels
out of their nurturing trash.
We climbed the Kokoda Track.
Goura pigeon, rain, kau kau.
Dad said after the war
they wanted soldier settlement
blocks in New Guinea. This was struck
down by a minister named Hasluck.
Paul Hasluck. Dad’s grateful now:
it would have been bloody Mau Mau.
THE FARM TERRACES
Beautiful merciless work
around the slopes of earth
terraces cut by curt hoe
at the orders of hunger
or a pointing lord.
Levels eyed up to rhyme
copied from grazing animals
round the steeps of earth,
balconies filtering water
down stage to stage of drop.
Wind-stirred colours of crop
swell between walked bunds
miles of grass-rimmed contour
harvests down from the top
by hands long in the earth.
Baskets of rich made soil
boosted up poor by the poor,
ladder by freestone prop
stanzas of chant-long lines
by backwrenching slog, before
money, gave food and drunk
but rip now like slatted sails
(some always did damn do)
down the abrupts of earth.
VISITING GENEVA
I came to Geneva
by the bullet train,
up from church kero lamps –
it must have been the bullet train.
I rolled in on a Sunday
to that jewelled circling city
and everything was closed
in the old-fashioned way.
In the city of Palais
and moored Secretariat
I arrived in spring when
the Ferraris come out.
Geneva, refuge of the Huguenots,
Courtauld, Pierrepoint, Haszard,
Boers Joubert and Marais,
Brunel’s young Isambard
and their black segmented lord
Rohan, curled on his tomb lid:
roi ne puis, sujet ne daigne*
that Perfect Captain sa
id,
but John Calvin, unforgiver
in your Taliban hat,
you pervade bare St Peter’s
in la France protestante,
Calvin, padlock of the sabbath,
your followers now protect you:
predestination wasn’t yours, they claim,
nor were the Elect you,
but: when you were God
sermons went on all day
without numen or presence.
Children were denied play.
I had fun with your moral snobbery
but your great work’s your recruits,
your Winners and Losers. You
turn mankind into suits –
even Italy, messer John.
* Roi ne puis, sujet ne daigne – I can’t be king, I scorn to be a subject (motto of the Dukes de Rohan)
THE BRONZE BULL
Went down to Wall Street
and the Bull it was gone
the mighty bronze one
squat lord of Wall Street.
A year and a half
before the subprime
not even a calf
wore bronze on that small street,
some skyscrapers may have.
Squared flow-lines, tight-packed,
are the charging Bull’s style.
In battle with his Squaremacht
the dumpy brown Allies
were brave in round turrets
or ice-shaggy as the Bear
but they took home Bull’s power.
Haven’t been back
among Wall Street diviners
where the long green’s assigned its
hourly valuations.
Don’t know if the hoof-scraping
humpmaster of freedom
is back in place there
or off fighting Baby Bear.
PORT JACKSON GREASEPROOF ROSE
Which spawned more civilisations,
yellow grass or green?
Who made poverty legal?
Who made poverty at all?
Eating a cold pork sandwich
out of greaseproof paper
as I cross to Circular Quay
where the world-ships landed poverty
on the last human continent
where it had not been known.
Linked men straddling their chains
being laughed at by naked people.
This belongs to my midlife:
out of my then suburban city
rise towers of two main kinds,
new glass ones keyed high to catch money
and brown steeples to forgive the poor
who made poverty illegal
and were sentenced here for it.
