Collected Poems

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.