by Les Murray
the portly, the stiff, and those lolling in pointed green slippers …
Wondering who’ll take the spare bagfulls, you grin with happiness
– it is your health – you vow to pick them all
even the last few, weeks off yet, misshapen as toes.
THE ACTION
We have spoken of the Action,
the believer-in-death, maker of tests and failures.
It is through the Action
that the quiet homes empty, and barrack beds fill up, and cities
that are cover from God.
The Action, continual breakthrough,
cannot abide slow speech. It invented Yokels,
it invented the Proles, who are difficult/noble/raffish,
it invented, in short, brave Us and the awful Others.
The smiling Action
makes all things new: its rites are father-killing,
sketching of pyramid plans, and the dance of Circles.
Turning slowly under trees, footing off the river’s linen
to come into shade – some waterhens were subtly
edging away to their kampongs of chomped reeds –
eel-thoughts unwound through me. At a little distance
I heard New Year children slap the causeway.
Floating
in Coolongolook River, there below the junction
of Curreeki Creek,
water of the farms upheld me.
We were made by the Action:
the apes who agreed to speech ate those who didn’t,
Action people tell us.
Rome of the waterpipes came of the Action, lost it,
and Louis’ Versailles, in memory of which we mow grass.
Napoleon and Stalin were, mightily, the Action.
All the Civilizations, so good at royal arts and war
and postal networks –
it is the myriad Action
keeps them successive, prevents the achievement for good
of civilization.
Wash water, cattle water, irrigation-pipe-tang water
and water of the Kyle,
the chainsaw forests up there
where the cedar getter walks at night with dangling pockets,
water of the fern-tree gushers’ heaping iron,
water of the bloodwoods, water of the Curreeki gold rush,
water of the underbrush sleeping shifts of birds
all sustained me,
thankful for great dinners
that had made me a lazy swimmer, marvellous floater,
looking up through the oaks
to the mountain Coolongolook,
the increase-place of flying-fox people, dancers –
Now talk is around of a loosening in republics,
retrievals of subtle water: all the peoples
who call themselves The People,
all the unnoticed cultures,
remnants defined by a tilt in their speech, traditions
that call the stars, say, Great Bluff, Five Hounds of Oscar,
the High and Low Lazies,
spells, moon-phase farming – all these are being canvassed.
The time has come round for republics of the cultures
and for rituals, with sound: the painful washings-clean
of smallpox blankets.
It may save the world,
or be the new Action.
Leaves
were coming to my lips, and the picnic on the bank
made delicious smoke.
Soon, perhaps, I’d be ready
to go and eat steak amongst Grandmother’s people,
talk even to children,
dipping my face again
I kneaded my muscles, softening the Action.
THE EDGE OF THE FOREST
The edge of the forest, hard smoke beyond the paddocks
frays back and is there. Cutters go out through it,
come in again on the ringbarked slopes, down the fence lines.
– You have to send flooded gum quick. It don’t stay flooded –
ironbark’s a bugger to bark if it comes dry weather –
the man sitting next to me knows inside the forest.
He has his praise out there. Two taps on a trunk
and he can tell you its life. Steering the chainsaw
he can drop a tree on a cigarette paper. His billets
bumped, loading, ring like gongs; they win prizes.
Tallowwood’s lovely: it has a deep like fat.
He has raised trucks out of swamp with his quick chain-cunning.
He loves praise, hoards it. The tic’s become hereditary.
His arts are the waltz, cards, company, ripostes:
Easy seen you’re not two-faced. You wouldn’t wear that one.
But at sixty-five, they take your life away.
If work has been shelter, they let in the winter
if work has been drudgery, night mocks the late-freed man
if work has been proof they take the glass away.
At four years old, he was milking easy cows
and was put to the plough at fourteen, the day after school.
Hauling timber with the teams, trusted in cattle dealing
he worked, then and always – long in lieu of pay –
for a sign of love from his irritable father,
the planter of flasks. His nightmare, strawed with praise.
The years hurry by. He was facing the bad birthday.
Neighbours talked heart. They tell you when to die
in a community. Thus when the Company, in person,
told him Stay on: you’re our best man, some custom
and cliché were bent. It was a commutation.
Life. Life given back. Almost a father speaking.
He will come and go for years yet through the edge of the forest.
LACHLAN MACQUARIE’S FIRST LANGUAGE
The Governor and the seer are talking at night in a room
beyond formality. They are not speaking English.
What like were Australians, then, in the time to come?
They had lost the Gaelic in them. It had become
like a tendon a man has no knowledge of in his body
but which puzzles his bending, at whiles, with a flexing impulse.
They’d wide cities, dram-shops, carriages with wings –
all the visions of Dun Kenneth. The singing at a ceilidh
lacked unison, though: each man there bellowing out of him
and his eyes undirected. Had they become a nation?
They had, and a people. A verandah was their capitol
though they spoke of a town where they kept the English seasons.
I heard different things: a farmer was telling his son
trap rabbits and sell the skins, then you can buy your
Bugs Bunny comics! – I didn’t understand this. All folk there,
except the child-hating ones, were ladies and gentlemen.
THE EUCHRE GAME
So drunk he kept it at tens – and the bloody thing lost!
he bought a farm out of it. Round the battered formica
table the talk is luck more than justice, justice
being the politics of a small child’s outcry.
The subtlest eyes in the Southern Hemisphere look at
the cards in front of them. Well I’ll go alone.
Outside the window, passionfruit flowers are blooming
singly together. Many are not in the sun.
Men lose a trick, deal a fresh hand. Intelligence here
is interest and the refusal of relegation;
those who conceive it chance-fixed to their benefit also
believe in justice. Some of them are what remains of
the Revolution. Hey, was that for us? Footsteps
recede down the hall. One looks at the window, three smile:
Europeans! you’re all suffering-snobs. Who’s away?
Th
e game’s loosely sacred: luck is being worked at.
THE MITCHELLS
I am seeing this: two men are sitting on a pole
they have dug a hole for and will, after dinner, raise
I think for wires. Water boils in a prune tin.
Bees hum their shift in unthinning mists of white
bursaria blossom, under the noon of wattles.
The men eat big meat sandwiches out of a styrofoam
box with a handle. One is overheard saying:
drought that year. Yes. Like trying to farm the road.
The first man, if asked, would say I’m one of the Mitchells.
The other would gaze for a while, dried leaves in his palm,
and looking up, with pain and subtle amusement,
say I’m one of the Mitchells. Of the pair, one has been rich
but never stopped wearing his oil-stained felt hat. Nearly everything
they say is ritual. Sometimes the scene is an avenue.
THE FLYING-FOX DREAMING
Now that the west
is lighting in under leaves
and Hookfoot the eagle
has gone from over the forest
there is no sound except the
tree-foxes, unwrapping from rest:
finger-winged night workers
who will soon beat up in tens
and thousands out of this daylong head-down city;
in the offing of scents above earth, they will cast for grown
and native fruit, and home in down-country for miles
on the ripe tree beacons.
Upside down all their days
Antipodean,
night wardrobes their singleness for them. Each bat, alone,
puts off crowding and chatter, once above the perches
he becomes the unfolded, far-speeding, upward-sidestepping,
nightowl-outflying one.
Here, one, his fur ballast
dropped among weeds in its tightening parchment, also
disproves a bush story: they don’t excrete through the mouth
to satisfy gravity. All down the valley of fig
and flying-fox men, the lights now of towns are beginning
to gleam. They will burn late. It goes on being appropriate,
even the dead one becoming a clenched oval stone
now clear of all twig-arrest, free of clambering dinners,
free at last of dawns’ dazzling comedowns. Windrowing east
over the farms, adroit
at wingshrink turns
he is topping the nectar time, and the pollen harvest,
going on out continually over horizons.
VISITING ANZAC IN THE YEAR OF METRICATION
Gelibolu, Chanakkale –
there’s no place called Gallipoli
down there, where the summer fires strip
the hills of scrub and rosemary.
Old wire snags the steeps like thorn
and human bones come out of the clay
where squatters’ and selectors’ boys
and the aghas’ sons and their peasant boys
met in a raked boot-scrambling roar
and the sooling prints turned black with names
when currents drifted the landing buoys
to the heights of thyme and rosemary.
o
Things sticking out jag at the mind,
Tooths’ bottles, messtins, vertebrae
laid down in the bonzer stoushing days
the spirited and clean-cut days
up where the laddering trenches clung
and gravel flew in hobnailed sprays
where ripped and screaming chaps found out
that fellow humans really would,
where crimson-tidemarked puttees bore
histories of crowding in the sea
below the chirrup-haunted thyme,
burst entrails, shell-brass, rosemary.
o
When hard-case jokes and frantic help
poured content into noble sieves
that human lives cannot keep filled
it was the day of turning round,
when, firing, wags might turn around
and yell How’s that? and in a push
a hundred jokers might turn round
and sprawl, and leap. Towns died of that
and the bush went underground:
the nation stalled in elegy
with a Day for massing through the streets
in pub time, wearing rosemary.
o
At Lone Pine and the Nek, the spinner
has scattered his cranial shilling bets
the king-and-country stones up there
mark no one’s grave (Islam burns crosses).
Bowled Walers and stumped Victorians lie
in those broken hills inextricably
with their adversary, who was no less brave.
The misemployed, undone by courage,
have become the Unsaluting Army
and buttoned boys, for all their trades,
are country again, and that funny Missus
Porter’s not yet changed poetry.
o
White bones, inconsolable proof
high scree, incomparable test –
on both points, class warfare has raged
but the war-pipes sail through jam-packed streets
where everyone is turning round:
old men and the ageing wear bright coins
and plain men and battlers’ sons are proud
and the flash still trust extremity.
Our continent is uncrowded space,
a subtler thing than history.
The Day of our peace will need a native
herb that out-savours rosemary.
o
Down in the flatlands, coming away,
torn cotton bloomed in the few scratch fields
and conscripts on bivouac jogged by,
the Hittite face, the Turan face –
down there, in a day of rabid peace
and wartime love, one thought of how,
to farm blokes, war is Sudden City.
The newchums learned the tram-routes well
but disaster is all our brotherhood,
starved height, incomparable friends,
this is the reign of the measuring god,
this is the pit of rosemary.
o
High, near-Port Lincoln light. Harsh places.
This is the day of Freedom, too –
like the sardine tin lid tied
to the hawk’s tail, life presents new faces.
Those shelterless hardscrabble cols
where even the Heads get knocked were best
assaulted in youth: we were handiest,
the climbing was overt and in vogue
and done with friends, in company.
Pioneering there, building with planks,
we showed the battler style to Death
amongst hoarse screams and rosemary.
THE POWERLINE INCARNATION
When I ran to snatch the wires off our roof
hands bloomed teeth shouted I was almost seized
held back from this life
O flumes O chariot reins
you cover me with lurids deck me with gaudies feed
my coronal a scream sings in the air
above our dance you slam it to me with farms
that you dark on and off numb hideous strong friend
Tooma and Geehi freak and burr through me
rocks fire-trails damwalls mountain-ash trees slew
to darkness through me I zap them underfoot
with the swords of my shoes
I am receiving mountains
piloting around me Crackenback Anembo
the Fiery Walls I make a hit in towns
I’ve never visited: smoke curls lightbulbs pop grey
discs hitch and slow I plough the face of Mozart
> and Johnny Cash I bury and smooth their song
I crack it for copper links and fusebox spiders
I call my Friend from the circuitry of mixers
whipping cream for a birthday I distract the immortal
Inhuman from hospitals
to sustain my jazz
and here is Rigel in a glove of flesh
my starry hand discloses smoke, cold Angel.
Vehicles that run on death come howling into
our street with lights a thousandth of my blue
arms keep my wife from my beauty from my species
the jewels in my tips
I would accept her in
blind white remarriage cover her with wealth
to arrest the heart we’d share Apache leaps
crying out Disyzygy!
shield her from me, humans
from this happiness I burn to share this touch
sheet car live ladder wildfire garden shrub –
away off I hear the bombshell breakers thrown
diminishing me a meaninglessness coming
over the circuits
the god’s deserting me
but I have dived in the mainstream jumped the graphs
I have transited the dreams of crew-cut boys named Buzz
and the hardening music
to the big bare place
where the strapped-down seekers, staining white clothes, come
to be shown the Zeitgeist
passion and death my skin
my heart all logic I am starring there
and must soon flame out
having seen the present god
It who feels nothing It who answers prayers.
SYDNEY AND THE BUSH
When Sydney and the Bush first met
there was no open ground
and men and girls, in chains and not,
all made an urgent sound.
Then convicts bled and warders bred,
the Bush went back and back,
the men of Fire and of Earth
became White men and Black.
When Sydney ordered lavish books
and warmed her feet with coal
the Bush came skylarking to town
and gave poor folk a soul.
Then bushmen sank and factories rose
and warders set the tone –
the Bush in quarter-acre blocks
helped families hold their own.
When Sydney and the Bush meet now
there is antipathy
and fashionable suburbs float
at night, far out to sea.
When Sydney rules without the Bush