by Les Murray
with mink and a nose ring. That is Society. That’s Style.
Sprawl is more like the thirteenth banana in a dozen
or anyway the fourteenth.
Sprawl is Hank Stamper in Never Give an Inch
bisecting an obstructive official’s desk with a chainsaw.
Not harming the official. Sprawl is never brutal
though it’s often intransigent. Sprawl is never Simon de Montfort
at a town-storming: Kill them all! God will know his own.
Knowing the man’s name this was said to might be sprawl.
Sprawl occurs in art. The fifteenth to twenty-first
lines in a sonnet, for example. And in certain paintings;
I have sprawl enough to have forgotten which paintings.
Turner’s glorious Burning of the Houses of Parliament
comes to mind, a doubling bannered triumph of sprawl –
except, he didn’t fire them.
Sprawl gets up the nose of many kinds of people
(every kind that comes in kinds) whose futures don’t include it.
Some decry it as criminal presumption, silken-robed Pope Alexander
dividing the new world between Spain and Portugal.
If he smiled in petto afterwards, perhaps the thing did have sprawl.
Sprawl is really classless, though. It’s John Christopher Frederick Murray
asleep in his neighbours’ best bed in spurs and oilskins
but not having thrown up:
sprawl is never Calum who, drunk, along the hallways of our house,
reinvented the Festoon. Rather
it’s Beatrice Miles going twelve hundred ditto in a taxi,
No Lewd Advances, No Hitting Animals, No Speeding,
on the proceeds of her two-bob-a-sonnet Shakespeare readings.
An image of my country. And would that it were more so.
No, sprawl is full-gloss murals on a council-house wall.
Sprawl leans on things. It is loose-limbed in its mind.
Reprimanded and dismissed
it listens with a grin and one boot up on the rail
of possibility. It may have to leave the Earth.
Being roughly Christian, it scratches the other cheek
and thinks it unlikely. Though people have been shot for sprawl.
THREE POEMS IN MEMORY OF MY MOTHER, MIRIAM MURRAY NÉE ARNALL
BORN 23.5.1915, DIED 19.4.1951
Weights
Not owning a cart, my father
in the drought years was a bowing
green hut of cattle feed, moving,
or gasping under cream cans. No weight
would he let my mother carry.
Instead, she wielded handles
in the kitchen and dairy, singing often,
gave saucepan-boiled injections
with her ward-sister skill, nursed neighbours,
scorned gossips, ran committees.
She gave me her factual tone,
her facial bones, her will,
not her beautiful voice
but her straightness and her clarity.
I did not know back then
nor for many years what it was,
after me, she could not carry.
Midsummer Ice
Remember how I used
to carry ice in from the road
for the ice chest, half running,
the white rectangle clamped in bare hands
the only utter cold
in all those summer paddocks?
How, swaying, I’d hurry it inside
en bloc and watering, with the butter
and the wrapped bread precarious on top of it?
‘Poor Leslie,’ you would say,
‘your hands are cold as charity – ’
You made me take the barrow
but uphill it was heavy.
We’d no tongs, and a bag
would have soaked and bumped, off balance.
I loved to eat the ice,
chip it out with the butcher knife’s grey steel.
It stopped good things rotting
and it had a strange comb at its heart,
a splintered horizon rife with zero pearls.
But you don’t remember.
A doorstep of numbed creek water the colour of tears
but you don’t remember.
I will have to die before you remember.
The Steel
I am older than my mother.
Cold steel hurried me from her womb.
I haven’t got a star.
What hour I followed
the waters into this world
no one living can now say.
My zodiac got washed away.
The steel of my induction
killed my brothers and sisters;
once or twice I was readied for them
and then they were not mentioned
again, at the hospital
to me or to the visitors.
The reticence left me only.
I think, apart from this,
my parents’ life was happy,
provisional, as lives are.
Farming spared them from the war,
that, and an ill-knit blue shin
my father had been harried back
to tree-felling with, by his father
who supervised from horseback.
The times were late pioneer.
So was our bare plank house
with its rain stains down each crack
like tall tan flames,
magic swords, far matched perspectives:
it reaped Dad’s shamed invectives –
Paying him rent for this shack!
The landlord was his father.
But we also had fireside ease,
health, plentiful dinners, the radio;
we’d a car to drive to tennis.
Country people have cars
for more than shopping and show,
our Dodge reached voting age, though,
in my first high school year.
I was in the town at school
the afternoon my mother
collapsed, and was carried from the dairy.
The car was out of order.
The ambulance was available
but it took a doctor’s say-so
to come. This was refused.
My father pleaded. Was refused.
The doctor wanted details
but my father could only say
A bad turn. She’s having a bad turn!
the words his culture
could allow on a party-line phone.
At length a neighbour nurse
produced the jargon: haemorrhage,
miscarriage, and the ambulance
was swiftly on its way.
The time all this took didn’t pass,
it spread through sheets, unstoppable.
Thirty-seven miles to town
and the terrible delay.
Little blood brother, blood sister,
I don’t blame you.
How can you blame a baby?
or the longing for a baby?
Little of that week
comes back. The vertigo,
the apparent recovery –
She will get better now.
The relapse on the Thursday.
In school and called away
I was haunted, all that week,
by the spectre of dark women,
Murrays dressed in midday black
who lived on the river islands
and are seen only at funerals;
their terrible weak authority.
Everybody in the town
was asking me about my mother;
I could only answer childishly
to them. And to my mother,
and on Friday afternoon
our family world
went inside itself forever.
Sister Arnall, city girl
wi
th your curt good sense,
were you being the nurse
when you let them hurry me?
being responsible
when I was brought on to make way
for a difficult birth in that cottage hospital
and Mrs Cheers’ child stole my birthday?
Or was it our strange diffidence,
unworldly at a pinch, unresentful
of being a case among cases,
a relative, wartime sense,
modern, alien to fuss,
that is not in the Murrays?
I don’t blame the Cheers boy’s mother:
she didn’t put her case.
It was the steel proposed
reasonably, professionally,
that became your sentence
but I don’t decry unselfishness:
I’m proud of it. Of you.
Any virtue can be fatal.
In the event, his coming gave no trouble
but it might have, I agree;
nothing you agreed to harmed me.
I didn’t mean to harm you
I was a baby.
For a long time, my father
himself became a baby
being perhaps wiser than me,
less modern, less military;
he was not ashamed of grief,
of its looking like a birth
out through the face
bloated, whiskery, bringing no relief.
It was mainly through fear
that I was at times his father.
I have long been sorry.
Caked pans, rancid blankets,
despair and childish cool
were our road to Bohemia
that bitter wartime country.
What were you thinking of,
Doctor MB, BS?
Were you very tired?
Did you have more pressing cases?
Know panic when you heard it:
Oh you can bring her in!
Did you often do
diagnosis by telephone
while not knowing rural language?
Perhaps we wrong you,
make a scapegoat of you;
perhaps there was no stain
of class in your decision,
no view that two framed degrees
outweighed a dairy.
It’s nothing, dear:
just some excited hillbilly –
As your practice disappeared
and you were cold-shouldered in town
till you broke and fled,
did you think of the word Clan?
It is an antique
concept. Not wholly romantic.
More, I think, my mother
was well loved. And people
stopped trusting their lives
to the one who understood anguish
only in translation.
I can forgive you. It was
cold steel that you blundered on.
Thirty-five years on earth:
that’s short. That’s short, Mother,
as the lives cut off by war
and the lives of spilt children are short.
Justice wholly in this world
would bring them no rebirth
nor restore your latter birthdays.
How could that be justice?
My father never quite
remarried. He went back
by stages of kindness to me
to the age of lonely men,
of only men, and men’s company
that is called the Pioneer age.
Snig chain and mountain track;
he went back to felling trees
and seeking justice from his
dead father. His only weakness.
One’s life is not a case
except of course it is.
Being just, seeking justice:
they were both of them right,
my mother and my father.
There is justice, there is death,
humanist: you can’t have both.
Activist, you can’t serve both.
You do not move in measured space.
The poor man’s anger is a prayer
for equities Time cannot hold
and steel grows from our mother’s grace.
Justice is the people’s otherworld.
MACHINE PORTRAITS WITH PENDANT SPACEMAN
FOR VALERIE
The bulldozer stands short as a boot on its heel-high ripple soles;
it has toecapped stumps aside all day, scuffed earth and trampled rocks
making a hobnailed dyke downstream of raw clay shoals.
Its work will hold water. The man who bounced high on the box
seat, exercising levers, would swear a full frontal orthodox
oath to that. First he shaved off the grizzled scrub
with that front-end safety razor supplied by the school of hard knocks
then he knuckled down and ground his irons properly; they copped many a harsh rub.
At knock-off time, spilling thunder, he surfaced like a sub.
o
Speaking of razors, the workshop amazes with its strop,
its elapsing leather drive-belt angled to the slapstick flow
of fast work in the Chaplin age; tightened, it runs like syrup,
streams like a mill-sluice, fiddles like a glazed virtuoso.
With the straitlaced summary cut of Sam Brownes long ago
it is the last of the drawn lash and bullocking muscle
left in engineering. It’s where the panther leaping, his swift shadow
and all such free images turned plastic. Here they dwindle, dense with oil,
like a skein between tough factory hands, pulley and diesel.
o
Shaking in slow low flight, with its span of many jets,
the combine seeder at nightfall swimming over flat land
is a style of machinery we’d imagined for the fictional planets:
in the high glassed cabin, above vapour-pencilling floodlights, a hand,
gloved against the cold, hunts along the medium-wave band
for company of Earth voices; it crosses speech garble music –
the Brandenburg Conch the Who the Illyrian High Command –
as seed wheat in the hoppers shakes down, being laced into the thick
night-dampening plains soil, and the stars waver out and stick.
o
Flags and a taut fence discipline the mountain pasture
where giant upturned mushrooms gape mildly at the sky
catching otherworld pollen. Poppy-smooth or waffle-ironed, each armature
distils wild and white sound. These, Earth’s first antennae
tranquilly angled outwards, to a black, not a gold infinity,
swallow the millionfold numbers that print out as a risen
glorious Apollo. They speak control to satellites in high
bursts of algorithm. And some of them are tuned to win
answers to fair questions, viz. What is the Universe in?
o
How many metal-bra and trumpet-flaring film extravaganzas
underlie the progress of the space shuttle’s Ground Transporter Vehicle
across macadam-surfaced Florida? Atop oncreeping house-high panzers,
towering drydock and ocean-liner decks, there perches a gridiron football
field in gradual motion; it is the god-platform; it sustains the bridal
skyscraper of liquid Cool, and the rockets borrowed from the Superman
and the bricked aeroplane of Bustout-and-return, all vertical,
conjoined and myth-huge, approaching the starred gantry where human
lightning will crack, extend, and vanish upwards from this caravan.
o
Gold-masked, the foetal warrior
unslipping on a flawless floor,
I backpack air; my life machine
breathes me head-Earthwards, speaks the Choc
taw
of tech-talk that earths our discipline –
but the home world now seems outside-in;
I marvel that here background’s so fore
and sheathe my arms in the unseen
a dream in images unrecalled
from any past takes me I soar
at the heart of fall on a drifting line
this is the nearest I have been
to oneness with the everted world
the unsinking leap the stone unfurled
o
In a derelict village picture show I will find a projector,
dust-matted, but with film in its drum magazines, and the lens
mysteriously clean. The film will be called Insensate Violence,
no plot, no characters, just shoot burn scream beg claw
bayonet trample brains – I will hit the reverse switch then, in conscience,
and the thing will run backwards, unlike its coeval the machine-gun;
blood will unspill, fighters lift and surge apart; horror will be undone
and I will come out to a large town, bright parrots round the saleyard pens
and my people’s faces healed of a bitter sophistication.
o
The more I act, the stiller I become;
the less I’m lit, the more spellbound my crowd;
I accept all colours, and with a warming hum
I turn them white and hide them in a cloud.
To give long life is a power I’m allowed
by my servant, Death. I am what you can’t sell
at the world’s end – and if you’re still beetle-browed
try some of my treasures: an adult bird in its shell
or a pink porker in his own gut, Fritz the Abstract Animal.
o
No riddles about a crane. This one drops a black clanger on cars
and the palm of its four-thumbed steel hand is a raptor of wrecked tubing;
the ones up the highway hoist porridgy concrete, long spars
and the local skyline; whether raising aloft on a string
bizarre workaday angels, or letting down a rotating
man on a sphere, these machines are inclined to maintain
a peace like world war, in which we turn over everything
to provide unceasing victories. Now the fluent lines stop, and strain
engrosses this tower on the frontier of junk, this crane.
o
Before a landscape sprouts those giant stepladders that pump oil
or before far out iron mosquitoes attach to the sea
there is this sortilege with phones that plug into mapped soil,
the odd gelignite bump to shake trucks, paper scribbling out serially
as men dial Barrier Reefs long enfolded beneath the geology
or listen for black Freudian beaches; they seek a miles-wide pustular