by Les Murray
or a very high tech bow tie
and the woman with the luminous
ruby signet of the smoker. And another
figure saying We need more passive verbs:
I am sneezed, for example (and just try to resist!) or:
You are coughed. More coughed about than coughing –
But the windowed littoral
distracts them again and again. The motionless
shellburst palms, on the skyline, over the golf course,
the sea’s lucent linoleum,
the near trees with green-ants’ nests
square-folded out of living leaves, like Japanese packages.
If the three stepped out
into that scene, humidity and glare would sandbag them,
make them fretful tourists.
Not coated glass but simple indoor contrast
has tuned the hyaline
to a sourceless cerebral light
and framing has made the window photo-realist,
a style of art everybody now feels they have been
in. And will be in again
at any immortal democratic moment.
LOUVRES
In the banana zone, in the poinciana tropics
reality is stacked on handsbreadth shelving,
open and shut, it is ruled across with lines
as in a gleaming gritty exercise book.
The world is seen through a cranked or levered
weatherboarding of explosive glass
angled floor-to-ceiling. Horizons which metre
the dazzling outdoors into green-edged couplets.
In the louvred latitudes
children fly to sleep in triplanes, and
cool nights are eerie with retracting flaps.
Their houses stand aloft among bougainvillea,
covered bridges that lead down a shining hall
from love to mystery to breakfast,
from babyhood to moving-out day
and visitors shimmer up in columnar gauges
to touch lives lived behind gauze
in a lantern of inventory,
slick vector geometries glossing the months of rain.
There, nudity is dizzily cubist, and directions
have to include: stage left, add an inch of breeze
or: enter a glistening tendril.
Every building of jinked and slatted ledges
is at times a squadron of inside-out
helicopters, humming with rotor fans.
For drinkers under cyclonic pressure, such
a house can be a bridge of scythes –
groundlings scuffing by stop only for dénouements.
But everyone comes out on platforms of command
to survey cloudy flame-trees, the plain of streets, the future:
only then descending to the level of affairs
and if these things are done in the green season
what to do in the crystalline dry? Well
below in the struts of laundry is the four-wheel drive
vehicle in which to make an expedition
to the bush, or as we now say the Land,
the three quarters of our continent
set aside for mystic poetry.
THE EDGELESS
Floodwater from remote rains has spread out
of the riverine scrub, resuming its mirages.
Mostly shallow, mild water
it ties its hidden drowning strains
taut around odd trees, in that low forest
whose skinny shade turns the water taupe. Nests float
and the vaster flat shine is cobbled at wave-shadow points
with little brown melons, just starting to smell rank.
The local station manager, his eyes
still squinting from the greenest green on the place,
the computer screen, strolls out of his office
onto the verandah. Tiny native bees
who fly standing up, like angels, shimmer the garden.
His wife points out their dog Boxer,
pads slipping, tongue slipping out, nails
catching in unseen lurch mineshafts, gamely
teetering along the round top rail of the killing yard.
Where does talk come from? the two ask each other
over teacups. – From the same place as the world.
We have got the word and we don’t understand it.
It is like too much. – So we made up a word of our own
as much like nothing else as possible
and gave it to the machines. It made them grow –
And now we can’t see the limits of that word either.
Come down off there, Boxer! Who put you up there?
THE DRUGS OF WAR
On vinegar and sour fish sauce Rome’s legions stemmed avalanches
of whirling golden warriors whose lands furnished veterans’ ranches;
when the warriors broke through at last, they’d invented sour mash
but they took to sugared wines and failed to hold the lands of hash.
By beat of drum in the wars of rum flogged peasant boys faced front
and their warrior chiefs conversed coolly, attired for the hunt,
and tobacco came in, in a pipe of peace, but joined the pipes of war
as an after-smoke of battle, or over the maps before.
All alcohols, all spirits lost strength in the trenches, that belt-fed country
then morphine summoned warrior dreams in ruined and would-be gentry;
stewed tea and vodka and benzedrine helped quell that mechanized fury –
the side that won by half a head then provided judge and jury.
In the acid war the word was Score; rising helicopters cried Smack! Smack!
Boys laid a napalm trip on earth and tried to take it back
but the pot boiled over in the rear; fighters tripped on their lines of force
and victory went to the supple hard side, eaters of fish sauce.
The perennial war drugs are made in ourselves: sex and adrenalin,
blood, and the endomorphias that transmute defeat and pain
and others hardly less chemical: eagles, justice, loyalty, edge,
the Judas face of every idea, and the fish that ferments in the brain.
LETTERS TO THE WINNER
After the war, and just after marriage and fatherhood
ended in divorce, our neighbour won the special lottery,
an amount then equal to fifteen years of a manager’s
salary at the bank, or fifty years’ earnings by
a marginal farmer fermenting his clothes in the black
marinade of sweat, up in his mill-logging paddocks.
The district, used to one mailbag, now received two
every mailday. The fat one was for our neighbour.
After a dip or two, he let these bags accumulate
around the plank walls of the kitchen, over the chairs,
till on a rainy day, he fed the tail-switching calves,
let the bullocks out of the yard, and, pausing at the door
to wash his hands, came inside to read the letters.
Shaken out in a vast mound on the kitchen table
they slid down, slithered to his fingers. I have 7 children
I am under the doctor if you could see your way clear
equal Pardners in the Venture God would bless you lovey
assured of our best service for a mere fifteen pounds down
remember you’re only lucky I knew you from the paper straightaway.
Baksheesh, hissed the pages as he flattened them, baksheesh!
mate if your interested in a fellow diggers problems
old mate a friend in need – the Great Golden Letter
having come, now he was being punished for it.
You sound like a lovely big boy we could have such times
her’s my photoe Doll Im wearing my birthday swimsuit
wit
h the right man I would share this infallible system.
When he lifted the stove’s iron lid and started feeding in
the pages he’d read, they clutched and streamed up the corrugated
black chimney shaft. And yet he went on reading,
holding each page by its points, feeling an obligation
to read each crude rehearsed lie, each come-on, flat truth, extremity:
We might visit you the wise investor a loan a bush man like you
remember we met on Roma Street for your delight and mine
a lick of the sultana – the white moraine kept slipping
its messages to him you will be accursed he husked them like cobs
Mr Nouveau Jack old man my legs are all paralysed up.
Black smuts swirled weightless in the room some good kind person
like the nausea of a novice free-falling in a deep mine’s cage
now I have lost his pension and formed a sticky nimbus round him
but he read on, fascinated by a further human range
not even war had taught him, nor literature glossed for him
since he never read literature. Merely the great reject pile
which high style is there to snub and filter, for readers.
That his one day’s reading had a strong taste of what he and war
had made of his marriage is likely; he was not without sympathy,
but his leap had hit a wire through which the human is policed.
His head throbbed as if busting with a soundless shout
of immemorial sobbed invective God-forsaken, God-forsakin
as he stopped reading, and sat blackened in his riches.
THE CHINA PEAR TREES
The power of three China pear trees
standing in their splintery timber bark
on an open paddock:
the selector’s house that staked and watered them
in Bible times, beside a shaded patch,
proved deciduous; it went away in loads,
but after sixty years of standing out,
vanishing in autumn, blizzarding in spring,
among the farmlands’ sparse and giant furniture,
after sixty crops gorged on from all directions,
so that no windfalls, fermenting, shrank to lizard-skinned
puree in the short grazed grass,
the trees drew another house, electrified and steaming
but tin-roofed as before for blazing clouds to creak over
and with tiny nude frogs upright again on lamplit glass;
they drew another kitchen garden, and a dam
half scintillating waterlily pleasance, half irrigation,
an ad hoc orchard, Christmas pines, a cud-dropping mower;
they drew a wire fence around acres of enclosure
shaped like a fuel tin, its spout a tunnel of trees
tangled in passionflower and beige-belled wonga vine,
down inside which a floodtime waterfall churns
millet-sized gravel. And they called lush water-leaved trees
like themselves to the stumpholes of gone rainforest
to shade with four seasons the tattered evergreen
oil-haloed face of a subtle fire landscape
(water forest versus fire forest, ancient war of the southern world).
It was this shade in the end, not their coarse bottling fruit
that mirrored the moist creek trees outward, as a culture
containing the old gardener now untying and heaping up
one more summer’s stems and chutneys,
his granddaughter walking a horse the colour of her boots
and his tree-shaping son ripping out the odd failed seedling,
‘Sorry, tree. I kill and I learn.’
THE VOL SPRUNG FROM HERALDRY
Left wing, right wing:
two wings torment our lives,
two wings without a body,
joined, turkey wing and vulture wing
like the badge of an airborne army.
Each has its clients to enfold
and shed lice on. It gets quite underarm
and the other wing lashes at them.
Two wings without a bird –
is called a vol in heraldry –
spinning, fighting, low to the ground,
whomping up evil dusts for our breath.
Two wings, longing for a body:
left wing, right wing, flexing
still from the noble secret spring
that launched, propels and will exhaust them:
that everything in the end grows boring.
THE MEGAETHON: 1850, 1906–29
I.M. LEO PORT
Farmer Cleve, gent., of the Hunter
Valley has ordained that his large
Sydney-built steam engine shall be walked
home under its own power, on iron
shoes serially laid beneath its wheels.
Making four miles a day, it’s no fizzer.
He has christened it the Megaethon,
Greek for the Ruddy Big Fiery Thing.
On black iron plates that lean down
and flatten successively, imprinting
rectangular billets of progression
it advances on the Hawkesbury district
hissing, clanking, stoked by freed men.
People run from oat-field and wash-house,
from pot-house and cockpit to gape
at its shackled gait, its belt-drive pulsation:
‘Look, Mother, it walks on its knees!’ ‘Aye,
it’s praying its way to Wiseman’s Ferry,
coughing black smoke out of its steeple!’
Sparks canter by it, cracking whips. Small
native children scream ‘Buggy-buggy!’
and the iron gangs straighten from their sad
triangular thoughts to watch another
mighty value approach along their spadework.
In that last, dissolving convict year
what passes their wedged grins is a harbinger
not merely of words like humdinger, but
of stumpjump ploughs, metal ores made float,
ice plants, keel wings, a widening vote,
the world’s harvesters, the utility truck, rotary
engines pipemoulds lawnmowers – this motor the
slaves watch strikes a ringing New World note.
As, tilting, stayed with ropes and pulleys,
the Megaethon descends a plateau edge,
casting shoes, crushing sandstone, only
the poorest, though, watching from dry bush
in that chain-tugging year, last before the gold rush,
know that here is a centre of the world
and that one who can rattle the inverted
cosmos is stamping to her stamping ground.
Not guided by such truth, the Megaethon
veers towards rum-and-opium stops,
waits, cooling, beside a slab bordello
and leans at last in upland swamp,
flat-footed, becoming salvage,
freight for ribald bullockies. Its polygonal
rhythms will engender no balladry;
it won’t break the trench-lines at Vicksburg.
The engine goes home to make chaff
and the idea of the Megaethon
must travel underground. Stockmen gallop
above it. It travels underground.
Secret ballots and boxkites are invented,
unions form, national purposes gather
above it. It travels underground;
for fifty years it travels underground
losing its first name. It surfaces
in Melbourne at last, in the mind
of one Frank Bettrill, who calls
his wheel of three sliding plates
the Pedrail or Dreadnaught wheel
‘for travelling across country in all
conditions, where roads may be
absent.’
In all but name, the Megaethon
is abroad again, now clearing country,
now ploughing the new farms. Its jointed
wheel-plates go to war on artillery
lashing back the Ottoman Empire
from Suez to Damascus. The monster
guns of Flanders advance and recoil
on many-slatted wheels. Tanks grind by them,
collateral descendants of the Megaethon
which itself remains in innocent
rebirth in its own hemisphere.
Its largest example, Big Lizzie
spends the mid-war years crossing Victoria
and following the Murray through Gunbower,
Mystic Park and Day Trap to Mildura.
From its cab eighteen feet above ground
crews wave to the river paddlesteamers:
‘Gutter sailors! Our ship don’t need water!’
Submarine in the mallee forests
Big Lizzie leaves a shattered wake;
she wades marsh, crosses grass fires’ negative
landscape: black ground, bleached rattling trees;
her slamming gait shuts the earth down
but her following ploughs reopen it
in long rising loaves. Soldiers follow her
and turn into farmers sewing full
wheat bags with a large darning needle.
Giant workhorse born between the ages
of plodding feet and highway speeds
it takes lorries a decade to catch
and relegate Lizzie’s oil-engined shuffle.
The Megaethon thus re-enters quaintness
at two miles an hour, having,
though ponderous, only lightly existed
(twice so far) and never directly
shed blood. And there, repaired with wire
from strict fences, it still walks the trackless,
slow as workaday, available for metaphor,
laying down and picking up the squeezed-
fragrant iron suit-cards of its patience,
crews making mugs of tea from its boiler.
FASTNESS
I am listening for words the eldest
of three brothers must have uttered
magically, out of their whole being,
to make a sergeant major look down
at the stamped grass, and not have them stopped
as they walked, not trooped, off his shouting
showground parade, in the brown
fatal clothes and pink boots they’d been given,
to retrieve their own horses and vanish