by Les Murray
A Man Sitting With Knees Against His Chest:
baga waga, knees up, the burial-shape of a warrior.
Eagles flying below me, I will ascend Wallanbah,
that whipcrack country of white cedar
and ruined tennis courts, and speed up on the tar.
In sight of the high ranges I’ll pass the turnoff to Bundook,
Hindi for musket – which it also took
to add to the daylight species here, in the prim-
al 1830s of our numbered Dreamtime
and under the purple coast of the Mograni
and its trachyte west wall scaling in the sky
I will swoop to the valley and Gloucester Rail
where boys hand-shunted trains to load their cattle
and walk on the platform, glancing west at that country
of running creeks, the stormcloud-coloured Barrington,
the land, in lost Gaelic and Kattangal, of Barandan.
THE IDYLL WHEEL: CYCLE OF A YEAR AT BUNYAH, NEW SOUTH WALES, APRIL 1986–APRIL 1987
PREFACE
An east-running valley where two hooded creeks make junction
and two snoring roads make a rainguttered cross of function:
there, each hamlet of house-and-sheds stands connected and alone
and the chimneys of old houses are square bottles cut from iron.
Gum forest is a solid blue cloud on the hills to the south
and bladygrass and chain rust round its every wheeltracked mouth.
Being back home there, where I am all my ages,
I wanted to trace a year through all its stages.
I would start after summer, to catch a subtly vernal effect
(April is also when I conceived the project).
At one poem per month, it would take a baker’s dozen
to accommodate the stretch and overlap of season
into season, in any single year –
and to be real, the year had to be particular
since this wasn’t to be a cyclic calendar
of miniature peasantry painted as for a proprietor.
No one can own all Bunyah. Names shouted over coal-oil lamps
cling to their paddocks. Bees and dingoes tax the cattlecamps.
As forefather Hesiod may have learned too, by this time,
things don’t recur precisely, on the sacred earth: they rhyme.
To illuminate one year on that known ground
would also draw light from the many gone underground
with steel wedges and glass and the forty thousand days lost or
worked, daylight to dark, there between Forster and Gloucester.
So: as grass tips turn maroon in a further winter
I present how time revolved through the spiral of a year
average, says experience, in erosions and deposit of seeds.
I thank Rosalind Atkins, whose burin opens up further leads
into the heart of it, making the more exquisite lines –
and I thank Alec Bolton for a book that dresses ours to the nines.
APRIL
Leaf Spring
The long-limbed hills recline high
in Disposals khaki boiled in tankwater
or barbed-wire-tattered navy wool.
A dust of oil blues the farther air.
Crotches of black shade timber
thicken, and walled sky insets;
friezes of the one tree are repeated
along ridgelines, and the gesture of the heights
continues beneath the valley floor,
outcrops stepping toward the roofed creeks’
greener underground forest, spacing
corrugated corn flats. Contour-line by contour
cattle walk the hills, in a casual-seeming
prison strung from buried violins.
Sparse houses sit unpacked for good, each
among sheds, in its wheeltracked star.
Hobnail and elastic-side, bare and cloven feet:
you can’t know this landscape in shoes, or with ideas
like relevance. It is a haughty pastoral
bent fitfully to farming’s fourteen-hour days.
Disked-up ground in unseasonable heat
burns purple, and the tracks of a foam-white
longed-for watersnake are brown down every incline.
Season of smoke and parrots pecking the road,
half-naturalized autumn. Fruit is almost done
though few deciduous imports have yet decided;
no rain, and the slow tanks fill with dew;
nothing flowering, yet colour is abundant:
it is leaf spring, that comes on after heat.
The paperbark trees that suck on swampy clay
are magnified in skims of leek and sherry.
Though growth’s gone out of grass, and cattle nose
green from underneath its tawny pelt,
the creek trees cluster, showered with pale expansion
from inside themselves, as if from dreams of rain;
heightening gum trees are tipped bronze and citrine
and grey-barked apple trees are misted round
with rosy blue – the aged angophora trees
that sprout from every live part of themselves
and drop their heavy death along the ground
on just such a still day here
as shade broadens south of everything
and fugitive whisky-bottle blink
and windscreen glance point the paddock air.
MAY
When Bounty Is Down To Persimmons and Lemons
In May, Mary’s month,
when snakes go to sleep,
sunlight and shade lengthen,
forest grows deep,
wood coughs at the axe
and splinters hurt worse,
barbed wire pulls through
every post in reverse,
old horses grow shaggy
and flies hunker down
on curtains, like sequins
on a dead girl’s ball gown.
Grey soldier-birds arrive
in flickers of speed
to hang upside down
from a quivering weed
or tremble trees’ foliage
that they trickle down through.
Women’s Weekly summer fashions
in the compost turn blue.
The sun slants in under things
and stares right through houses;
soon pyjamas will peep, though,
from the bottoms of trousers.
Night-barking dogs quieten
as overcast forms
and it rains, with far thunder,
in queer predawn storms;
then the school bus tops ridges
with clay marks for effort,
picking up drowsy schoolkids,
none of them now barefoot,
and farmers take spanners
to the balers, gang ploughs
and towering diesel tractors
they prefer to their cows.
JUNE
The Kitchens
This deep in the year, in the frosts of then
that steeled sheets left ghostly on the stayed line,
smoked over verandah beds, cruelled water taps rigid,
family and visitors would sit beside the lake
of blinding coals, that end of the detached kitchen,
the older fellows quoting qoph and resh
from the Book of Psalms, as they sizzled phlegm
(some still did it after iron stoves came
and the young moved off to cards and the radio)
and all told stories. That’s a kind of spoken video:
We rode through from the Myall
on that road of the cedarcutter’s ghost.
All this was called Wild Horses Creek then;
you could plait the grass over the pommel
of your saddle. That grass don’t grow now.
>
I remember we camped on Waterloo that night
there where the black men gave the troopers a hiding.
The garden was all she had: the parrots were at it
and she came out and said to them, quite serious
like as if to reasonable people They are my peas.
And do you know? They flew off and never come back.
If you missed anything: plough,
saddle, cornplanter, shovel,
you just went across to Uncle Bob’s
and brought it home. If he
was there, he never looked ashamed:
he’d just tell you a joke,
some lies, sing you a poem,
keep you there drinking all night –
Bloody cruel mongrels, telling me the native bear
would grow a new hide if you skun it alive.
Everybody knows that, they told me. I told them
if I caught any man skinning bears alive
on my place, he’d bloody need a new hide himself.
Tommy Turpin the blackfellow said to me More better
you walk behind me today, eh boss.
Might be devil-devil tell me hit you with the axe
longa back of the head. I thought he was joking
then I saw he wasn’t. My word I stayed behind
that day, with the axe, trimming tongues on the rails
while he cut mortises out of the posts. I listened.
I wis eight year old, an Faither gied me the lang gun
tae gang doon an shuit the native hens at wis aitin
aa oor oats. I reasoned gin ye pit ae chairge
i the gun, pouder waddin an shot, ye got ae shot
sae pit in twa, ye’d get twa. Aweel, I pit in seven,
liggd doon ahint a stump, pu’d the trigger – an the warld
gaed milky white. I think I visited Scotland
whaur I had never been. It was a ferlie I wis seean.
It wis a sonsy place. But Grannie gard me gang back.
Mither wis skailan watter on ma heid, greetin. Aa they found
o the gun wis stump-flinders, but there wis a black scour thro the oats,
an unco ringan in ma ears, an fifteen deid native hens.
Of course long tongue she laughed about that other
and they pumped her about you can guess and hanging round there
and she said He’s got one on him like a horse, Mama,
and I like it. Well! And all because of you know –
Father couldn’t stand meanness.
When Uncle you-know-who
charged money for milking our cows
that time Isabel took bad
Father called him gutless,
not just tin-arsed, but gutless.
Meanness is for cowards, Father reckoned.
The little devil, he says to the minister’s wife
Daddy reckons we can’t have any more children,
we need the milk for the pigs. Dear I was mortified –
Poor Auntie Mary was dying Old and frail
all scroopered down in the bedclothes pale as cotton
even her hardworking old hands Oh it was sad
people in the room her big daughters performing
rattling the bedknobs There is a white angel
in the room says Mary in this weird voice And then
NO! she heaves herself up Bloody no! Be quiet!
she coughed and spat Phoo! I’ll be damned if I’ll die!
She’s back making bread next week Lived ten more years.
Well, it was black Navy rum; it buggered Darcy.
Fell off his horse, crawled under the cemetery fence.
Then some yahoos cantered past Yez all asleep in there?
All but me, croaks Darcy. They off at a hand gallop,
squealing out, and his horse behind them, stirrups belting it.
The worst ghost I ever saw
was a policeman and (one of the squatters)
moving cattle at night.
I caught them in my headlights.
It haunted me. Every time
I went in to town after that
somehow I’d get arrested –
I’ll swear snakes have got no brains!
The carpet snake we had in the rafters
to eat rats, one day it et a chook.
I killed it with the pitchfork, ran a tine
through the top of its head, and chucked it
down the gully. It was back in a week
with a scab on its head and another under its chin.
They bring a house good luck but they got no brain.
Then someone might cup his hand short of the tongue
of a taut violin, try each string to be wrung
by the bow, that spanned razor of holy white hair
and launch all but his earthly weight into an air
that breathed up hearth fires strung worldwide between
the rung hills of being and the pearled hills of been.
In the language beyond speaking they’d sum the grim law,
speed it to a daedaly and foot it to a draw,
the tones of their scale five gnarled fingers wide
and what sang were all angles between love and pride.
JULY
Midwinter Haircut
Now the world has stopped. Dead middle of the year.
Cloud all the colours of a worn-out dairy bucket
freeze-frames the whole sky. The only sun is down
intensely deep in the dam’s bewhiskered mirror
and the white-faced heron hides in the drain with her spear.
Now the world has stopped, doors could be left open.
Only one fly came awake to the kitchen heater
this breakfast time, and supped on a rice bubble sluggishly.
No more will come inside out of the frost-crimped grass now.
Crime, too, sits in faraway cars. Phone lines drop at the horizon.
Now the world has stopped, what do we feel like doing?
The district’s former haircutter, from the time before barbers, has shaved
and wants a haircut. So do I. No longer the munching hand clippers
with locks in their gears, nor the scissors more pointed than a beak
but the buzzing electric clipper, straight from its cardboard giftbox.
We’ll sit under that on the broad-bottomed stool that was
the seat for fifty years of the district’s only sit-down job,
the postmistress-telephonist’s seat, where our poor great-aunt
who trundled and spoke in sour verdicts sat to hand-crank
the tingling exchange, plugged us into each other’s lives
and tapped consolation from gossip’s cells as they unlidded.
From her shrewd kind successor who never tapped in, and planes
along below the eaves of our heads, we’ll hear a tapestry
of weddings funerals surgeries, and after our sittings
be given a jar of pickle. Hers won’t be like the house
a mile down the creek, where cards are cut and shuffled
in the middle of the day, and mortarbombs of beer
detonate the digestion, and they tell world-stopping yarns
like: I went to Sydney races. There along the rails,
all snap brims and cold eyes, flanked by senior police
and other, stony men with their eyes in a single crease
stood the entire Government of New South Wales
watching Darby ply the whip, all for show, over this fast colt.
It was young and naïve. It was heading for the post in a bolt
while the filly carrying his and all the inside money
strained to come level. Too quick for the stewards to note him
Darby slipped the colt a low lash to the scrotum.
It checked, shocked, stumbled – and the filly flashed by.
As he came from weighing in, I caught Darby’s eye
&n
bsp; and he said Get out of it, mug, quite conversationally. –
AUGUST
Forty Acre Ethno
The Easter rains are late this year
at this other end of a dry hard winter.
Low clouds grow great rustling crops of fall
and all the gully-courses braid and bubble,
their root-braced jugs and coarse lips pour
and it’s black slog for cows when, grass lake to puddle,
a galloping dog sparks on all four.
It’ll be plashy England here for a while
or boggy Scotland, by the bent straw colour
and the breaks of sun mirror-backed with chill.
Coming home? It was right. And it was time.
I had been twenty-nine years away
after books and work and society
but society vanished into ideology
and by then I could bring the other two home.
We haven’t been out at night since we came
back, except last month, in the United Kingdom.
The towns ranged like footlights up the highway
and coastline here rehearse a subtle play
that’s only staged in private by each family.
Sight and life restored by an eye operation
my father sits nightly before the glass screen
of a wood-burning slow combustion stove. We see
the same show, with words, on television.
Dad speaks of memories, and calls his fire homely:
when did you last hear that word without scorn
for something unglossy, or some poor woman?
Here, where thin is poor, and fat is condition,
‘homely’ is praise and warmth, spoken gratefully.
Its opposite lurks outside in dark blowing rain.
Horses are exposed to it, wanly stamping out
unglazed birth ware for mosquitoes in the coming season
and already peach trees are a bare wet frame
for notional little girls in pink dots of gingham.
Cars coming home fishtail and harrow the last mile,
their undersea headlights kicking gum trees around eerily;
woodducks wake high in those trees, and peer from the door
they’ll shove their ducklings out of, to spin down in their down,
sprawl, and swim to water. Our children dog the foot-
steps of their grandfather, learning their ancient culture.
SEPTEMBER
Mercurial
Preindustrial haze. The white sky rim
forecasts a hot summer. Burning days