by Les Murray
indeed are rehearsed, with flies and dinnertime fan,
but die out, over west mountains
erased with azure, into spring-cool nights
and the first flying insects
which are the small weeds of a bedroom window.
Early in the month, the valley was a Friesian cow:
knobbed black, whitened straw.
Alarming smokes bellied up behind the heights of forest.
Now green has invested fires’
fixed cloud-shadows; lower gum boughs are seared chestnut.
Emerald kingparrots, crimson-breasted, whirr
and plane out of open feed sheds.
Winds are changeable. We’re tacking.
West on rubbed blue days,
easterlies on hot, southerly and dead calm for rain.
Mercury is near the moon, Venus at perigee
and frogs wind their watches all night on swampy stretches
where waterhens blink with their tails at dusk, like rabbits
and the mother duck does her cripple act.
Dams glitter like house roofs again.
The first wasp comes looking for a spider to paralyse:
a flimsy ultralight flier
who looks like a pushover, but after one pass lifts
you, numb, out of your trampoline. Leaves together
as for prayer or diving, bean plants erupt
into the grazing glory. Those unnibbled spread their arms.
Poddy calves wobbling in their newborn mushroom colours
ingest and make the pungent custard of infancy.
Sign of a good year, many snakes lie flattened
on the roads again. Bees and pollens drift
through greening orchards. And next day it pours rain:
smokes of cloud on every bushland slope,
that opposite, wintry haze. The month goes out facing backwards.
OCTOBER
Freshwater and Salt
It’s the opening of the surf season
thirty miles away east;
most things speak a different dialect
over there on the coast.
Here, the rising wave comes as
grass. The animals drink it
thirstily. It’s a sweetwater ocean.
If your house is fenced in, it’ll sink it.
Fire and snakes swim in it;
you have to slash and mow.
Time for rotary blades, and weeping salt water
with your whole skin as you make them go.
It isn’t in fact such a whelming
tide. But it’s an ever-swelling one
you have to keep in balance, like the Dutch.
Much worse when it doesn’t run.
Between us and the saltwater breakers
there’s that rind, too, of chip-frying city
twelve thousand miles long, that locals
will come home from soon with gritty
trunksful and running shoes full
of ground bottle, ground coral, ground shell.
I guess we’re all flesh of that shell
and will broach it by New Year, and wade gingerly
up to our nacres in salt swirl,
even we freshwater pearlers
and privately pale herbage hurlers
happiest on the grassed forms of groundswell.
NOVEMBER
The Misery Cord
IN MEMORY OF F.S. MURRAY
Misericord. The Misery Cord.
It was lettered on a wall.
I knew that cord, how it’s tough to break
however hard you haul.
My cousin sharefarmed, and so got half:
half dignity, half hope, half income,
for his full work. To get a place
of his own took his whole lifetime.
Some pluck the misery chord from habit
or for luck, however they feel,
some to deceive, and some for the tune –
but sometimes it’s real.
Milking bails, flannel shirts, fried breakfasts,
these were our element,
and doubling on horses, and shouting Score!
at a dog yelping on a hot scent –
but an ambulance racing on our back road
is bad news for us all:
the house of community is about
to lose a plank from its wall.
Grief is nothing you can do, but do,
worst work for least reward,
pulling your heart out through your eyes
with tugs of the misery cord.
I looked at my cousin’s farm, where he’d just
built his family a house of their own,
and I looked down into Fred’s next house,
its clay walls of bluish maroon.
Just one man has broken the misery cord
and lived. He said once was enough.
A poem is an afterlife on earth:
Christ grant us the other half.
DECEMBER
Infant Among Cattle
Young parents, up at dawn, working. Their first child can’t
be his own babysitter, so as they machine the orphaned milk
from their cows, he must sit plump on the dairy cement,
the back of his keyhole pants safetypinned to a stocking
that is tied to a bench leg. He studies a splotch of cream,
how the bubbles in it, too thick to break, work like
the coated and lucid gravels in the floor. On which he then dings
a steel thing, for the tingling in it and his fingers
till it skips beyond his tether. As the milkers front up
in their heel-less skiddy shoes, he hangs out aslant
on his static line, watching the breeching rope brace them
and their washed udders relieved of the bloodberry ticks
that pull off a stain, and show a calyx of kicking filaments.
By now the light stands up behind the trees like sheet iron.
It photographs the cowyard and dairy-and-bails in one vast
buttery shadow wheel on the trampled junction of paddocks
where the soil is itself a concrete, of dust and seedy stones
and manure crustings. When his father slings a bucketful
of wash water out the door, it wallops and skids
and is gulped down by a sudden maw like the cloth of a radio.
Out and on out, the earth tightens down on the earth
and squeezes heat up through the yellow grass
like a surfaceless fluid, to pool on open country,
to drip from faces, and breed the insect gleams of midday.
Under the bench, crooning this without words to his rag dog,
he hears a vague trotting outside increase – and the bull
erupts, aghast, through the doorway, dribbling, clay in his curls,
a slit orange tongue working in and out under his belly –
and is repulsed, with buckets and screams and a shovel.
The little boy, swept up in his parents’ distress, howls then
but not in fear of the bull, who seemed a sad apparition:
a huge prostrate man, bewildered by a pitiless urgency.
JANUARY
Variations on a Measure of Burns
When January is home to visit her folks
and official work is a public hoax,
soy sprouts dotting the serpentine strokes
ploughs combed in the lacquered
hill soil that each afternoon’s rainstorm soaks
weave a green jacquard
and zucchini and wart squash and Queensland Blues
(not the dog, but the pumpkin) squeak together like shoes
in tractor trailers, and nectarines bruise
from being awaited,
but the grizzled haze over mountain views
looks faintly methylated
because Drought, who’s in on every forced sale,
thought he may have seen the farmers granted bail
this summer, has the continent in his entail.
Even smashed, he’s seen you:
that old man up a back road fumbling his mail
gets letters from El Niño.
Disappointment, holiday and heatwave shilly-shally
round this snaky time of year. Stock prices plunge and rally
but the government’s retreated for keeps from this valley:
the flash brick erstwhile
Whitlam toilet block lacks its school, and stands orphaned on its gully;
the PO’s a closed file.
We retain a public phone and some dirt main roads
on whose corners part-time squatters tip sprawling loads
of gravel for drunk drivers who for lifetimes and by codes
like Whoa car! and hug-the-crown
miraculously get home to treat their families like toads
or finish upside down
in the dark, miles from town,
standing on my scalp with the rain’s sparks falling upward,
windscreen a collective noun,
delighted by the spinning tyre slowing above the cupboard
and the glare-path through inverted trees – myself as I could
have been, through brutal labour for a bare livelihood,
myself on that quest
few families dare acknowledge, let alone go with you on,
the hunger for the Rest
when mortgage world time politics, everything’s on top of one
and the teenage girl you married is not months but decades gone:
I’m sorry for myself in his sideburns and cardigan.
O he will like that,
murmurs his wife, wrestling farm accounts, steering above the rocks,
then bundling the children off to bed, switching off the box:
Television makes you fat!
Our concern cuts away at once. Moorhen and flying fox
outside creak identical rusty keys in their vocal locks
and the dark stands pat.
FEBRUARY
Feb
Seedy drytime Feb,
lightning between its teeth,
all its plants pot-bound.
Inside enamelled rims
dams shrink their mirroring shields,
baking the waterlilies.
Days stacked like clay pigeons
squeezed from dust and sweat.
Two cultures: sun and shade.
Days dazed with actuality
like a bottle shot
sniping fruit off twigs,
by afternoon, portentous
with whole cloud-Atlantics
that rain fifteen drops.
Beetroot and iron butter,
bread staled by the fan,
cold chook: that’s lunch with Feb.
Weedy drymouth Feb, first cousin of scorched creek stones,
of barbed wire across gaunt gullies, bringer of soldered
death-freckles to the backs of farmers’ hands. The mite-struck
foal rattles her itch on fence wires, like her mother,
and scraped hill pastures are grazed back to their charred
bulldozer stitchings. Dogs nip themselves under the tractor
of needy Feb, who waits for the raw eel-perfume
of the first real rain’s pheromones, the magic rain-on-dust
sexual scent of Time itself, philtre of all native beings –
Lanky cornhusk Feb,
drilling the red-faced
battalions of tomatoes
through the grader’s slots:
harvest out of bareness,
that semidesert mode.
Worn grasshopper month
suddenly void of children;
days tucking their tips in
with blackberry seeds to spit
and all of life root-bound;
stringy dryland Feb.
MARCH
Masculeene, Cried the Bulls
Bang! it was autumn,
right on the first of the month,
cool overcast after scorchers
and next day it poured.
Four and a half inches
of rise in the dams, of wet in garden soil:
we know how long you were, rain,
four and a half deep inches.
As fresh green abolished
this summer’s only white-blond month
the first autumnal scents
were ginger and belladonna
and as beds resumed their blankets
at the mopoke hour, bulls sang.
Among cattle, the more masculine
the higher the voice is pitched.
Our pumpkins took
first prize at Nabiac Show,
where a horse named Danielle
pirouetted, and posed on a tub,
and men raced through solid timber
backwards, with aimed steel strides,
and we met the Anglo-Nubian
tree-climbing goat, maker of,
and sheep of, the desert.
This was the weekend after clocks
jerked the sun an hour forward,
and all the time, leafage
of various winebottle colour
sprouted on the roses and lemon trees
and dew twinkled for longer
on the lengthening paddocks.
APRIL
The Idyll Wheel
And so we’ve come right round the sun
to April again. It’s unique again
like each month, each year. Much less of summer
reached April this year. Yet grass burgeoned after Easter.
Now fenced cultivations rug up, blue and tan
and old fruit trees declare themselves russet
along the creeks, or that dismantling brown
of cedars long ago spied from a mountain.
Into blue dimensionless as an ideal
with a Y-shaped prop, Mavis hoists the unreal
statures, flat and wet, of her whole family
for her glance and the warm sun to re-fill
above the pleats and hoed flickers of their hill
where Jack and her father move bent, keeping busy.
This isn’t that year. But their names are there still
with Careys, Monks, Arnolds, the farms of surnames gone.
Here, roads have different names coming and going.
Over Bulby kinks one the Murrays rode along
into the hard-to-discern ruins of an idyll,
beige, drab with new bush, country emptied and unshaven.
On went Johnnie and Bella, east went Mina and Jimmy
whose family milked squatting so as not to get lazy,
Uncle Hughie, Aunt Grace – us girls say Mrs Murray! –
and years turned with handles were the first farming wheel.
This month, this year, Hiles’ cattle mar the air
with saleyards’ caked music. Before dinner, Charlie sang
The old folk had their reasons over the horizontal
queer hang of his guitar. Then we who say muttai
ate the last of this year’s, boiled. Those who say corn
didn’t all fly Macquarie Street dachas, though, here:
many are as poor as settlers ever were.
Now small frogs turn bronze. With the Post Office gone
nowhere’s left for district people to meet by accident.
It has to be by knowledge. Ellen Harris, who taught me
to walk, Joyce new-widowed, and Vera and Norm
bail up cows, or watch milk suffuse the machine-glass
like a blizzarding idea. And I’m visible to them
on this wheel that was our Law, once. I haven’t milked,
again, and it’s sundown. They are the last to dairy.
Still, farmlets and cattle-spreads also live by touches,
a stump burning, dam scoopings, new wire stitch
es
and unstated idylls had driving to and from.
THE TRANSPOSITION OF CLERMONT
After the Big Flood, we elected
to move our small timber city
from the dangerous beauty of the river
and its fringed lagoons
since both had risen to destroy us.
Many buildings went stacked on wagons
but more were towed entire
in strained stateliness, with a long groyning sound,
up timber by traction engines.
Each moved singly. Life went on round them;
in them, at points of rest.
Guests at breakfast in the Royal Hotel, facing
now the saddlery, now the Town Hall.
We drank in the canted Freemasons
and the progressive Shamrock, but really
all pubs were the Exchange. Relativities
interchanged our world like a chess game:
butcher occluded baker, the police
eclipsed both brothels, the dance hall
sashayed around the Temperance Hall,
front doors sniffed rear, and thoughtfully ground on.
Certain houses burst, and vanished.
One wept its windows, one trailed mementoes up the street.
A taut chain suddenly parted and scythed down
horses and a verandah. Weed-edged black rectangles
in exploded gardens yielded sovereigns and spoons.
That ascent of working architecture
onto the pegged plateau was a children’s crusade
with lines stretching down to us.
Everything standing in its wrong accustomed place.
My generation’s memories are intricately transposed:
butcher occluding dance music, the police
eclipsed by opportunity, brothels sashaying royally
and, riding sidesaddle up shined skids, the Town Hall.
Excited, we would meet on streets that stayed immutable
sometimes for weeks; from irrecoverable corners
and alleys already widening, we’d look
back down at our new graves and childhood gardens,
the odd house at anchor for a quick tomato season
and the swaying nailed hull of a church going on before us.
And many allotments left unbought, or for expansion
never filled up, above, as they hadn’t below.
What was town, what was country stayed elusive
as we saw it always does, in the bush,
what is waste, what is space, what is land.