Collected Poems
Page 29
THE FALL OF APHRODITE STREET
So it’s back to window shopping
on Aphrodite Street
for the apples are stacked and juicy
but some are death to eat.
For just one generation
the plateglass turned to air –
when you look for that generation
half of it isn’t there.
An ugliness of spirit
leered like a hunting dog
over the world. Now it snarls and whines
at its fleshly analogue.
What pleased it made it angry:
scholars Score and Flaunt and Scene
taught that everything outstanding
was knobs on a skin machine.
Purer grades of this metaphysic
were sold out of parked cars
down alleys where people paired or reeled
like desperate swastikas.
Age, spirit, kindness, all were taunts;
grace was enslaved to meat.
You never were mugged till you were mugged
on Aphrodite Street.
God help the millions that street killed
and those it sickened too,
when it was built past every house
and often bulldozed through.
Apples still swell, but more and more
are literal death to eat
and it’s back to window shopping
on Aphrodite Street.
TWO RAINS
Our farm is in the patched blue overlap
between Queensland rain and Victorian rain
(and of two-faced droughts like a dustbowl tap).
The southerly rain is skimmed and curled
off the Roaring Forties’ circuit of the world.
It is our chased Victorian silver
and makes wintry asphalt hurry on the spot
or pauses to a vague speed in the air,
whereas, lightning-brewed in a vast coral pot
the tropical weather disgorges its lot
in days of enveloping floodtime blast
towering and warm as a Papuan forest,
a rain you can sweat in, it steams in the sun
like a hard-ridden horse, while southern rain’s absorbed
like a cool, fake-colloquial, drawn out lesson.
TO THE SOVIET AMERICANS
The working class, the working class,
it is too radiant to see through.
More claim to come from the working class
than admit they do.
Between syruping mailed brutes in flattery
and translating the world into litmag terms
those equivalent modes of poetry
there comes this love of the working class
who never set out to be a class
or the subject forever of exams
they’re not allowed to take or pass
or else they’re no longer the working class,
and in the forest, a working man
must say, Watch out for the ones in jeans
who’ll stop you smoking and stop you working:
I call them the Soviet Americans.
I used to have work and a family here
but both them have shot through.
Now that trees belong to the working class
I don’t suppose I do.
LOW DOWN SANDCASTLE BLUES
You can’t have everything, I said as we drank tea.
No, you can’t have everything. And I sipped my tea.
You can’t have anything, my friend answered me.
Yes, I’ve wrestled with an angel: there is no other kind.
I wrestled with an angel: that wrestling’s the only kind.
Any easier wrestling finally sends you blind.
Trouble’s a stray dog that’s mighty hard to lose:
if he latches on to you, he’s mighty hard to lose
but not even a dog joins in when you sing the blues.
A man told me I’ve no right to what I need.
He told me Oh yes, I’ve no right to what I need.
He had all his rights and quivered under them like a reed.
If you’ve got the gift of seeing things from both sides
– it’s an angel-wound, that curse of seeing things from both sides –
then police beat you up in a sandcastle built between tides.
THE EMERALD DOVE
We ought to hang cutout hawk shapes
in our windows. Birds hard driven
by a predator, or maddened by a mirrored rival
too often die zonk against the panes’
invisible sheer, or stagger away from
the blind full stop in the air.
It was different with the emerald dove.
In at an open sash, a pair
sheered, missile, in a punch of energy,
one jinking on through farther doors, one
thrown, panicked by that rectangular wrong copse, braked
like a bullet in blood, a full-on splat of wings
like a vaulter between shoulders, blazed and calliper,
ashriek out of jagbeaked fixe fury, swatting wind,
lights, keepsakes, panes, then at the in window out, gone.
A sparrowhawk, by the cirrus feathering.
The other, tracked down in a farther room
clinging to a bedhead, was the emerald dove,
a rainforest bird, flashed in beyond its world
of lice, sudden death and tree seeds. Pigeon-like,
only its eye and neck in liquid motion,
there, as much beyond us as beyond
itself, it perched, barefoot in silks
like a prince of Sukhothai, above the reading lamps and cotton-buds.
Modest-sized as a writing hand, mushroom fawn
apart from its paua casque, those viridescent closed wings,
it was an emerald Levite in that bedroom
which the memory of it was going to bless for years
despite topping our ordinary happiness, as beauty
makes background of all around it. Levite too
in the question it posed: sanctuary without transformation,
which is, how we might be,
plunged out of our contentment into evolved strange heaven,
where the need to own or mate with or eat the beautiful
was bygone as poverty,
and we were incomprehensibly, in our exhaustion,
treasured, cooed at, then softly left alone
among vast crumples, verticals, refracting air,
our way home barred by mirrors, our splendour unmanifest
to us now, a small wild person, with no idea of peace.
CAVE DIVERS NEAR MOUNT GAMBIER
Chenille-skinned people are counting under the countryside
on resurrections by truck light off among the pines.
Here in the first paddocks, where winter comes ashore,
mild duckweed ponds are skylights of a filled kingdom
and what their gaze absorbs may float up districts away.
White men with scorches of hair approach that water,
zip into black, upturn large flap feet and free-fall
away, their mouths crammed full. Crystalline polyps
of their breathing blossom for a while, as they disturb
algal screens, extinct kangaroos, eels of liquorice colour
then, with the portable greening stars they carry under,
these vanish, as the divers undergo tight anti-births
into the vaults and profound domes of the limestone.
Here, approaching the heart of the poem they embody
and thereby make the gliding cavern-world embody,
they have to keep time with themselves, and be dull often
with its daylight logic – since to dream it fully
might leave them asprawl on the void clang of their tanks,
their faceplates glazing an unfocused
dreadful portrait
at the apex of a steeple that does not reach the day.
THE TIN WASH DISH
Lank poverty, dank poverty,
its pants wear through at fork and knee.
It warms its hands over burning shames,
refers to its fate as Them and He
and delights in things by their hard names:
rag and toejam, feed and paw –
don’t guts that down, there ain’t no more!
Dank poverty, rank poverty,
it hums with a grim fidelity
like wood-rot with a hint of orifice,
wet newspaper jammed in the gaps of artifice,
and disgusts us into fierce loyalty.
It’s never the fault of those you love:
poverty comes down from above.
Let it dance chairs and smash the door,
it arises from all that went before
and every outsider’s the enemy –
Jesus Christ turned this over with his stick
and knights and philosophers turned it back.
Rank poverty, lank poverty,
chafe in its crotch and sores in its hair,
still a window’s clean if it’s made of air,
not webby silver like a sleeve.
Watch out if this does well at school
and has to leave and longs to leave:
someone, sometime, will have to pay.
Shave with toilet soap, run to flesh,
astound the nation, rule the army,
still you wait for the day you’ll be sent back
where books or toys on the floor are rubbish
and no one’s allowed to come and play
because home calls itself a shack
and hot water crinkles in the tin wash dish.
THE INVERSE TRANSPORTS
Two hundred years, and the bars
reappear on more and more windows;
more people have a special number to ring.
This started with furious strange Christians:
they would have all things in common,
have morals superseded by love –
truth and Christ they rejected scornfully.
More people sell and move to the country.
The bush becomes their civil city.
What do they do there? Some make quilts
sewing worn and washed banknotes together.
What romantic legends do they hear there?
Tales of lineage, and of terrible accidents:
the rearing tractor, the sawmills’ bloody moons.
Accident is the tiger of the country,
but fairytale is a reserve, for those rich only
in that and fifty thousand years here.
The incomers will acquire those fifty thousand
years too, though. Thousands of anything
draw them. They discovered thousands,
even these. Which they offer now, for settlement.
Has the nation been a poem or an accident?
And which should it be? America, and the Soviets
and the First and Third Reich were poems.
Two others, quite different, have been Rome’s.
We’ve been through some bloody British stanzas
and some local stanzas where ‘pelf’
was the rhyme for ‘self’ – and some about police,
refuge, ballots, space, the Fair Go and peace.
Many strain now to compose a National Purpose,
some fear its enforcement. Free people take liberties:
inspired government takes liberty itself.
Takes it where, court to parliament to bureaucracy
to big union to gaol, an agreed atmosphere
endures, that’s dealt with God and democracy.
Inside convict ships that Christ’s grace inverted
hanging chains end in lights. Congregations
approach the classless there. But the ships are being buried
in tipped dirt. Half the media denies
it’s happening, and the other half justifies
this live burial – and the worshippers divide likewise
in their views of the sliding waves of garbage
in which their ships welter and rise
beneath towers with the lyric sheen of heroin
that reach skyward out of the paradox
that expression and achievement are the Prize
and at the same time are indefensible privilege.
Two hundred years, and the bars
appear on more and more windows.
THE NARRABRI RESERVATION
On the road to the Nandewars
there was a slab of dead
enfolded in a green gumtree
and a nectar-blackened hole in it
at which bees hovered and appeared –
Still unfocused from the dream-prolonging
shower, this man sops lather,
stipples his face, then grades off
the Santa-wool of his shave
with flicks and whittlings.
Despite back yard and front garden
his children watch breakfast television
like Japanese in a miniature apartment
on the fiftieth floor. They
don’t know a bywash from a bore-drain.
Splashed cologne won’t sting the thought away.
It bothers him, knotting the tie
that will serve him for a beard
expounding lines in the boardroom:
his children don’t come from his country.
Fatal, that in his own childhood
he walked up mortised stays
to the tops of strainer posts
on the coast of a wheat ocean.
It seeded in him the Narrabri reservation
with which he’ll hear every scheme put forward today.
Also by midday, when downtown wears the aspect
of towering sets left over from a nighttime
private-eye series, he’ll recall how at midnight
the same buildings appear left over from the day
and will feel toward them the Narrabri reservation.
Not being the only person in his family
he won’t start reading the Farm and Station ads
but will listen to the irony colleagues bring
to items in the paper: Ted’s is the Katanning,
Laurel’s will be the Gayndah reservation –
On the worn brakes of the city
all these instants of light friction.
THE UP-TO-DATE SCARECROW
FOR MELISSA GORDON
With my mouldy felt hat and my coat pinned shut
I’d soon frighten nothing; birds’d sit on me – but
with some builders’ plastic sheeting and a Coles bag on my head
I can dance standing still in a garden bed.
Ah, raggy plastic sheets! They’re my favourite fad!
the best new idea the gardeners have had
for an old scarecrow (we scarecrows are born old):
they give me a voice, and the birds get told!
In any sort of breeze, in my polythene clothes
I can make crows vanish and men swear oaths –
fair crack of the whip! – when I put an elastic
snap to the air with a crinkle of my plastic,
and give me a wind blowing as wind can
I can crackle like eggs in a giant’s frying pan!
THE POLE BARNS
Unchinked log cabins, empty now, or stuffed with hay
under later iron. Or else roofless, bare stanzas of timber
with chars in the text. Each line ends in memorial axemanship.
With a hatch in one gable end, like a cuckoo clock,
they had to be climbed up into, or swung into
from the saddle of a quiet horse, feet-first onto corn.
On logs like rollers these rooms stand on creek flat and ridge,
and
their true roofs were bark, every squared sheet a darkened
huge stroke of painting, fibrous from the brush.
Flattened, the sheets strained for a long time to curl again:
the man who slept on one and woke immobilised
in a scroll pipe is a primal pole-barn story.
The sound of rain on bark roofing, dotted, not pointed,
increasing to a sonic blanket, is millennia older than walls
but it was still a heart of storytelling, under the one lantern
as the comets of corn were stripped to their white teeth
and chucked over the partition, and the vellum husks shuffled down
round spooky tellers hunched in the planes of winter wind.
More a daylight thinker was the settler who noticed the tide
of his grain going out too fast, and set a dingo trap
in the servery slot – and found his white-faced neighbour,
a man bearded as himself, up to the shoulder in anguish.
Neither spoke as the trap was released, nor mentioned that dawn ever.
Happiest, in that iron age, were sitting aloft on the transom
unscrewing corn from cobs, making a good shower for the hens
and sailing the barn, with its log ram jutting low in front.
Like all the ships of conquest, its name was Supply.
THE 1812 OVERTURE AT TOPKAPI SARAY
The Rosary in Turkish, and prayers for the Sultān.
Through the filigree perforations of a curtain wall
a vagrant breeze parts a hanging mist of muslin
behind the Dowager Wife seated in her pavilion.
For fourteen hundred Sundays she has commended
to the Virgin’s Son a fluctuating small congregation
of those who, like herself, had no choice about virginity:
concubines and eunuchs with the faces of aged children.
For perhaps thirteen hundred she has prayed for the Sultãn,
both him to whom she was sent as a captured pearl
by the Bey of Algiers, and their son who reigns now in succession
beneath the inscriptions which, though she reads them fluently, still
at moments resemble tongues involved with a pastille,
or two, or three. The bitterest to her own taste
was never to succeed in stopping the trade in eunuchs
whereby little boys, never Muslim on the cutting day,
must be seated crying in hot, blood-stanching sand.
A sorrowful mystery. The traffic in bed-girls is another,