Collected Poems

by Les Murray

  be shaved or uplifted, cool or chic.

  He blusters shyly – poverty can’t afford instincts.

  Nothing protects him, and no one.

  He must be suppressed, for modernity,

  for youth, for speed, for sexual fun.

  Also, believing as tacitly as he

  that only dim Godly joys are equal

  while the competitive, the exclusive

  class pleasures are imperative evil

  they see him as a nascent devil,

  wings festering to life in his weekly shirt,

  and daily go for the fist-and-finger

  hung at the arch of keenest hurt.

  Slim revenge of sorority. He must shoot birds,

  discard the love myth and search for clues.

  But for the blood-starred barefoot spoor

  he found, this one might have made dark news.

  THE BALLAD OF THE BARBED WIRE OCEAN

  No more rice pudding. Pink coupons for Plume. Smokes under the lap for aunts.

  Four running black boots beside a red sun. Flash wireless words like Advarnce.

  When the ocean was wrapped in barbed wire, terror radiant up the night sky,

  exhilaration raced flat out in squadrons; Mum’s friends took off sun-hats to cry.

  Starting south of the then world with new showground rifles being screamed at and shown

  for a giggle-suit three feeds a day and no more plans of your own,

  it went with some swagger till God bless you, Tom! and Daddy come back! at the train

  or a hoot up the gangways for all the girls and soon the coast fading in rain,

  but then it was flared screams from blood-bundles whipped rolling as iron bombs keened down

  and the insect-eyed bombers burned their crews alive in off-register henna and brown.

  In steep ruins of rainforest pre-affluent thousands ape-scuttling mixed sewage with blood

  and fear and the poem played vodka to morals, fear jolting to the mouth like cud.

  It was sleep atop supplies, it was pickhandle, it was coming against the wall in tears,

  sometimes it was factory banter, stoking jerked breechblocks and filing souvenirs,

  or miles-wide humming cattleyards of humans, or oiled ship-fires slanting in ice,

  rag-wearers burst as by huge War Bonds coins, girls’ mouths full of living rice.

  No one came home from it. Phantoms smoked two hundred daily. Ghosts held civilians at bay,

  since war turns beyond strut and adventure to keeping what you’ve learned, and shown,

  what you’ve approved, and what you’ve done, from ever reaching your own.

  This is died for. And nihil and nonsense feed on it day after day.

  MIDNIGHT LAKE

  Little boy blue, four hours till dawn.

  Your bed’s a cement bag, your plastic is torn.

  Your breakfast was tap water, dinner was sleep;

  you are the faith your olds couldn’t keep.

  In your bunny rug room there were toys on the floor

  but nothing is obvious when people get poor

  and newspaper crackles next to your skin.

  You’re a newspaper fairytale now, Tommy Thin,

  a postnatal abortion, slick outer space thing,

  you run like a pinball BING! smack crack BING!

  then, strung out and spotty, you wriggle and sigh

  and kiss all the fellows and make them all die.

  ANTARCTICA

  Beyond the human flat earths

  which, policed by warm language, wreathe

  in fog the limits of the world,

  far out in space you can breathe

  the planet revolves in a cold book.

  It turns one numb white page a year.

  Round this in shattering billions spread

  ruins of a Ptolemaic sphere,

  and brittle-beard reciters bore

  out time in adamant hoar rods

  to freight where it’s growing short,

  childless absolutes shrieking the odds.

  Most modern of the Great South Lands,

  her storm-blown powder whited wigs

  as wit of the New Contempt chilled her.

  The first spacefarers worked her rope rigs

  in horizontal liftoff, when to climb

  the high Pole was officer class.

  Total prehuman pavement, extending

  beyond every roof-brink of crevasse:

  Sterility Park, ringed by sheathed animals.

  Singing spiritoso their tongueless keens

  musselled carollers fly under the world.

  Deeper out, our star’s gale folds and greens.

  Blue miles above the first flowered hills

  towers the true Flood, as it was,

  as it is, at the crux of global lattice,

  and long-shod humans, risking diamond there,

  propitiate it with known laws and our wickedness.

  DISTINGUO

  Prose is Protestant-agnostic,

  story, discussion, significance,

  but poetry is Catholic:

  poetry is presence.

  THE PAST EVER PRESENT

  Love is always an awarded thing

  but some are no winners, of no awarding class.

  Each is a song that they themselves can’t sing.

  For months of sundays, singlehanded under iron, with the flies,

  they used to be safe from that dizzying small-town sex

  whose ridicule brought a shamed evasion to their eyes.

  Disdaining the relegated as themselves, they eyed the vividest

  for whom inept gentleness without prestige was slow.

  Pity even the best, then, when they’re made second best.

  Consider the self-sentenced who heel the earth round with shy feet

  and the wallflower who weeps not from her eyes but her palms

  and those who don’t master the patter, or whom the codes defeat.

  If love is always an awarded thing

  some have cursed the judging and screamed off down old roads

  and all that they killed were the song they couldn’t sing.

  LIKE THE JOY AT HIS FIRST LIE

  Paradises of limitation, charm

  of perpetual doughy innocence –

  how quickly the reality

  scrubs such stuff from mind.

  Today, at eleven and a half,

  he made his first purchase:

  forty cents, for two biscuits, no change

  but a giant step into mankind.

  BLUE ROAN

  FOR PHILIP HODGINS

  As usual up the Giro mountain

  dozers were shifting the road about

  but the big blue ranges looked permanent

  and the stinging-trees held no hint of drought.

  All the high drill and blanket ridges

  were dusty for want of winter rains

  but down in the creases of picnic oak

  brown water moved like handled chains.

  Steak-red Herefords, edged like steaks

  with that creamy fat the health trade bars

  nudged, feeding, settling who’d get horned

  and who’d horn, in the Wingham abattoirs

  and men who remembered droughttime grass

  like three days’ growth on a stark red face

  described farms on the creeks, fruit trees and fun

  and how they bought out each little place.

  Where farm families once would come just to watch

  men knock off work, on the Bulliac line,

  the fear of helplessness still burned live brush.

  Dirty white smoke sent up its scattered sign

  and in at the races and out at home

  the pump of morale was primed and bled:

  ‘Poor Harry in the street, beer running out his eyes,’

  as the cousin who married the baker said.

  THE ROAD TOLL

  FOR THOSE
MOST RECENTLY SLAUGHTERED ON THE ROADS

  Toll. You are part of the toll

  government causes, and harps on, and exacts

  as more toll. The word means both death and taxes.

  Trains are government, so they don’t pay, toll. Trucks pay

  and pay, and pay. Speed narrows the wrecked highway

  as fines, based on the death toll, are increased continually.

  So you justify, and your stretchers drip, the toll

  we must pay for the juggernaut Government,

  for every Crown careerist’s inner greasy pole,

  for the logic of swift movement –

  It’s crocodile tears, toll, except from those who loved you.

  Your death taps us for revenue. You were driving on the railway

  and we’ll all be fined for it. You were a tin boat on the sea

  and a ship ran over you. A fleeing merchantman, toll.

  AN ERA

  The poor were fat and the rich were lean.

  Nearly all could preach, very few could sing.

  The fashionable were all one age, and to them

  a church picnic was the very worst thing.

  THE GAELIC LONG TUNES

  On Sabbath days, on circuit days,

  the Free Church assembled from boats and gigs

  and between sermons they would tauten

  and, exercising all they allowed of art,

  haul on the long lines of the Psalms.

  The seated precentor, touching text,

  would start alone, lifting up his whale-long tune

  and at the right quaver, the rest set sail

  after him, swaying, through eerie and lorn.

  No unison of breaths-in gapped their sound.

  In disdain of all theatrics, they raised

  straight ahead, from plank rows, their beatless God-paean,

  their giving like enduring. And in rise

  and undulation, in Earth-conquest mourned

  as loss, all tragedy drowned, and that weird

  music impelled them, singing, like solar wind.

  WAGTAIL

  Willy Wagtail

  sings at night

  black and white

  Oz nightingale

  picks spiders off wall

  nest-fur and eyesocket

  ticks off cows

  cattle love that

  Busy daylong

  eating small species

  makes little faeces

  and a great wealth of song

  Will and Willa Wagtail

  indistinguishable

  switchers, whizzers

  drinkers out of scissors

  weave a tiny unit

  kids clemming in it

  Piping in tizzes

  two fight off one

  even one eagle

  little gun swingers

  rivertop ringers

  one-name-for-all

  whose lives flow by heart

  beyond the liver

  into lives of a feather

  Wag it here, Willy

  pretty it there

  flicker and whirr –

  if you weren’t human

  how many would care?

  SANDSTONE COUNTRY

  Bush and orchard forelands stop sheer

  with stencilled hands under mossed cliff eaves

  and buried rain peeing far down off balconies

  stains ink-dark and slows into leaves.

  Bleached rusting country, where waterfalls

  reanimate froth and stripped-out cars

  in hills being cleft for shopping malls.

  If sex and help never dawned on Mars

  maybe they’re unique, and yet to spread

  and Sun and Moon and barren stars

  revolve round the scrub Earth after all,

  pale handprints climbing an old smoked wall.

  MANNERS OF THE SUPRANATION

  Along our hills, before the first star

  arises the glow of Meruka,

  the clearer, brighter, more focused nation

  we enter to rest from contemplation.

  There songs are for watching, and sexy as war

  and truth is what there is footage for.

  Most death is by contract, though. And people kiss a lot

  but reproduce by zoom and gunshot.

  Night and Day are lighting terms. There are no cycles.

  Seasons and epochs there are locales.

  Breasts and faces are matte. Chests and horses shine

  and everything spoken is a line,

  and actorly spoken – though in sport, men, not women

  may talk like blokes. The lit bowl all swim in

  streams fact, the shortest urban myth:

  cholesterol, radon, IQ, coprolith.

  Square-muscled as chocolate bars, sirens give tongue

  but their fountain of youth is just for the young.

  The authentic, from hoeing dry earth to raise rent,

  stare into the wash cycle where their children went.

  Very few are fat there; all are reduced;

  poverty looks applied when it is produced.

  The red neck, in country that never gets dark,

  is curbed by young nobles from the National Park.

  Labour’s dim-sacred, business sinister, trade sly:

  the only chic enterprise is private eye.

  There the one book in everyone is filmed and on show

  but its strange truths are trimmed to what viewers may know;

  in spy series, the knowing may rise to despair

  which is noblest and deadliest, above savoir faire.

  Also Meruka loves animals, but hers have no smell

  so those in the animal world can’t tell,

  but ads shine through satire like poems through critique

  and to win on the replay is mortal technique

  as, name-starred, the monolith from 2001

  lies half sunk at right angles in Washington.

  Meruka, death’s babysitter, hearth fire of cool

  the ads are in Hamlet and he’s in Play School:

  now you’re First. Second’s us, where we glance or lie curled,

  and where anything still happens, that is the Third World.

  KIMBERLEY BRIEF

  With modern transport, everywhere you go

  the whole world is an archipelago,

  each place an island in a void of travel.

  In our case, cloud obscured the continent’s whole gravel

  of infinite dot-painting, as we overflew zones and degrees

  toward the great island of the Kimberleys.

  It was dusk when we slanted into Broome

  to be checked in, each with a bungalow for a room.

  Town of bougainvillea, of turmeric dust, of tin

  geometric solids that people run tourist shops in,

  of pastels and lattice, of ghosts with dented heads

  and porthole eyes, whose boats recline on beds

  of tidal concentrate, to resurrect, if ever, when aquamarine

  re-engorges the mangroves, the raw Romance has been,

  where a recent Shire President was Mr Kimberley Male

  and pearls shower upward through shops like inverse hail.

  In that town restrained from lovingly demolishing its past

  I saw fewer brown faces than when I’d been there last,

  Malay Afghans, Chinese Aborigines, or Philippine Celts,

  and Euro Australians, with hind paws stuck in their belts

  and a bumless tail dressed as two moleskin legs from there down

  must have hopped to Derby for the races, or moved out of town,

  but the sun off Cable Beach, entering the ocean’s hold

  ran its broad cable hot with incoming traffic of gold.

  Deeper levels were anchored with many-fathomed ropes

  knotted with old murder and world-be-my-oyster hopes;

  jerseyed grandsons of the neck-chained took mar
ks, or kicked a goal

  while a great painter of theirs sat in jail for jumping parole

  and it was dry months till some mouthless cave-coloured one

  would don cloudy low-pressure dress and dance a cyclone –

  Why tell this in verse? For travelling, your reasons can be

  the prosiest prose. As a tourist, though, you come for the poetry.

  Slot-car racing in a groove deep-cut by a grader through dust

  I asked my mate ‘This low bush we’re in, this pubic forest:

  is it all picture, or all detail?’ ‘You could die in it, resolving that.’

  Our bus seemed to climb all day, the land was so flat.

  The Kimberley was once mooted as a National Home for the Jews,

  in the late Thirties. Even then, they felt constrained to refuse.

  In Palestine were their Dreamings, in Vilna and Krakow their roots.

  Midmorning, then, we came to an Aboriginal kibbutz,

  with real children, barefoot ones. The square we weren’t to stray from

  contained a mud-brick church we hated to come away from,

  since inside were Mosaic scale-armour and celestial wicket gates,

  the table of God, His kitchen, His dresser of plates

  each a lucent pearl shell; above that, His concrete city, rose-pearled

  with all the arch-shells’ mundane sides facing out of the world

  and their lustre cupped our way. And over all, full span,

  hung the Reader among characters: God, sacrificed to man.

  The Stations had been painted by Sisters from Mainz and Bavaria,

  the sort who seized children to educate and ran hands-on leprosaria

  when leprosy was AIDS, but less pitied. The Carpenter who

  taught Oscar Wilde, and millions before him too,

  that the opposite of a platitude is more likely true

  moves through sheets of action that are echoing with energy, like Munch

  but often stronger, till he tilts like a plank off a shed

  in hue and rigour, with one arm hinged hanging, dead

  and helplessly ready to stand all death on its head.

  That peninsula, named for a pirate who hated the place,

  had no kangaroos to stand with handcuffed paws and belly-face,

  no emus, no sheep, but featureless termite men instead.

  We lunched under tamarinds planted by some Macassar crew