by Les Murray
duple rhythmic feed which same of great yore turned
my back on every other thing the mothering thereof
the seed whereof in need-clotting strings
of plaque I dissolve with reagent drool
that doth stagger swelling’s occult throb.
O one tap of splendour turned to me –
blank years grass grip
sun haggard rain
shell to that all.
Cell DNA
I am the singular
in free fall.
I and my doubles
carry it all:
life’s slim volume
spirally bound.
It’s what I’m about,
it’s what I’m around.
Presence and hungers
imbue a sap mote
with the world as they spin it.
I teach it by rote
but its every command
was once a miscue
that something rose to,
Presence and freedom
re-wording, re-beading
strains on a strand
making I and I more different
than we could stand.
Sunflowers
I am ever fresh cells who keep on knowing my name
but I converse in my myriads with the great blast Cell
who holds the centre of reality, carries it behind the cold
and on out, for converse with a continuum of adorers:
The more presence, the more apart. And the more lives circling you.
Falling, I gathered such presence that I fused to Star, beyond all fission –
We face our leaves and ever-successive genitals toward you.
Presence is why we love what we cannot eat or mate with –
We are fed from attachment and you, our futures draw weight from both, and droop.
All of my detached life lives on death or sexual casings –
The studded array of our worship struggles in the noon not to lose you.
I pumped water to erect its turning, weighted its combs with floury oil –
You are more intense than God, and fiercely dopey, and we adore you.
Presence matches our speed; thus it seems not flow but all arrivals –
We love your overbalance, your plunge into utterness – but what is presence?
The beginning, mirrored everywhere. The true indictment. The end all through the story.
Goose to Donkey
My big friend, I bow help;
I bow Get up, big friend:
let me land-swim again beside your clicky feet,
don’t sleep flat with dried wet in your holes.
Spermaceti
I sound my sight, and flexing skeletons eddy
in our common wall. With a sonic bolt from the fragrant
chamber of my head, I burst the lives of some
and slow, backwashing them into my mouth. I lighten,
breathe, and laze below again. And peer in long low tones
over the curve of Hard to river-tasting and oil-tasting
coasts, to the grand grinding coasts of rigid air.
How the wall of our medium has a shining, pumping rim:
the withstood crush of deep flight in it, perpetual entry!
Only the holes of eyesight and breath still tie us
to the dwarf-making Air, where true sight barely functions.
The power of our wall likewise guards us from
slowness of the rock Hard, its life-powdering compaction,
from its fissures and streamy layers that we sing into sight
but are silent, fixed, disjointed in. Eyesight is a leakage
of nearby into us, and shows us the tastes of food
conformed over its spines. But our greater sight is uttered.
I sing beyond the curve of distance the living joined bones
of my song-fellows; I sound a deep volcano’s valve tubes
storming whitely in black weight; I receive an island’s slump,
song-scrambling ship’s heartbeats, and the sheer shear of current-forms
bracketing a seamount. The wall, which running blind I demolish,
heals, prickling me with sonars. My every long shaped cry
re-establishes the world, and centres its ringing structure.
Honey Cycle
Grisaille of gristle lights, in a high eye of cells,
ex-chrysalids being fed crystal in six-sided wells,
many sweating comb and combing it, seating it sexaplex.
The unique She sops lines of descent, in her comedown from sex
and drones are driven from honey, having given their own:
their oeuvre with her ova or not, he’s re-learn the lone.
Rules never from bees but from being give us to build food
then to be stiff guards, hairtrigger for tiffs with non-Brood.
Next, grid-eyes grown to gathering rise where a headwind bolsters
hung shimmering flight, return with rich itchy holsters
and dance the nectar vector. Bristling collectors they entrance
propel off, our stings strung. And when we its advance
beyond wings, or water, light gutters in our sight-lattice
and we’re eggs there again. Spent fighting-suits tighten in grass.
The Dragon
It was almost not born.
The lioness stopped short from full
gallop, at a black apparitional
onrush of glare and jag horn
stark as day’s edge on the moon.
With râles of fury she conceded
a step – the herd’s meat slipped her pride,
a step – and the bull only needed
to keep sure, and encroaching, deadly-eyed,
facing her, facing her down.
The dragon was nearly not born
but the herd’s gone silence shakes me
to wavering, to need of more me –
my teeth through his tongue, he moans in me.
I have crushed shut his mouth bone –
Dust torn aloft by hooves, by pads
is fanning wings over how they shorten,
twist, wrest, re-elongate the dragon,
their bubbling Stokes, their gasps Cheyne,
the snake they make has lived for chiliads.
From under like-tasselled tails, one gas
blows oppositely, in the soundless burning
blare of urinary language. Turning
on their needs, on their agony, like a windlass
tightening life and all contested goodness,
gored power draining splintered blood-froth
toward dirt death for one, or both,
the dragon spirals, straining, over eight legs to
where there never was a dragon
and all such beasts exist like God, or you.
Animal Nativity
The Iliad of peace began
when this girl agreed.
Now goats in trees, fish in the valley
suddenly feel vivid.
Swallows flit in the stable as if
a hatchling of their kind,
turned human, cried in the manger
showing the hunger-diamond.
Cattle are content that this calf
must come in human form.
Spiders discern a water-walker.
Even humans will sense the lamb,
He who frees from the old poem
turtle-dove and snake
who gets death forgiven
who puts the apple back.
Dogs, less enslaved but as starving
as the poorest humans there
crouch, agog at a crux of presence
remembered as a star.
Stone Fruit
I appear from the inner world, singular and many, I am
the animals of my tree, appointed to travel and be eaten
since animals are plants’ genital extensions, I’m clothed
in luscious
dung but designed to elicit yet richer, I am modelled on the sun,
dry shine shedding off mottled surface but having like it a crack seed,
I am compact of laws aligned in all their directions, at behests I tip
over from law to law, I am streamy inside, taut with sugar meats, circular,
my colours are those of the sun as understood by leaf liquor cells
and cells of deep earth metal, I am dressed for eyes by the blind,
perfumed, flavoured by the mouthless, by insect-conductors who kill
and summon by turns, I’m to tell you there is a future and there are
consequences, and they are not the same, I emerge continually
from the inner world, which you can’t mate with nor eat.
Deer on the Wet Hills
As anywhere beyond the world
it is always the first day.
Smell replaces colour
for these ones, who are loved
as they are red: from within.
Bed brightening into feed,
the love stays hooves on steep.
History is unforgiveness.
Terse, as their speech would be,
food-rip gets widespread.
Tuned for stealth and sudden
ones’ senses all point, chewing
uninterest as anguish flaps one wing.
Day-streak, star-cinders.
Black sky. Pale udders forming there.
Ones’ nap spooned in licks
like mutual silent sentences,
bulk to mirrored bulk.
One forgets being male
right after the season.
Raven, sotto voce
Stalk’s so unlike every other flight, or walk
a casual so pitched it’s out of whack
with all lives around. Its head has eyes
in the neck, in the back. Its stick is a gun,
its mind’s read from its knees.
This prime of lies
stills normal sound: wing-sink, vague trot,
the closing tack alone, in on the heat
of fellow-life makes loosely shared flesh speak
in flashed silence, in whirrs,
the first pan-warmblood talk.
The gun’s a stick when eyes come out of stalk.
Cuttlefish
Spacefarers past living planetfall
on our ever-dive in bloom crystal:
when about our self kin selves appear,
slowing, rubber to pulp, we slack from spear,
flower anemone, re-clasp and hang, welling
while the design of play is jelling,
then enfolding space, jet
every way to posit some essential set
of life-streaks in the placeless,
or we commune parallel, rouge to cerulean
as odd proposals of shape and zip floresce
– till a jag-maw apparition
spurts us apart into vague as our colours shrink,
leaving, of our culture, an ectoplasm of ink.
Migratory
I am the nest that comes and goes,
I am the egg that isn’t now,
I am the beach, the food in sand,
the shade with shells and the shade with sticks.
I am the right feeling on washed shine,
in wing-lifting surf, in running about
beak-focused: the feeling of here, that stays
and stays, then lengthens out over
the hill of hills and the feedy sea.
I am the wrongness of here, when it
is true to fly along the feeling
the length of its great rightness, while days
burn from vast to a gold gill in the dark
to vast again, for many feeds
and floating rests, till the sun ahead
becomes the sun behind, and half
the little far days of the night are different.
Right feelings of here arrive with me:
I am the nests danced for and now,
I am the crying heads to fill,
I am the beach, the sand in food,
the shade with sticks and the double kelp shade.
From Where We Live on Presence
A human is a comet streamed in language far down time; no other
living is like it. Beetlehood itself was my expression.
It was said in fluted burnish, in jaw-tools, spanned running, lidded shields
over an erectile rotor. With no lungs to huff hah! or selah!
few sixwalkers converse. Ants, admittedly, headlong flesh-mobbers, meeting,
hinge back work-jaws, part their food-jaws, merge mouths in communion
and taste their common being; any surplus is message and command.
Mine signal, in lone deposits; my capsule fourth life went by clues.
I mated once, escaped a spider, ate things cooked in wet fires of decay
but for the most part, was. I could not have put myself better,
with more lustre, than my presence did. I translate into segments, laminates,
cachou eyes, pungent chemistry, cusps. But I remain the true word for me.
Possum’s Nocturnal Day
The five-limbed Only One
in bush that bees erect as I curb glare-bringing mistletoe
can alight, parachute, on any bird’s touchdown,
perch eating there,
cough scoff at other Only Ones, drop through
reality and flicker at tangents clear to its crown
but then, despite foliage,
my cool nickel daytime bleaches into light
and loses me the forest genes’ infinite air of sprung holds.
My eyes all hurt branchings
I curl up in my charcoal trunk of night
and dream a welling pictureless encouragement
that tides from far but is in arrival me
and my world, since nothing is apart enough for language.
HOME SUITE
Home is the first
and final poem
and every poem between
has this mum home seam.
Home’s the weakest enemy
as iron steams starch –
but to war against home
is the longest march.
Home has no neighbours.
They are less strong
than the tree, or the sideboard.
All who come back belong.
No later first-class plane
flies the sad quilt wings.
Any feeling after final
must be home, with idyll-things.
Love may be recent,
and liquid enough term
to penetrate and mollify
what’s compact in home.
THE FELLOW HUMAN
Beside Anchor Flour school frocks dimmed with redknuckle soaps
poverty’s hardly poverty nowadays, here.
The mothers who drive up under tortoiseshell pines to the school
are neat in jeans and track tops
and have more self and presence on hand in the car.
Their four-wheeled domains are compound of doors to slam
but only their children do. Drama is private, for home.
Here, the tone is citizenly equal.
The woman with timber-grey braids and two modelled in cold-cream
chat through and minutely modulate their opening wry smile.
Another, serene, makes a sad-comic mouth beneath glasses
for her fine-necked rugby-mad boy, also in glasses,
and registers reed notes in the leatherhead birds’ knotty music
who unpick a red-gold judge’s wig of bloom
in the silky-oak tree above the school’s two classes.
To remodel the countryside, in this post-job age of peace,
women have slept with trucks, raised houses by hammer and telephone,
plucked sopping geese and whitened the
m to stone,
and suddenly most sex writing seems slave-era boasting, in the face,
living mousseline, never-shaved, of the fellow human.
The ginger local woman alighting from the saddle of her van
talks to a new friend who balances a baby on one hip
and herself on the other. The two nod upwards, and laugh.
Not for heavy old reasons does the one new here go barefoot
but to be arrived, at home in this dust-warm landscape.
THE WEDDING AT BERRICO
CHRISTINA AND JAMES, 8TH FEBRUARY 1992
To reach your watershed country
we’ve driven this summer’s green climbs
and the creekwater film spooling over
causeways got spliced many times
with its boulders like ice under whisky,
tree pools mirrory as the eyes of horses.
Great hills above, the house en fête:
we’ve parked between soaring rhymes
and slipped in among brilliant company.
Here are your gifts. I see God’s sent
all your encounters so far with him:
life. Landscape. Unfraught love. Some poetry.
Risk too, with his star rigger Freedom,
but here’s poise, for whatever may come.
What’s life wish you? Sound genetics, delight,
long resilience against gravity, the sight
of great-grandchildren, a joint sense of home.
Hey, all these wishes in smart boxes! Fun,
challenges, Meaning, work-satisfaction –
this must be the secular human lot: health
till high old age, children of character,
dear friendships. And the testing one: wealth.
Quietly we add ours: may you
always have each other, and want to.
Few poems I’ve made mention our children.
That I write at all got you dork names.
More might have brought worse. Our jealous nation…
I am awed at you, though, today,
silk restraining your briskness and gumption,
my mother’s face still hauntingly in yours
and this increase, this vulnerable beauty.
James is worthy of his welcome to our family.
Never would I do, or he ask
me to do what no parental memories