by Les Murray
the pistol that kills women, that gets them killed, crippling men
on the towel-spattered sand. Equality is dressed, neatly,
with mouth still shut. Bared body is not equal ever.
Some are smiled to each other. Many surf, swim, play ball:
like that red boy, holding his wet T-shirt off his breasts.
Leash Chain
The pelican of urban myth swooping
away with syllables of chihuahua
leash-chain trickling from its beak
at the owner crying down the beach
can’t have been more hunter-insouciant
than this wadded water-skier in bikers
jacket wings now braking to assume
its seat on the lunchtime peak of tide.
Does that child’s sock of dog, though, dropped
for its very chain, get pulled by it down
a boggling counter-chain to drowned zero?
Or does it rock back, tickling asphalt after
jerking fans across the floor of the palms’
idling forest of helicopter feathers?
From Bennett’s Head
The absolute blue ocean is scaled and smoothed.
Fur seals, absolute until they die, ruche through it.
The headland mounts raked strata with a white-fronted
sea eagle angling along them. Inland, blue
medicinal scrublands are being bared and squared.
The wind brings a sense of shiplap and cream clinker.
It is the suburbs, broadcast in colour from Metropolis
and received along the coast by loans and savings,
the sort of money, not nobly notorious, which literary
language curls to ironise. But the sky is bare
of human class hatred. I mirror a blacktop street,
biscuit walls, Roman numeral balustrades, inner shadow
and a plastic pedal car, all fronting a vast minute clarity
of lives assuming brick, and not as a performance.
THE BOHEMIAN OCCUPATION
Take back Bohemia, Havel; take back the name.
Wrap it round the Hradčany, weight it with linden hills,
goose ponds and lozengy punchbowls. Let depression
find itself a new game.
Take back Bohemia, Vaclav. Don’t supply a noun
to that dreamy world empire of unpaid and sexual police
where the tanks still are, green under boredom and garlands,
and fathers get mown down.
Take back Bohemia, dear President. Disclaim
the coffee machines whose every snort is Bourgeois!
where all non-Bohemians are cattle to brand, and all
difference is the same.
You alone, colleague, can close Bohemia back
down over Brno guns, plates of fox-with-juniper-berries
and that strategist of race whom Hindenburg’s Bohemian corporal
sent upon you in black.
Reclaim Bohemia, Havel, and also Bohème
from that sweet soil, avid for barbed wire again,
where poetry is made a progressive model prison.
Now that Philistine is Palestine once more
take back your good name!
THE FOSSIL IMPRINT
The impress of a whelk
in hard brown rock,
fluted as a plinth.
Its life gone utterly,
throb, wet and chalk,
left this shape-transmission,
a kin boat of fine brick.
Just off centre is a chip
healed before its death.
Before some credit help
this glazed biographee
beat surf-smash, stone rap,
maybe even saurid bite
in a swamp Antarctic.
Here, and where you are,
have been Antarctic.
ON THE PRESENT SLAUGHTER OF FERAL ANIMALS
It seems that merciless human rearrangement
of the whole earth is to have no green ending.
In khaki where nothing shoots back, rangers pose,
entering a helicopter with its sniping door removed.
In minutes, they are over drab where buffalo flee
ahead of dust – beasts rotund and beetle brown, with rayed
handlebar horns – or over shine that hobbles them in spray.
The rifle arrests one’s gallop, and one more, and one,
cow, calf, bull, the two tons of projectile
power riding each bullet’s invisible star
whipcrack their plunging fluids. Poor caked Asian cattle,
they lie, successive, like towns of salt stench on a map.
Passionate with altruism as ever inquisition was,
a statistical dream loads up for donkeys, cats, horses.
The slab-fed military rifles, with lenses tubed on top,
open and shut. A necked bulging cartridge case and animal
both spin to oblivion. Behind an ear, fur flicks,
and an unknowable headlong world is abolished.
But so far as treetops or humans now alive know
all these are indigenous beings. When didn’t we have them?
Each was born on this continent. Burn-off pick and dusty shade
were in their memory, not chill fall, not spiced viridian.
Us against species for bare survival may justify
the infecting needle, the pig rifle up eroded gullies,
but this luxury massacre on landscapes draining of settlement
smells of gas theory. The last thing brumby horses hear
is that ideological sound, the baby boom.
It is the hidden music of a climaxing native self-hatred
where we edge unseeing around flyblown millions toward
a nonviolent dreamtime where no one living has been.
MEMORIES OF THE HEIGHT-TO-WEIGHT RATIO
I was a translator in the Institute back
when being accredited as a poet
meant signing things against Vietnam.
For scorn of the bargain I wouldn’t do it.
And the Institute was after me
to lose seven teeth and five stone in weight
and pass their medical. Three years I dodged
then offered the teeth under sacking threat.
From five to nine, in warm Lane Cove,
and five to nine again at night,
an irascible Carpatho-Ruthenian strove
with ethnic teeth. He claimed the bite
of a human determined their intelligence.
More gnash-power sent the brain more blood.
In Hungarian, Yiddish or Serbo-Croat
he lectured emotional fur-trimmers good,
clacking a jointed skull in his hand
and sent them to work face-numbed and bright.
This was my wife’s family dentist. He
looked into my mouth, blenched at the sight,
eclipsed me with his theory of occlusion
and wrested and tugged. Pausing to blow
out cigarette smoke, he’d bite his only
accent-free mother tongue and return below
to raise my black fleet of sugar-barques
so anchored that they gave him tennis elbow.
Seven teeth I gave that our babies might eat
when students were chanting Make Love! Hey Ho!
But there was a line called Height-to-Weight
and a parallel line on Vietnam. When a tutor
in politics failed all who crossed that, and wasn’t
dismissed, scholarship was back to holy writ.
Fourteen pounds were a stone, and of great yore so,
but the doctor I saw next had no schoolyard in him:
You’re a natural weight-lifter! Come join my gym!
Sonnets of flesh could still model my torso.
Modernism’s not modem: it’s police and despair.
I we
ar it as fat, and it gnawed off my hair
as my typewriter clicked over gulfs and birch spaces
where the passive voice muffled enormity and faces.
But when the Institute started afresh
to circle my job, we decamped to Europe
and spent our last sixpence on a pig’s head.
Any job is a comedown, where I was bred.
WATER-GARDENING IN AN OLD FARM DAM
Blueing the blackened water
that I’m widening with my spade
as I lever up water tussocks
and chuck them ashore like sopping comets
is a sun-point, dazzling heatless
acetylene, under tadpoles that swarm
wobbling, like a species of flies
and buzzing bubbles that speed
upward like many winged species.
Unwettable green tacos are lotus leaves.
Waterlily leaves are notched plaques
of the water. Their tubers resemble
charred monstera trunks. Some I planted,
some I let float. And I bought
thumb-sized mosquito-eating fish
for a dollar in a plastic amnion.
‘Wilderness’ says we’ve lost belief
in human building: our dominance
now so complete that we hide from it.
Where, with my levered back,
I stand, too late in life,
in a populous amber, feet deep
in digesting chyle over clays,
I love green humanised water
in old brick pounds, water carried
unleaking for miles around contour,
or built out into, or overstepping
stonework in long frilled excess.
The hands’ pride and abysmal
pay that such labour earned,
as against the necks and billions
paid for Nature. But the workers
and the need are gone, without reaching
here: this was never canal country.
It’s cow-ceramic, softened at rain times,
where the kookaburra’s laugh
is like angles of a scrubbing toothbrush
heard through the bones of the head.
Level water should turn out of sight,
on round a bend, behind an island,
in windings of possibility, not
be exhausted in one gesture, like an avenue.
It shouldn’t be surveyable in one look.
That’s a waterhole. Still, the trees
I planted along this one bend it
a bit, and half roof it, bringing
its wet underearth shadow to the surface
as shade. And the reeds I hate,
mint sheaves, human-high palisades
that would close in round the water,
I could fire floating petrol among them
again, and savage but not beat them,
or I could declare them beautiful.
THE SUSPENSION OF KNOCK
Where will Australia be held?
Ethnics who praise their home ground
while on it are called jingo chauvinists.
All’s permitted, though, when they migrate;
the least adaptable are the purest then,
the narrowest the most multicultural.
Where will we hold Australia,
we who have no other country?
Not Indigenous, merely born here,
shall we be Australian in Paraguay
again, or on a Dublin street corner?
Some of them like us in Dublin.
We were the proletarian evolution,
a lot of us. We’ve been the future
of many snobbish nations,
but now the élite Revolution
that rules unsullied by elections
has no use for us. Our experience
and presence, unlike theirs, are fictive
ideological constructions.
When we are made fully nothing
by our own, at home and abroad,
where will we hold Australia?
In con-men’s scams? In overdone slang?
In great shifting floods and rescue?
In the hand-high spaces that doctors
crawled through beneath a wrecked train?
In the very uniqueness of a racism
practised only against ourselves?
For the moment, a salamander identity
is permitted us in fire, in the tones
that say Well we got all the kids out;
the house was only property;
where the unsleeping blood-eyed run
their hoses toward full nightmare,
saving strangers and strangers’ houses
from the Other Flower of the gum tree,
feral highrise, blizarding, total orange,
oncoming in shot azure, glorious as an air raid,
our recurrent Blitz, hideout of values.
IT ALLOWS A PORTRAIT IN LINE SCAN AT FIFTEEN
He retains a slight ‘Martian’ accent, from the years of single phrases.
He no longer hugs to disarm. It is gradually allowing him affection.
It does not allow proportion. Distress is absolute, shrieking, and runs him at frantic speed through crashing doors.
He likes cyborgs. Their taciturn power, with his intonation.
It still runs him around the house, alone in the dark, cooing and laughing.
He can read about soils, populations and New Zealand. On neutral topics he’s illiterate.
Arnie Schwarzenegger is an actor. He isn’t a cyborg really, is he, Dad?
He lives on forty acres, with animals and trees, and used to draw it continually.
He knows the map of Earth’s fertile soils, and can draw it freehand.
He can only lie in a panicked shout SorrySorryIdidn’tdoit! warding off conflict with others and himself.
When he ran away constantly it was to the greengrocers to worship stacked fruit.
His favourite country was the Ukraine: it is nearly all deep fertile soil.
Giggling, he climbed all over the dim Freudian psychiatrist who told us how autism resulted from ‘refrigerator’ parents.
When asked to smile, he photographs a rictus-smile on his face.
It long forbade all naturalistic films. They were Adult movies.
If they (that is, he) are bad the police will put them in hospital.
He sometimes drew the farm amid Chinese or Balinese rice terraces.
When a runaway, he made uproar in the police station, playing at three times adult speed.
Only animated films were proper. Who Framed Roger Rabbit then authorised the rest.
Phrases spoken to him he would take as teaching, and repeat.
When he worshipped fruit, he screamed as if poisoned when it was fed to him.
A one-word first conversation: Blane. – Yes! Plane, that’s right, baby! – Blane.
He has forgotten nothing, and remembers the precise quality of experiences.
It requires rulings: Is stealing very playing up, as bad as murder?
He counts at a glance, not looking. And he has never been lost.
When he ate only nuts and dried fruit, words were for dire emergencies.
He knows all the breeds of fowls, and the counties of Ireland.
He’d begun to talk, then resumed to babble, then silence. It withdrew speech for years.
When he took your hand, it was to work it, as a multi-purpose tool.
He is anger’s mirror, and magnifies any near him, raging it down.
It still won’t allow him fresh fruit, or orange juice with bits in it.
He swam in the midwinter dam at night. It had no rules about cold.
He was terrified of thunder and finally cried as if in explanation It – angry!
He grilled an egg he’d broken into bread. Exchanges of soil-knowledge are called landtalking.
He lives in objectivity.
I was sure Bell’s palsy would leave my face only when he said it had begun to.
Don’t say word! when he was eight forbade the word ‘autistic’ in his presence.
Bantering questions about girlfriends cause a terrified look and blocked ears.
He sometimes centred the farm in a furrowed American Midwest.
Eye contact, Mum! means he truly wants attention. It dislikes I-contact.
He is equitable and kind, and only ever a little jealous. It was a relief when that little arrived.
He surfs, bowls, walks for miles. For many years he hasn’t trailed his left arm while running.
I gotta get smart! looking terrified into the years. I gotta get smart!
PERFORMANCE
I starred last night, I shone:
I was footwork and firework in one,
a rocket that wriggled up and shot
darkness with a parasol of brilliants
and a peewee descant on a flung bit;
I was busters of glitter-bombs expanding
to mantle and aurora from a crown,
I was fouettés, falls of blazing paint,
para-flares spot-welding cloudy heaven,
loose gold off fierce toeholds of white,
a finale red-tongued as a haka leap:
that too was a butt of all right!
As usual after any triumph, I was
of course inconsolable.
WAR SONG
TRANSLATED FROM THE GERMAN OF MATTHIAS CLAUDIUS 1740–1815
It’s war! O angel of God, restrain
It: lift up your voice!
It’s war, alas – and unbearable pain
If any think it my choice!
How would I endure it if, bloody and wan,
The slaughtered came to me in sleep,
All those mourning spirits, and began
Around me to weep?
If valiant men, maimed in the dust, near death,
Who had gone seeking fame,
Writhed before me, and with their dying breath
Cursed my very name?
If millions of poor fathers, mothers, wives,
So glad before the war,
Now brought the wreck, the misery of their lives,
Crying, to my door?
If famine, evil plague and their affliction
Smote friend and foe the same,
Then stood up on a corpse to crow the fiction
Of my glorious fame?
Neither in crown nor honour, lands nor gain