by Les Murray
the swerving muskets, death in a bag of flour.
The ancient poetry totters – but new laughs get learned,
jobs tried, worlds pictured, and brave ambitious women
come to borrow seed at the edge of spaceship tents,
things better known on the low horse than the high horse.
Few horses come into the great hall of the Chlorine:
better not to bring them.
Nothing in the water feeds Race. A little of the sun
pouring in through wiped walls may be kin to it,
but that family the Race dog followed in has merged
in the swimming noise of this mall, handling blue and yellow
floats that mark the lapping lanes. They plunge under ropes
and separate into their ages, over by the wheelchair hoist.
If I met them, we might become good friends
if we could cross that land, proxy-farmed for indignation,
that lies between us.
A DOG’S ELEGY
The civil white-pawed dog who’d strain
to make speech-like sounds to his humans
lies buried in the soil of a slope
that he’d tear down on his barking runs.
He hated thunder and gunshot
and would charge off to restrain them.
A city dog too alive for backyards,
we took him from the pound’s Green Dream
but now his human name melts off him;
he’ll rise to chase fruit bats and bees;
the coral tree and the African tulip
will take him up, and the prickly tea trees.
Our longhaired cat who mistook him
for an Alsatian flew up there full tilt
and teetered in top twigs for eight days
as a cloud, distilling water with its pelt.
The cattle suspect the Dog lives
but three kangaroos stood in our pasture
this daybreak, for the first time in memory,
eared gazing wigwams of fur.
LÁSZLÓ
One crepe-myrtle tree’s already mirrored
in the grass by bloom it has shed,
tissue flowerets the exact mauve of gloves
that adjust the coffined dead.
Now it’s evening. Cuisine on television:
artful pinches in Republic-flag liquid
on vast plates. I thought I would find
thistles in Scotland, too, but I never did.
Last night I met Lesley Murray.
She was my junior. Logically so.
Male Leslies crashed with Leslie Howard
in ’43. And he was a László.
My friend’s mother, seeing a woman shot,
split, and knew detachment from then on.
I marvelled She remembers when hers started! –
I watch myself writing this down.
BIG SHAME
When Dad and I first drove to Sydney
we shared billy tea by the kerb
brewed with water a housewife boiled for us.
Too flash for him, a cafe in a suburb,
though he could charm them dewy when he tried.
Same with all Up Home advice, where to eat
or stay, in the Big Smoke: it’s always
cheap holes where slurs die of defeat.
One dictionary awards rural-poor speech
entire to the Black folk who share it:
box up, walk off, bad friends, Poor, growl,
cheeky, hollow, in with, hunt, quiet –
Define me all those, or spare the Proletariat.
It’s called Big Shame, my poison-brother* fellow
says, this feeling abashed by proper people.
Before Racist and Beaut Authentic, we were Low
for which you get sentenced to the past
– you never see the court –
to smokes, to single beds in plywood rooms,
to union legends, to sashcord round your port.
* poison-brother – (Aboriginal English) brother-in-law.
An avoidance relationship in the Aboriginal kinship system.
THE SUNRAYSIA POEMS
Asparagus Bones
Thirstland talc light
haunted the bush horizons
all day. As it softened
into blusher we drove out
through gardens that are farms
past steeped sultana frames
to a red-earth dune
flicked all over with water
to keep it tightly knitted
in orange and avocado trees
black-green and silver green
above trickling dust. My friend
fetched a box of fossil bones
from the unlocked half-million
of the coolroom there: asparagus
for his banquet kitchen,
no-one around, no dog,
then we drove where biceps
of river water swelled
through a culvert, and bulges
of turbulence hunted swirls
just under their moon skin,
and we mentioned again
unsecured farm doors, open
verandahs, separate houses,
emblems of a good society.
Oasis City
Rose-red city in the angles of a cut-up
green anthology: grape stanzas, citrus strophes,
I like your dirt cliffs and chimney-broom palm trees,
your pipe dream under dust, in its heads of pressure.
I enjoy your landscape blown from the Pleistocene
and roofed in stick forests of tarmacadam blue.
Your river waltzed round thousands of loops to you
and never guessed. Now it’s locked in a Grand Canal,
aerated with paddlewheels, feeder of kicking sprays,
its willows placid as geese outspread over young
or banner-streamed under flood. Hey, rose-red city
of the tragic fountain, of the expensive brink,
of crescent clubs, of flags basil-white-and-tomato,
I love how you were invented and turned on:
the city as equipment, unpacking its intersections.
City dreamed wrongly true in Puglia and Antakya
with your unemployed orange-trunks globalised out of the ground,
I delight in the mountains your flat scrub calls to mind
and how you’d stack up if decanted over steep relief.
I praise your camel-train skies and tanglefoot red-gums
and how you mine water, speed it to chrome lace and slow it
to culture’s ingredients. How you learn your tolerance
on hideous pans far out, by the crystals of land sweat.
Along high-speed vistas, action breaks out of you,
but sweeter are its arrivals back inside
dust-walls of evergreen, air watered with raisins and weddings,
the beer of day pickers, the crash wine of night pickers.
Closer Links with Sunraysia
Hoofed beasts are year-round fires
devouring as high as they can reach,
hopeless to put out. Pink smoke
lifts off their terra cotta
but all fences have been torn out
and flocks, herds and horses banished
from this apricot country. Here
they’ve finished with the pastoral.
Downstream of this sprinkled terrain
merged desert rivers stop-go to Ocean
but the real Australian river,
the one made of hard labour and launched
with a tilt of a Chinese pole-bucket,
that one sets out for the human mouth
down a thousand asphalt beds
in squeaky crates and marshalled vintages.
The Bulb of the Darling Lily
Sitting round in the Grand Hotel
at Festival time. Another year
that Phili
p Hodgins can’t be here.
Naming the festival after him
almost confirms that. But like his fine
drypoint poems, it lets him be somewhere.
Sitting around in the Grand
with the stained glass in the gaming room
an upwelling pattern of vivid cards
and the T-shaped lolly-coloured logo
of the TAB everywhere, the Tabaret.
All Victoria’s become one casino.
Sitting around the Grand Hotel
adding antipasto to the impasto
of my mortal likeness, writing postcards
instead of going on the guided
Lake Mungo tour. Too reverential,
too sacred. No grinners out there laugh.
So, sitting around in the Grand
yarning with Mario, with Donna and Stefano
and descending to the lower kitchen
to meet Leopardo Leopardi, who isn’t
posing in languor on a thorn-tree limb
though he has the build, but making gnocchi.
Sitting around the Grand Hotel, yarning
about river cod as big as seals
and the de-snagged inland waters
being re-snagged to let them breed,
shovel-mouthed, with the beady gape
and rejecting clamp of a critic.
THE NEWLY TRAGIC DODO
It’s French for sleeping,
it’s English for dead,
the first extinction
the regretful regretted.
Trustful island bird, flightless,
too long on its pat:
survivors-of-the-fittest
used to point to all that,
but approving any die-out’s
now a thing you don’t do;
evolution is racist
if you think it right through.
When we were tough
the dodo was grotesque,
fat, silly, comical –
now it’s proud and brisk.
As any being becomes fashionable
its weight loses weight,
like the sea-supported whale
or the Carolina parrot.
THE MOWED HOLLOW
When yellow leaves the sky
they pipe it to the houses
to go on making red
and warm and floral and brown
but gradually people tire of it,
return it inside metal, and go
to be dark and breathe water colours.
Some yellow hangs on outside
forlornly tethered to posts.
Cars chase their own supply.
When we went down the hollow
under the stormcloud nations
the light was generalised there
from vague glass places in the trees
and the colours were moist and zinc,
submerged and weathered and lichen
with black aisles and white poplar blues.
The only yellow at all
was tight curls of fresh butter
as served on stainless steel
in a postwar cafe: cassia flowers,
soft crystal with caraway-dipped tongues,
butter mountains of cassia flowers
on green, still dewed with water.
TOWARDS 2000
As that monster the Twentieth Century
sheds its leathers and chains, it will cry
Automatic weapons! I shot at
millions and they died. I kept doing it,
but most not ruled by uniforms ate well
in the end. And cool replaced noble.
Nearly every black-and-white Historic figure
will look compromised by their haircut and cigar-
ette. And the dead will grow remoter
among words like pillow-sham and boater.
You’ll admit, the old century will plead,
I developed ways to see and hear the dead.
Only briefly will TV restrain Hitler
and Napoleon from having an affair.
I changed my mind about the retarded:
I ended great for those not the full quid.
You breathers, in your rhythmic inner blush,
you dismiss me, now I’m a busted flush,
but I brought cures, mass adventures – no one’s fooled.
A line called Last Century will be ruled
across all our lives, lightly at first,
even as unwiring bottles cough
their corks out, and posh aerosols burst
and glasses fill and ding, and people quaff.
YOU FIND YOU CAN LEAVE IT ALL
Like a charging man, hit
and settling face down in the ringing,
his cause and panic obsolete,
you find you can leave it all:
your loved people, pain, achievement
dwindling upstream of this raft-fall,
back with the dishes that translated
beasts and croplands into the ongoing
self portrait your genes had mandated.
Ribbed fluorescent-panels flow
over you down urgent corridors,
dismissing midday outside. Slow,
they’d resemble wet spade-widths in a pit;
you’ve left grief behind you, for others;
your funeral: who’ll know you’d re-planned it?
God, at the end of prose,
somehow be our poem –
When forebrainy consciousness goes
wordless selves it’d barely met,
inertias of rhythm, the life habit
continue the battle for you.
If enough of those hold
you may wake up in this world,
ache-boned, tear-sponged, dripped into:
Do you know your name? ‘Yes’ won’t do.
It’s Before again, with shadow. No tunnels.
You are a trunk of prickling cells.
It’s the evening of some day. But it’s also
afterlife from here on, by that consent
you found in you, to going where you went.
THE DERELICT MILKY WAY
FOR TAREE CITY MILLENNIUM COMMITTEE
Those estuaries of the east coast
with burnish over their olives and tans
from a sun that reads its days from right
to left, the Arab and Hebrew way;
each river’s a trumpet with a sand mute,
its valves are lift bridges at upstream towns;
receding outbreaks of violent hessian
map a long industry called The Highway
and little crosses turbaned in wreath
along its verges mark traffic death,
all because trumpets are no longer blown,
some reckon. Because there’s no agreed tune.
This coast was a cheek the Millennium
kissed early, on both of its dawns
as the Black Armband tightened and loosened
round throats, on our moral proscenium.
Such stuff was all Town, though, way back
when milk-lorries stacked can on can
bringing us in to learn from Shakespeare’s
fifteen acts against one fat man.
For pelicans over bottle-coloured lakes
time doesn’t count to a climax
then re-start, from no egg, in mid air.
Eels scuttering on creek crossings don’t care,
but a dog’s nose snuggled to your bum
is a form of walking hand in hand
and all through the bricked enormous Hospital
cousins jink in wheeled beds from room to room.
I wish us all more truthful cousinship
of more races, in the centuries to come –
that’s my boost. Beached lovers caress
like singing to each other in Braille
and Wrong wrong! the cattle grids shout
on sphinx-knee hills to the h
igh plateau
and guitar-shaped helicopters peer, strumming,
for a pot crop in forests’ cloud-shadow
but the big legal crop here is wilderness,
closing, in its solitudes and myriads,
on a Milky Way still settled by Australians
now portrayed kindly only in ads.
LITERARY EDITOR
He sits rejecting poems,
saying too much no,
a black pen in his hand
to score their lack of lo!
but then a magic word stands up
off the page: candelaborough –
it throws him out of kilter.
I’ve been too fine a filter.
Now see: the name of my true home.
It calls me! My native rococo!
Snug in his stamped envelope,
folds grimed like those in verses,
he rejects himself, bites a wet lip
and steering with his paperclip
lifts off for their rendezvous:
You edit me! You are my due!
Above the cirrus he traverses
we hear his fading blip.
THE RELATIVE GOLD
Most white people had no relations,
some had things to live up or live down;
in the days of Black Tommy McPherson
the country was more like the town.
Black Tom was a sport in New England
with his red Spanish boots and his sash
but among those who have no relations
respect is called credit. Bare cash
will get you supplies and survival
depending what stories are told –
so Black Tommy reached into New England
and drew out alluvial gold.
Places lightning had shattered in water
and still winked among pebbles were the source
of his drinking with duffers and teamsters;
all this drew the blue Police Force
who badgered him under suspicion
and questioned him where his claim lay
but the claims he half made and grinned off
truly tangled their snarling assay.
No trackers, no vertical riding
in gorges traced the washed vein of worth
with which he was buying up dignity.
Next thing, blacks’d be sharing the earth!
Tom’s one of the Tableland’s richest men,
smiled gold expert Henry Grob.
Who’d begrudge a McPherson up here? laughed Tommy,