by Les Murray
were dry and arch, but quickly earnest.
From that day, and the audible
woodwind cry of peafowl, it was half
a long lifetime till jerked motors
would ripple the highroad
with their soundwaves, like a palate,
and kiss its gravel out
with round rubber lips
growling for the buckets of tar
and another life to the autobahn
nothing joins, where I race the mirror
in a fighter cockpit made posh
under flak of Guy Fawkes eve
over the cities of fumed brick.
THE TEST
How good is their best?
and how good is their rest?
The first is a question to be asked of an artist.
Both are the questions to be asked of a culture.
THE KITCHEN GRAMMARS
The verb in a Sanscrit or Farsi
or Latin or Japanese sentence
most frequently comes last,
as if the ingredients and spices
only after collection, measure and
even preservation might get cooked.
To all these cuisines renown attaches.
It’s the opening of a Celtic sentence
is a verb. And it was more fire and pot
for us very often than ingredients.
Had we not fed our severed heads on poetry
final might have been our fame’s starvation.
Upholding cuisine for us are the French
to be counting in scores and called Gallic.
In English and many more, in Chinese
the verb surrounds itself nucleus-fashion
with its subjects and qualifiers.
Down every slope of the wok they go
to the spitting middle, to be sauced,
ladled, lidded, steamed, flipped back up,
becoming verbs themselves often
and the calm egg centres the meatloaf.
WINTER WINDS
Like appliqué on nothingness
like adjectives in hype
fallen bracts of the bougain-
magenta-and-faded-villea
eddy round the lee verandah
like flowers still partying
when their dress has gone home.
THE TUNE ON YOUR MIND
Asperges me hyssopo
the snatch of plainsong went,
Thou sprinklest me with hyssop
was the clerical intent,
not Asparagus with hiccups
and never autistic savant.
Asperger, mais. Asperg is me.
The coin took years to drop:
Lectures instead of chat. The want
of people skills. The need for Rules.
Never towing a line from the Ship of Fools.
The avoided eyes. Great memory.
Horror not seeming to perturb –
Hyssop can be a bitter herb.
A DIALECT HISTORY OF AUSTRALIA
Bralgu. Kata Tjuta. Lutana.
Cape Leeuwin Abrolhos Groote Eylandt.
Botany Bay Cook Banksia Kangaroo Ground
Sydney Cove Broad Arrow Neutral Bay China Walls
Sodwalls Hungerford Cedar Party Tailem Bend
Jackadgery Loveday Darwin Kilmany. Come-by-Chance
Lower Plenty Eureka Darling Downs Dinner Plain
Telegraph Point Alice Maryfarms Diamantina
Combo Waterhole Delegate Federal Spion Kop
Hermannsburg Floreat Emu Heights. Pozieres
Monash Diggers Rest. Longreach The Gabba Hollow Tree
Perisher Police Point. Hawker Kuttabul Owens Gap
Greenslopes Repat. Red Bluff Curl Curl Charmhaven
Cracow York Kalimna Howrah. Wave Hill.
Beenleigh Yea Boort Iron Baron Long Pocket
Grange Nowhere Else Patho Tullamarine. Timor.
FOR AN EIGHTIETH BIRTHDAY
I. M. LEWIS DEER
On a summer morning after the war
you’re walking with the Belle of the Ball
both in your new pressed sports gear
over grass towards the scotching sound
of tennis balls on lined antbed
inside the netting’s tall swarm.
You glance past the wartime rifle range
below the great cattle hill
that lifts your family name high
and into the gap the Japanese
soldiers never reached, there where
your years of farming will happen.
Bounce comes in your step from strung
racquets, from neighbours still young,
from unnoticed good of sun and birds
and the understandings calmly dancing
between you two, walking into the stroke-play
of gee-ups on a tournament Saturday.
ON THE CENTRAL COAST LINE
When the magazine of rising suburbs
slips off my face, our train
has come down through shrubland
a head ahead
into a stone archipelago
of forested gigantic oysters
underlit to their mouth valves
in a river-coloured sea
a head a head
brushed to red cedar
We sail on steel at water level
and on and on up mirror fjord,
shell barges, roadless weekenders
in pastels turning khaki
don’t let glances become
cells of a stare
We knock inside a tunnel
and are released to wide chrome,
to jelly-sting of wharf towns –
if that head turned
to show one certain face
this would not be now
MELBOURNE PAVEMENT COFFEE
Storeys over storeys without narrative
an estuarine vertical imperative
plugged into vast salt-pans of pavement
and higher hire over the river
ignited words pouring down live:
there an errant dog is running
nose down like a pursuit car
police car! police car! central city
and trams that look always oncoming
stop, and stand shimmering like cymbals
after the mesh! of their pair.
Here posture is better, suitings thicker
and footmen are said to survive
behind oaks up the odd gravel drive.
We saw a wall of tomato
blazer-backs striped blue-and-yellow
ranged right across their school stage
just like an inland rain painting.
We heard our grandest parliament sigh
down Bourke Street My country, why
did you leave me, and change at Albury?
History made here touched the world.
Now a demoted capital bleeds politics
Burnet’s immune system was right wing!
down the microphone, black icecream cone,
down the cinecamera, New Age monocle.
Not housing, but characterful houses
lace-trimmed like picnic day blouses
reigned when beer went with cray.
Now the crayfish are Formula One
cars, flat out in raging procession –
but we’re off to where the river
learns and teaches the Bay.
PHOTOGRAPHING ASPIRATION
Fume-glossed, unhearably shrill,
this car is dilated with a glaze,
that will vanish before standstill –
and here’s the youth swimming in space
above his whiplash motorcycle:
quadriplegia shows him its propped face –
after, he begged video scenes
not display his soaking jeans,
urine that leathers would have hidden
and the drag cars have engines on their engines.
BLACK BELT IN MARITAL ARTS
Pork hock and jellyfish. Poor cock.
King Henry had a marital block.
A dog in the manager? Don’t mock!
denial flows past Cairo.
A rhyme is a pun that knows where
to stop. Puns pique us with the glare
of worlds too coherent to bear
by any groan person.
Nothing moved him like her before.
It was like hymn and herbivore,
Serbs some are too acerbic for –
punning moves toward music.
THE WELTER
How deep is the weatherfront of time
that advances, roaring and calm
unendingly between was and will be?
A millisecond? A few hours? All secular life
worldwide, all consequences of past life
travel in it. It’s weird to move ahead of,
so I went back to 1938,
the year of the Sesquicentennial,
and it was bare as a drought landscape
under a weakened sun. I found few objects,
a dessicated brougham in a slab lean-to,
a phrenological head defined in segments,
all sparse dead matter from far earlier times.
Underfoot at first were ghostly streets, but I
found my valley by its shapes. No trace of home.
My birth and my family were still travelling
in the time-front and beyond it. Mr Speed,
the last convict, who had died that year
may be travelling too, in effects of his life.
All the human figures I thought I saw
away on that country proved to be
tall old-style window tombstones. I became
aware that all the clouds there’d ever been
were up ahead, being recycled in the life-front.
Beyond flat furrows and exhausted wire
salt frosted the cobble of parched waterholes.
But tears underlie every country. Nowhere do they
discharge the past, which is the live dark matter
that flows undismissably with us, and impends
unseen over every point we reach. One day
over wing-collared futures towered the dinosaur.
A LEVITATION OF LAND
OCTOBER 2002
Haze went from smoke-blue to beige
gradually, after midday.
The Inland was passing over
high up, and between the trees.
The north hills and the south hills
lost focus and faded away.
As the Inland was passing over
lungless flies quizzing road kill
got clogged with aerial plaster.
Familiar roads ended in vertical
paddocks unfenced in abstraction.
The sun was back to animating clay.
The whole ploughed fertile crescent
inside the ranges’ long bow
offered up billion-tonne cargo
compound of hoofprints and debt,
stark street vistas, diesel and sweat.
This finest skim of drought particles
formed a lens, fuzzy with grind,
a shield the length of Northern Europe
and had the lift of a wing
which traffic of thermals kept amassing
over the mountains. Grist the shade
of kitchen blinds sprinkled every scene.
A dustbowl inverted in the sky
shared the coast out in bush-airfield sizes.
A surfer from the hundred acre sea
landed on the beach’s narrow squeak
and re-made his home town out of pastry.
A sense of brown snake in the air
and dogs whiffed, scanning their nosepaper.
Teenagers in the tan foreshortening
regained, for moments, their child voices,
and in double image, Vanuatu to New Zealand
an echo-Australia gathered out on the ocean
having once more scattered itself from its urn.
THROUGH THE LATTICE DOOR
This house, in lattice to the eaves,
diagonals tacked across diagonals,
is cool as a bottle in wicker.
The sun, through stiff lozenge leaves,
prints verandahs in yellow Argyle.
Under human weight, the aged floorboards
are subtly joined, and walk with you;
French windows along them flicker.
In this former hospital’s painted wards
lamplit crises have powdered to grief.
Inner walling, worn back to lead-blue,
stays moveless as the one person still
living here stands up from reading,
the one who returned here from her life,
up steps, inside the guesswork walls,
since in there love for her had persisted.
ON THE NORTH COAST LINE
The train coming on up the Coast
fitting like a snake into water
is fleeing the sacrificial crust
of suburbs built into fire forest.
Today, smoke towers above there.
We’ve winged along sills of the sea
we’ve traversed the Welsh and Geordie
placenames where pickaxe coughing
won coal from miners’ crystal lungs.
No one aboard looks wealthy:
wives, non-drivers, Aborigines,
sun-crackled workers. The style
of country trains isn’t lifestyle.
River levees round old chain-gang towns
fall away behind our run of windows.
By cuttings like hangars filled with rock
to Stroud Road, and Stratford on the Avon,
both named by Robert Dawson, who ordered
convicts hung for drowning Native children
but the Governor stopped him. God
help especially the underdogs of underdogs
and the country now is spread hide
harnessed with sparse human things
and miles ahead, dawning into mind
under its approaching cobalt-inked
Chinese scroll of drapefold mountains
waits Dawson’s homesick Gloucester
where Catholics weren’t allowed to live.
There people crowd out onto the platform
to blow smoke like a regiment, before windows
carry them on, as ivory phantoms
who might not quip, or sue,
between the haunches of the hills
where the pioneer Isabella Mary Kelly
(She poisons flour! Sleeps with bushrangers!
She flogs her convicts herself!)
refusing any man’s protection
rode with pocket pistols. Which
on this coast, made her the Kelly
whom slander forced to bear the whole guilt,
when it was real, of European settlement.
Now her name gets misremembered:
Kelly’s crossing, Kate Kelly’s Crossing
and few battlers on this train
think they live in a European settlement
and on a platform down the first
subtropic river, patched velvet girls
get met by their mothers’ lovers,
lawn bowlers step down clutching their nuclei
and a walking frame is hoisted yea! like swords.
THE NOSTRIL SONGS
P. Ovidius Naso
when banished from Rome
remained in the city
for days on slave clothing,
for weeks in his study,
for decades in living noses –
*
Trees register the dog
and the dog receives the forest
as it trots toward the trees
then the sleeping tiger
reaches the dog en masse
befo
re the dog reaches the tiger:
this from the Bengal forests
in the upper Kerosene age,
curry finger-lines in shock fur.
*
The woman in the scarlet tapestry
who stands up on a sprigged cushion
of land in space, is in fact
nude, as all are in the nostril-world.
What seem to be her rich gowns
are quotations from plants and animals
modulating her tucked, demure
but central olfactory heart
and her absent lover, pivoting
on his smaller salt heart
floats banner-like above her.
*
No stench is infra dog.
*
Fragrance stays measured,
stench bloats out of proportion:
even a rat-sized death,
not in contact with soil, is soon
a house-evacuating metal gas
in our sinuses; it boggles our gorge.
No saving that sofa:
give it a Viking funeral!
*
The kingdom of ghosts
has two nostril doors
like the McDonald’s symbol.
You are summoned to breathe
the air of another time
that is home, that is desperate,
the tinctures, the sachets.
You yourself are a ghost.
If you were there
you are still there –
even if you’re alive
out in the world of joking.
For other species, the nasal kingdom
is as enslaved and barbed
as the urine stars around all territory,
as the coke lines of autumn
snorting into a truffle-pig’s head
or the nose-gaffed stallion,
still an earner, who screams rising
for the tenth time in a day.
*
Mammal self-portraits
are everywhere, rubbed on
or sprayed on in an instant.
Read by nose, they don’t give
the outline shapes demanded
by that wingless bird the human;
with our beak and eyes
we perceive them as smears
or turds, or nothing at all.
Painted from inside
these portraits give the inner
truth of their subject
with no reserve or lie.
Warned or comforted or stirred
every mammal’s an unfoolable
connoisseur, with its fluids