by Les Murray
will you drink in your suit?
Will you come on the Net?
Once it was unions
now it’s no carbohydrates
no fats, then no proteins
barista, barista!
In the tall cities
barista, barista!
world is not made of atoms
world is made of careers.
DEATH FROM EXPOSURE
That winter. We missed her stark face
at work. Days till she was found, under
his verandah. Even student torturers
used to go in awe. She had zero small talk.
It made no sense she had his key.
It made no sense all she could have
done. Depression exhausts the mind.
She phones, no response, she drives up
straight to his place in the mountains,
down a side road, frost all day.
You knock. What next? You can’t manage
what next. Back at last, he finds her car.
She’s crawled in, under, among the firewood.
Quite often the world is not round.
ME AND JE REVIENS
My great grand-uncle invented haute couture. Tiens,
I am related to Je Reviens!
It is the line of Worth, Grandmother’s family
that excuses me from chic. It’s been done for me.
When Worths from Coolongolook, Aboriginal and white,
came out of Fromelles trenches on leave from the fight
they went up to Paris and daringly located
the House of Worth. At the doors, they hesitated –
but were swept from inquiry to welcome to magnificence:
You have come around the world to rescue France,
dear cousins. Nothing is too good for you!
Feast now and every visit. Make us your rendezvous.
I checked this with Worths, the senior ones still living:
Didn’t you know that? they said. Don’t you know anything?
PRESSURE
A man with a neutral face
in the great migration
clutching his shined suitcase
queueing at the Customs station:
Please (yes, you) open your suitcase.
He may not have understood.
Make it snappy. Open it! Come on!
Looking down out of focus did no good.
Tell him to open his suitcase!
The languages behind him were pressure.
He hugged his case in stark reluctance.
Tell him put suitcase on the counter!
Hasps popped, cut cords fell clear
and there was nothing in the suitcase.
CHURCH
I. M. JOSEPH BRODSKY
The wish to be right
has decamped in large numbers
but some come to God
in hopes of being wrong.
High on the end wall hangs
the Gospel, from before he was books.
All judging ends in his fix,
all, including his own.
He rose out of Jewish,
not English evolution
and he said the lamp he held
aloft to all nations was Jewish.
Freedom still eats freedom,
justice eats justice, love –
even love. One retarded man said
church makes me want to be naughty,
but naked in a muddy trench
with many thousands, someone’s saying
the true god gives his flesh and blood.
Idols demand yours off you.
PASTORAL SKETCHES
The sex of a stallion at rest
bulges in subtle fine rehearsal,
and his progeny drop in the grass
like little loose bagpipes.
Wet nap and knotty drones, they lie
glazing, and learning air
then they lever upright, wobbling.
Narrow as two dimensions
they nuzzle their mothers’ groin
for the yoghurt that makes girth.
*
The prickly paperbark tree
annually called Snow-in-summer
resembles the fragrant coiffure
of a crowd of senior women;
it joins up into a mountain,
white as Graz, warm as cauliflower.
Pencil holes in the clay soil
are where cicadas woke from their
years of foetus life, to two
two days frantic amethystine.
*
Individuals move round, miles apart,
planning gravel, making access.
Local news is the kind least sold.
Funerals come by radio or phone,
deduction and For Sale bring other bits,
some must even be danced for
at the Hall. You know Sid’s moved? –
Where to? – Out Gunnedah. –
After only eighty years? – His absence
will be the dark under their house brim.
*
Cleome flowers on improbably lank
spears incline their heads, to fling
free of the booty weight of bees.
Cats freeze and dab, and have to be
screamed back No, Mogg! as a snake
shuffles its suits like a cardsharp’s stretch.
Christmas stars detonating violetly
the season comes on with beachwear and bling.
We preferred the no-fly zone of Spring,
and cattle wade in their peaceful tragedy.
THE BLUEPRINT
Whatever the great religions offer
it is afterlife their people want:
Heaven, Paradise, higher reincarnations,
together or apart –
for these they will love God, or butter Karma.
Afterlife. Wherever it already exists
people will crawl into ships’ framework
or suffocate in truck containers to reach it,
they will conjure it down
on their beaches and their pooled clay streets,
inject it, marry into it.
The secular withholds any obeisance
that is aimed upwards.
It must go declaratively down,
but ‘an accident of consciousness
between two eternities of oblivion’ –
all of us have done one
of those eternities already, on our ear.
After the second, we require an afterlife
greater and stranger than science gives us now,
life like, then unlike
what mortal life has been.
BLUEPRINT II
Life after death
with all the difficult people
away in a separate felicity.
NORFOLK ISLAND
What did they get for England,
the Bounty mutineers?
Tahitian wives, then the discharging
of murder, on an islet walled by sea.
When all the ship-takers were dead
England gave their descendants
this greater island draped like a green
parachute over cliffs and ravines
and pegged with towering furled pines.
All around lay the same blue wall
supplies are still roped and lightered
in over, for the Beauty mountaineers.
They lived in an abandoned gulag.
Trim Georgian houses whose inside
fireplaces astonished the first
of Bounty’s neo-Polynesians.
On a Sydney whim, they were driven
out of that guilty settlement:
damn half breeds on Quality Row!
Sick people in their beds on the street –
Go up and live on your allotments!
Now the island is a garden city
in the flown-over ocean,
a godly tan ar
istocracy
whose children don’t seem hostile
and cars buzz them around
their anxiously fostering nation
of big unused fields.
(Chorus) We got
everything Tahiti got
e-e-xcept the
coconut!
BIRTHPLACE
Right in that house over there
an atom of sharp spilled my sanctum
and I was extruded, brain cuff,
in my terror, in my soap.
My heart wrung its two
already working hands together
but all the other animals
started waking up in my body,
the stale-water frog, the starving-worm;
my nerves’ knotwork globe
was filling up with panic writing;
bat wings in my chest caught fire
and I screamed in comic hiccups
all before focus, in the blazing cold –
then I was re-plugged, amid soothe,
on to a new blood that tasted.
Nothing else intense
happened to us, in this village.
My two years’ schooltime here
were my last in my own culture,
the one I still get held to
in this place, in working hours.
I love the wry equal humane
and drive in to be held to it.
THE SICK-BAGS
We landed through a Southerly Buster,
mad wind of thirty degrees south.
This landing was truly foot and mouth:
the sick-bags whispered out of every seat as
the plane bucked through two thousand metres,
lurched, and caused a grim fluster
like massed fans at a cotillon
before wheels locked, and rolled
and we would live on.
Heads of young trees were at work
still brushing the ground.
LATERAL DIMENSIONS
Cloudy night –
not enough stars
to make frost
haunted house –
one room the cattle
never would go in
mowing done –
each thing’s a ship again
on a wide green harbour
purification –
newspapers soaked in rain
before they are read
an airliner, high –
life falling in from space
to ramify
rodeo bull
he wins every time
then back on the truck
only one car
of your amber necklace
holds a once-living passenger
afternoon plains –
the only hill ahead
is the rising moon
eels’
liquid jostle through the grass
that night of the year
big pelican, begging,
hook through one yellow foot –
and nobody dares
on line
the first motor car
trotting without a horse
joking
in a foreign language
everyone looks down
accused of history
many decide
not to know any
all the colours
of inside a pumpkin –
Mallee forest in rain
BRIGHT LIGHTS ON EARTH
Luminous electric grist
brushed over the night world:
White Korea, Dark Korea,
tofu detailing all Japan,
Bangkok on a diamond saddle,
snowed-in Java and Bali
circled by shadow isles,
Cairo in its crushed-ice coupe,
dazzling cobwebbed Europe
that we’ve seen go black.
Now the streetlights don’t
switch off for wars. The past
is fuel of glacé continents,
it rims them in stung salt,
Australia in her sparsely starred
flag hammock. Human light
is the building whose walls
are inside. It bleeds the planet
but who could be refused
the glaring milk of earth?
PANIC ATTACK
The body had a nightmare.
Awake. No need of the movie.
No need of light, to keep hips
and shoulders rotating in bed
on the gimbals of wet eyes.
Pounding heart, chest pains –
should it be the right arm hurting?
The brain was a void
or a blasted-out chamber –
shreds of speech in there,
shatters of lust and prayer.
No one can face their heart
or turn their back on it.
Bowel stumbled to bowl,
emptied, and emptied again
till the gut was a train
crawling in its own tunnel,
slowly dragging the nightmare
down with it, below heart level.
You would not have died
the fear had been too great
but: to miss the ambulance moment –
Relax. In time, your hourglass
will be reversed again.
RECOGNISING THE DERISION AS FEAR
Death gets into the suburbs, but sleek
turnover highrise keeps it out of mind
and wilderness, wrapped in its own deaths,
scarcely points us at ours,
but furred rusty machines, and grey
boards unglazed for heritage or holiday –
you can’t truck in enough bricks.
Settled country is the land of the dead,
there you are taught love as mourning,
you shop in boarded-up places.
It’s great to follow car-dust
out towards the Mistake,
way past a working people’s farm,
long widowed, standing in space.
GENTRIFICAL FORCE
Gentrifical force, gentrifical force:
that’s an ex-convict on his own horse
with a new white wife and the black one gone
with his first children to a far station.
Then race and real estate took a joint course
and white ladies held the no-creole line
that ran up through sheaves to raise the bricks
which would become every rising town.
Gentrifical force: who paid for yours?
I sold out the conscripts and made them go mad
when we were rewritten by a new fashion.
I had to be cool. I have no remorse.
From the high ground we now tell our blood
that they are scum, living on stolen salt land –
Gentrifical force leaves so many behind
and turns them to primitives in its mind.
THE PHYSICAL DIASPORA OF WILLIAM WALLACE
Your conquest of the world
by merchandrie and steam,
by logic and surgery
gets my sidelong esteem
but every true nation is
underlain by hard men.
I fought for a kingdom
to guard our ways in.
We’d fought off each other,
we’d fought off the Norse;
I chain-maced the English
from my wee shaggy horse
and my heart’s near the Highlands,
my spleen is in York,
one gnawed shin’s in London,
my blood’s in your talk –
such was their peace-work.
I confess I brought grue
down on cottars and lassies
but for less long than you
with your borderless realms
of doctrine and idea,
often colder than the cleavers
that sent me far and ne
ar,
me, followed by high-hearts,
the headlong and the poor
to Wembley and Calcutta,
to Melbourne and Bras d’Or
to be Scots for some lifetimes
and then Scots no more.
SUNDAY ON A COUNTRY RIVER
After caramel airs of the sugar islands
and their carrying-handle bridges,
we skimmed over salt rainwater
that was reached across by smoke.
Ospreys flew, or sat up castled on sticks
and the shore trees were algal with creeper.
The diked low country on parole from floods
began foreshadowing inland jacaranda.
Below a two-deck bridge and cathedral city
water silver-brown as polarised shades
shook ahead of us, and split
in two behind us like innumerable catch.
We tied up under high oiled gondola-poles.
Fig trees had star-burst the pavements we pubbed on
but the blackboards lunch was scrubbed on
sent us away to cast off for more vista.
Pelicans still luffed aloft
now into air that breathed of cattle, and
front-verandah houses, bland with equality,
perched atop increasing bluffs.
Only a historic Bedouin tent of vast
corrugated iron presided, farther back,
and turning under layered cliffs
we kept causing long wing-skitter takeoffs.
We were nearly to Pages’, when our boat
Bumped and started cavilling. It gets hairy from here,
we said. And there was hair, too,
muddy blonde, growing just underwater.
RIPE IN THE ARBOURS OF THE NOSE
Even rippled with sun
the greens of a citrus grove darken
like ocean deepening from shore.
Each tree is full of shade.
A shadowy fast spiral through
and a crow’s transfixed an orange
to carry off and mine
its latitudes and longitudes
till they’re a parched void scrotum.
alAndalus has an orange grove
planted in rows and shaven above
to form an unwalkable dream lawn
viewed from loggias.
One level down,
radiance in a fruit-roofed ambulatory.
Mandarin, if I didn’t eat you
How could you ever see the sun?
(Even I will never see it
except in blue translation).