Collected Poems

by Les Murray

Shedding its spiral pith helmet

  an orange is an irrigation

  of rupture and bouquet

  rocking the lower head about;

  one of the milder borders

  of the just endurable

  is the squint taste of a lemon,

  and it was limes, of dark tooled green

  which forgave the barefoot sailors

  bringing citrus to new dry lands.

  Cumquat, you bitter quip,

  let a rat make jam of you

  in her beardy house.

  Blood orange, children!

  raspberry blood in the glass:

  look for the five o’clock shadow

  on their cheeks.

  Those are full of blood,

  and easy: only pick the ones that

  relax off in your hand.

  Below Hollywood, as everywhere

  the trees of each grove appear

  as fantastically open

  treasure sacks, tied only at the ground.

  JET PROPULSION STEREO

  Over Westminster Bridge

  a cobalt BI bomber

  curved upward with doughboys,

  GIs and Hemingways; it

  circled up on spread wings

  then racked them back

  like a man pushing down

  hard on a top rafter

  to boost into speed,

  dwindle westwards and be haze

  at the end of the Cold War.

  Above Waterloo Bridge

  in a different year

  Concorde was rising

  atop ear-drilling stereo

  over the ranked city’s

  mid stream. Far up, white,

  near vertical, it looked

  like the cropped writing-quill

  Martin Waldseemüller would dip

  to letter on his draft map

  the wrong tribute-name America.

  INDUSTRIAL RELATIONS

  Said the conjuror Could I have afforded

  to resign on the spot when you ordered

  me to saw the Fat Lady

  in half before payday

  I would have. I find wage cuts sordid.

  FROM A TOURIST JOURNAL

  In a precinct of liver stone, high

  on its dais, the Taj seems bloc hail.

  We came to Agra over honking roads

  being built under us, past baby wheat

  and undoomed beasts and walking people.

  Lorries shouldered white marble loads.

  Glamour of ads demeaned street life

  in the city; many buildings were

  held aloft with liverwurst mortar.

  I have not left the Taj Mahal.

  Camels were lozenge-clipped like rug pile

  and workhorses had kept their stallionhood

  even in town, around the Taj wall.

  Anglos deny theirs all Bollywood.

  On Indian streets, tourists must still

  say too much no, and be diminished.

  Pedlars speak of it to their lit thumbs.

  I have not left the Taj Mahal.

  Poor men, though, in Raj-time uniforms:

  I’d felt that lure too, and understood.

  In Delhi, we craned up at a sky-high

  sandstone broom cinched with balustrades.

  Schoolkids from Nagaland posed with us

  below it, for their brag books, and new cars

  streamed left and right to the new world,

  but from Agra Fort we’d viewed, through haze,

  perfection as a factory making depth,

  pearl chimneys of the Taj Mahal.

  BLUELOOKOUT MOUNTAIN

  Bluelookout is a tractor climb

  to where you see the South Pacific.

  The animals who stay

  up there don’t know to see it.

  Bluelookout is the colours and smooth

  texture of forest pigeons

  though it’s ‘dirty’ in some folds

  with scrub the old ones would have burnt.

  Grasses of exotic green

  radiate down its ridge lines

  just how snow would lie

  and the owner’s house snuggles

  in close, not for shelter

  but out of all the view.

  Note: the spelling Bluelookout as one word with the accent

  on the first syllable reflects local pronunciation.

  THE SHARMAN DRUM

  What year was the very best Mallee Show?

  When Lord Hopetoun attended, that bottled year?

  When Skuthorpe danced his horse for some peer,

  Lord Brassicae? Or was it Brassey?

  and Sunshine harvesters turned into Massey –

  No no, what year? I need to hear.

  When the Wallup Pipe Band piped music and rum

  and Jim Sharman’s pugs beat the step-up drum

  just as the Departures began recording

  and ladies dressed up their skills and tone

  or dressed for each other, or themselves alone,

  when the ticket strung through the tweedy eye

  of each member’s lapel meant pedigree –

  What year, what year? It was every year

  after the last. They made a past,

  the ring events, the Wyandotte hens

  the marble cakes in their ribboned pens.

  What year was the greatest Mallee Show?

  When Warracknabeal yachts sailed on Lake Glue,

  bagging needles flew and girth straps strained.

  The best show was any year it rained!

  THE TOPPLED HEAD

  A big bald head is asleep

  like Lenin on a pavement.

  Tipping backward, it starts

  a great mouth-breathing snore

  throttling as stormwater,

  loud as a hangar door

  running on rails

  but his companion gently

  reshapes his pillow, till his

  position’s once more foetal,

  breathing toward his feet.

  His timbre goes silent, and

  the glottal dies in a gulp.

  DEFINITIONS

  Effete: a pose

  of palace cavalry officers

  in plum Crimean fig,

  spurs and pointed boots,

  not at all the stamp

  of tight-buttoned guards

  executing arm-geometry

  in the shouting yards,

  but sitting his vehicle

  listening to tanks change gears

  amid oncoming fusiliers

  one murmurs the style

  that has carried his cohort

  to this day, and now will test them:

  You have to kill them, Giles,

  You can’t arrest them.

  THE CONVERSATIONS

  A full moon always rises at sunset

  and a person is taller at night.

  Many fear their phobias more than death.

  The glass King of France feared he’d shatter.

  Chinese eunuchs kept their testes in spirit.

  Your brain can bleed from a sneeze-breath.

  A full moon always rises at sunset

  and a person is taller when prone.

  Donald Duck was once banned in Finland

  because he didn’t wear trousers,

  his loins were feather-girt like Daisy’s

  but no ostrich hides its head in sand.

  The cure for scurvy was found

  then long lost through medical theory.

  The Beginning is a steady white sound.

  The full moon rises at sunset

  and lemurs and capuchin monkeys

  pass a millipede round to get off on

  its powerful secretions. Mouthing it

  they wriggle in bliss on the ground.

  The heart of a groomed horse slows down.

  A fact is a small compact faith,

  a sense-datum to beasts, a power to man


  even if true, even while true –

  we read these laws in Isaac Neurone.

  One woman had sixty-nine children.

  Some lions mate fifty times a day.

  Napoleon had a victory addiction.

  A full moon always rises at sunset.

  Soldiers now can get in the family way.

  THE DOUBLE DIAMOND

  He was the family soldier,

  deadly marksman on tropic steeps.

  Home, he spurned the drunk heir-splitting

  of working for parents, and stayed poor

  on share farm after fence-sagging share farm.

  Goodbye! yelled the kids to new friends.

  Slim sang his songs, and his kind

  wife’s skin was sensitive to gossip.

  Over eighty, he stands in his suit

  outside where she, quick-spoken Alice

  lies tight-packed in varnished timber.

  As the family gather, he tells me

  Late years, I’ve lived at the hospital.

  Now I’ll forget the way there.

  AS COUNTRY WAS SLOW

  FOR PETER

  Our new motorway

  is a cross-country fort

  and we reinforcements

  speed between earthworks

  water-sumps and counterscarps,

  breaking out on wide glimpses,

  flying the overpasses –

  Little paper lanterns

  march up and down dirt,

  wrapped round three chopsticks

  plastic shrub-guards grow bushes

  to screen the real bush,

  to hide the old towns

  behind sound-walls and green –

  Wildlife crossings underneath

  the superglued pavement

  are jeep size; beasts must see

  nature restart beyond.

  The roads are our nature

  shining beyond delay,

  fretting to race on –

  Any check in high speed

  can bleed into gravel

  and hang pastel wreaths

  over roadside crosses.

  Have you had your scare yet? –

  It made you a driver

  not an ever-young name.

  We’re one Ireland, plus

  at least six Great Britains

  welded around Mars

  and cross-linked by cars –

  Benzene, diesel, autobahn:

  they’re a German creation,

  these private world-splicers.

  The uncle who farmed our place

  was an Arab of his day

  growing fuel for the horses

  who hauled the roads then.

  1914 ended that. Will I

  see fuel crops come again?

  I’ll ride a slow vehicle

  before cars are slow

  as country was slow.

  THE DEATH OF ISAAC NATHAN, 1864

  Stone statues of ancient waves

  tongue like dingoes on shore

  in time with wave-glitter on the harbour

  but the shake-a-leg chants of the Eora

  are rarely heard there any more

  and the white man who drew their nasals

  as footprints on five-lined paper

  lies flat away up Pitt Street,

  lies askew on gravel Pitt Street.

  Jumping off startled horses come men

  and other men down off the horse-tram

  which ladies stay aboard and cram

  their knuckles in their teeth, because a

  grandson of the last king of Poland

  is lying behind the rear wheels,

  lying in his blood and his music sheets

  where he missed his step and fell

  to be Sydney tramways’ first victim.

  Byron’s Hebrew melodist, driven

  out of London by Lord Melbourne,

  by the inked horns of Lord Melbourne,

  is now being lifted tenderly,

  he, the Anglican who used

  to pray wrapped in a white shawl

  is being wrapped in a tarpaulin

  and carried in catch-up cadence

  with crotchets he might have scored,

  carried over streets to his residence

  to lie in state on his table:

  Our Father and Melech ha-olam,

  then to go in a bourdon to Newtown

  and sleep near the real Miss Havisham.

  THE FILO SOLES

  When tar roads came

  in the barefoot age

  crossing them was hell

  with the sun at full rage.

  Kids learned to dip

  their feet in the black

  and quench with dust,

  dip again, and back

  in the dust, to form

  a dark layered crust

  and carry quick soles

  over the worst

  annealing their leather

  though many splash scornfully

  across, to flayed ground.

  MIDI

  Muscles and torsoes of cloud

  ascended over the mountains.

  The fields looked like high speed

  so new-mown was the hay,

  then the dark blue Italian lavender

  met overhead, a strange maize

  deeply planted as mass javelins

  in the hoed floor of the land.

  Insects in plastic armour stared

  from their turrets, and munched

  as others machined stiffly over us

  and we turned, enchanted

  in sweet walling breath

  under far-up gables of the lavender.

  OBSERVING THE MUTE CAT

  Clean water in the house

  but the cat laps up clay water

  outside. Drinking the earth.

  His pile, being perfect,

  ignores the misting rain.

  A charcoal Russian

  he opens his mouth like other cats

  and mimes a greeting mew.

  At one bound top-speed across

  the lawn and halfway up

  the zippy pear tree. Why? Branches?

  Stopping puzzles him.

  Eloquent of purr

  or indignant tail

  he politely hates to be picked up.

  His human friend never does it.

  He finds a voice

  in the flyscreen, rattling it,

  hanging cruciform on it,

  all to be let in

  to walk on his man.

  He can fish food pellets

  out of the dispenser, but waits,

  preferring to be served.

  A mouse he was playing

  on the grass ran in under him.

  Disconsolate, at last he wandered

  off – and drew and fired

  himself in one motion.

  He is often above you

  and appears where you will go.

  He swallows his scent, and

  discreet with his few stained birds

  he carries them off to read.

  BUTTRESS ON A HIGH CUTTING

  Angophora, rusty-shelled

  tree without a deep hold

  but when its hill split,

  this side root, jutting

  out into sun glare

  bent

  and flowed down, tight

  as mailbag wax, rain

  year by drought year

  to the new ground level

  buttressing its trunk still

  in high bush overhead

  far

  above blue roadbed

  and palm-tree eruptions,

  this pirouette of wood-

  coated trouserleg, taller

  than its many-buckled man.

  OVOIDS

  Moist black as sago pearls

  in white Chinese tea

  heads of women lovingly

  watch babies grabbing

  like unsteady moons


  in a wading pool full

  of cherry balloons.

  Cushions and knees

  and round toes in grass

  under tropic leaves

  the scented sweet

  skin glazed in sweat –

  all snapped from above in

  the aqueous ovarian.

  NURSING HOME

  Ne tibi supersis:

  don’t outlive yourself,

  panic, or break a hip

  or spit purée at the staff

  at the end of gender,

  never a happy ender –

  yet in the pastel light

  of indoors, there is a lady

  who has distilled to love

  beyond the fall of memory.

  She sits holding hands

  with an ancient woman

  who calls her brother and George

  as bees summarise the garden.

  FAME

  We were at dinner in Soho

  and the couple at the next table

  rose to go. The woman paused to say

  to me: I just wanted you to know

  I have got all your cook books

  and I swear by them!

  I managed

  to answer her: Ma’am

  they’ve done you nothing but good!

  which was perhaps immodest

  of whoever I am.

  CATTLE-HOOF HARDPAN

  Trees from modern times don’t bear

  but the old China pear

  still standing in the soil

  of 1880 rains fruit.

  PHONE CANVASS

  Chatting, after the donation part,

  the Blind Society’s caller

  answered my shy questions:

  ‘… and I love it on the street,

  all the echo and air pressure,

  people in my forehead and

  metal stone brick, the buildings

  passing in one side of my head …

  I can hear you smiling.’

  KING LEAR HAD ALZHEIMER’S

  The great feral novel

  every human is in

  is ruthless. It exists

  to involve and deflate.

  It is the meek talking.

  The great feral novel

  is published, not written

  (science bits may be written).

  Media grope in its shallows.

  The Real Story is their owners.

  The feral novel can get you

  told the lies about you,

  let you hear the Line about you.