Collected Poems
Page 55
And the first jumbo jets descend
like mates whose names you won’t recall,
going down behind the city.
THE SPRINGFIELDS
Lead drips out of
a burning farm rail.
Their Civil War.
RUGBY WHEELS
I.M. MATT LAFFAN 1970–2009
Four villages in Ireland
knew never to mix their blood
but such lore gets lost
in the emigrations.
Matt Laffan’s parents learned it
in their marriage of genes
they could never share again.
They raised Matt through captaincies
and law degrees. And he exalted them
with his verve and clarities,
sat on a rugby tribunal,
drank beers a third his height
and rode a powered wheelchair
akimbo as in a chariot
with tie-clip, combed red hair,
causes to plead. Beloved in Sydney
he created a travel website
for the lame, and grinned among them
Doors will often open.
Beware a step or two
down or up when they do,
and he told self-doubters
You’ll always be taller than me!
as he flew his electoral box-kite.
Popular with women, and yet
vision of him in their company
often shows a precipice near
or a balcony-lit corridor.
I would have lacked his
heroism in being a hero.
A FREQUENT FLYER PROPOSES A NAME
Sexburga Drive is a steep mud lane
but Sexburga, she was Queen of Kent
fourteen centuries ago.
She tried to rule as well as reign
but her tough spear-thanes grated No!
she’s but a wife-man, a loaf-kneader:
we will not obey a bodice-feeder.
No precedent, said Witan. Quite unkent
so on Sheppey isle she built a convent.
But now, in an era more Amazon,
the notion has come to the jarl of London,
white-polled Boris, to move Heathrow
east to the marshy Thames outflow
so jetliners may leave their keening cry
out over the Channel and grim North Sea –
and Celtic queens have ruled: Boudicca, Bess,
but your Saxon ones still await redress
so savour this name: London Sexburga Airport.
HESIOD ON BUSHFIRE
Poxes of the Sun or of the mind
bring the force-ten firestorms.
After come same-surname funerals,
junked theory, praise of mateship.
Love the gum forest, camp out in it
but death hosts your living in it, brother.
You need buried space
and cellars have a convict foetor:
only pubs kept them. Houses shook them off
wherever Diggers moved to.
Only opal desert digs homes by dozer,
the cool Hobbit answer.
Cellars, or bunkers, mustn’t sit square
under the fuel your blazing house will be,
but nearby, roofed refractory,
tight against igniting air-miles.
Power should come underground
from Fortress Suburbia, and your treasures
stay back there, where few now
grow up in the fear of grass.
Never build on a summit or a gully top:
fire’s an uphill racer deliriously welcomed
by growth it cures of growth.
Shun a ridgeline, window puncher at a thousand degrees.
Sex is Fire, in the ancient Law.
Investment is Fire. Grazing beasts are cool Fire
backburning paddocks to the door.
Ideology is Fire.
The British Isles and giant fig trees are Water.
Horse-penis helicopters are watery TV
but unblocked roads and straight volunteers
are lifesaving spume spray.
Water and Fire chase each other in jet
planes. May you never flee through them
at a generation’s end, as when
the Great Depression died, or Marvellous Melbourne.
THE BLAME
FOR CLARE
Archie was a gun to shoot at biplanes
and an uncle I missed meeting, a dancing whiz
till we lost the footwork that was his.
His elder brother was a timbercutter
who scorned to harvest a rotting tree
so their father wheedled hapless Archie
who felled it crooked, into his brain.
All would rather he had left children
on earth than the mighty grief that followed.
His mother had seen the head-splash happen
five hours before it did, and rode
searching the bush to find the men.
She saw because she knew her world.
Later she would ask her husband
Did you even take your own axe, Allan?
The expert brother got a family block
with a weatherproof dairy and bung clock.
Everything else let the wind through.
Neither he nor his father believed in accident.
Punishment was happening. He was charged rent
to preclude any loans for farm improvement
and eight years’ back pay would never come.
Face and bequests were the family-labour system
and, all too often, its enforcement.
He, the blamed son, loved all his mother gave him,
the gold watch, touring car, touch of fey;
the latter two failed on his wife’s death day
but the car was kept till it fell apart.
Archie’s name was shunned, its luck was bad,
but all his survivors got the farm we’d had.
Now nearly everyone who knew an Archie
has rejoined him in more than memory.
Freed of blood, the name starts to return.
SINGING TOUR IN VIETNAM
FOR LITTLE PATTIE
Mrs Amp., it’s good to meet you.
Hey, did they ever give you
a medal for Long Tan?
No! They reckoned I caused it …
MIDWINTER KANGAROO NESTS
Rasp and whistle
remix this long grass
grown out of hoofprints
to the borders of shade.
The caked white bling
of frost salts melting
tiny birds arrive
sorting for proteins.
As day dries, sleep-tubs
flattened down in the billows
of string-coloured cursive
display no dungs,
not black cattle-green,
not papery human
and quail-run stems revive
lifting longshank fiddlers.
Breath-chaff gets coughed
and dog-drowners tall as khaki
rise in forest that has been
sky-suspended all day.
THE MIRRORBALL
Half a day’s drive from Melbourne
until we reach the first town
that’s not bypassed by expressway.
Holbrook, once Germantown,
Holbrook of the submarines,
conning tower and periscopes
rising out of sheep land.
It recalls the country towns
up the roads of 1940
each with its trees and Soldier,
its live and dead shop windows
and a story like Les Boyce
we heard about up home,
Taree’s Lord Mayor of London.
But now song and story are pixels
of a mirrorball that spins celebrities
in patter a
nd tiny music
so when the bus driver restarts
his vast tremolo of glances
half his earplugged sitters wear
the look of deserted towns.
INFINITE ANTHOLOGY
Gross motor – co-ordination as a whistle subject
audiation – daydreaming in tunes
papped – snapped by paparazzi
whipping side – right hand side of a convict or sheep
hepcat, hip (from Wolof hipi-kat, one who knows the score) – spirit in which modernist art goes slumming
instant – (Australian) Nescafé
ranga – redhead
Creators of single words or phrases are by far the largest class of poets. Many ignore all other poetry.
Jail tats – totemic underskin writing done because illegal
lundy – a turned Ulster
rebuttal tapes – counter-propaganda filmed by warplanes
free traders – (19th and early 20th cent.) split bloomers worn under voluminous skirts
daylight – second placegetter when winner is very superior to field
window licker – a voyeur
fibro – resident of a poorer suburb
Single-word poets hope to be published and credited in the Great Book of Anon, the dictionary. The cleverest make their names serve this purpose: Maxim, Maxim’s, Churchillian.
Irishtown – a Soweto of old-time Catholic labour
bunny boiler – one who kills her offspring
dandruff acting – the stiffest kind of Thespian art
blackout – Aboriginal party or picnic, whites not invited
butternut – homespun cloth dyed with hickory juice
shart – a non-dry fart
Baptist Boilermaker – coffee and soda (an imagined Puritan cocktail)
Single-word poets recycle words in advance of need, or leave them exposed to the weather of real difference.
Wedge – cloth bunched in the groin; may cause camel toe (q.v.)
wedge – to force the pace or direction
bushed – lost (Australian)
bushed – tired (American)
bushed – suffering camp fever (Canadian)
limo – limousin cattle
proud – castrated but still interested
Many quaint items are invented merely for show, but similar items may be the insignia of particular groups or classes.
Drummy – echoing, hollow-sounding (mining term)
rosebud – American Civil War wound
Shabos goy – Gentile who does small jobs for Orthodox Jews on Sabbath or other holy days
choke – to strap loose freight tightly together for transport
off book – (theatre) having one’s lines down pat
bugle driver – attachment on a drill to intensify its power in sinking screws
tipping elbow – (Aboriginal) sneaking glances at one’s watch
WRECKED BIRDS
Mostly in the spring
a trainee bird’s wing
will wave from the roadbed.
Colours that had started
in its feathers will clog, scattered
by a botched evade
attempted out above
that naked ground young birds
don’t sense as haunted.
AT THE OPERA
Twitching the curtain aside
reveals an ebullition of talk
including the word lorgnette
which I thought
had faded before I was born yet.
THE CARTOONIST
Harry Reade, whom green students
called Harry the Bolshie
to his irritation,
argued with libertarians
and savagely with Hungarians
and recited Spanish verbs
while trolleying cadavers
in the School of Anatomy
in a fever to reach Cuba
and fight in the Revolution
since it had taken hold there.
Harry Reade spoke of camping
in hollow logs with his father –
then vanished for ten years
to the Bay of Pigs,
to cartooning for ¡Hoy!
Che and Fidel called him
their kangaroo, their mascot,
but when he wept home
by ship up the Harbour
he’d also cartooned
in Toronto, on the Star.
The Revolution was fine
for getting parasites out
of the bloodstreams of children
but not for the mind,
the life of the mind,
Kangaroo Harry told me.
Ten more years, and he lived
at the Harold Park Hotel
by the dog track, the harness track –
the Harold Park, where poor teens
heard six poets for one beer –
Harry wrote plays for there,
one of Rudd, Steele, caricaturist
hustling a man to the gallows
and the Revolution, ay
¡la Revolucion! was all back,
Bay of Pigs and of Missiles
in its full santería.
Now his ashes would be scattered
on a park in la Habana,
Harry Reade, all alone
and in time it was done.
He led his kindly ash-bearers
past an enormous field
where a running man screamed
threats at them because a child
in their party chewed a cane-stub:
¡Yanquis, sabotajeando el azúcar!
But no, they were Australians,
un veterano, sus cenizas –
and Harry kept his course
in the week that Fidel
conceded his error
in having banned the Beatles.
MANUSCRIPT ROUNDEL
What did you see in the walnut?
Horses red-harnessed criss cross
and a soldier wearing the credits
of his movie like medal ribbons.
An egg in there building a buttery
held itself aloft in its hands –
red straps then pulled the nut shut.
NATAL GRASS
Plain as wicker most of the year
along October this tousled grass
wakes up on road verges in a smoke
of sago bloom, of ginger knots
tied in a shapeless woolly plasma
but get this web across the sun
and it ignites cut-glass rosé
goblets and pitchers. In God’s name
liquid opal from a parallel shore,
the dazzle of dew anytime of day.
THE FALLEN GOLFER
The sound of a perfect Masaman shot
doddling to rest in the fifteenth pot
with the same dull scrabble as in the tenth hole
reassured a tedium in us all –
and who would I be joining, should I now laugh?
THE MAN IN THE WHITE BAY HOTEL
When the pub’s ground floor
was to be walled in
by the new highway’s curve
its city-ward swerve
the old bloke upstairs
was asked to stay on
despite empty cellars
‘to scare the bad fellers.’
Two dozen white bedrooms
were bridal to his choice
and his mealtimes’ vast kitchen
insulated from road noise;
deal wardrobes in abundance
awaited his pants
and his views of the city
mixed the past with high rise.
Written up in the paper
which the bad fellers read
just how his life ended
no one I met said.
Down, perhaps, with beetles
just emerged from their foetals
black and gold, moribund and
still breeding though dead.
But I hope he stayed unrescued
as he wished to be
or living out his mystery
in a hotel built too regal,
licensed, floor-hosed and legal,
to afford sailors and workmen
coming to with dunnage gone
on windjammers far at sea.
WINDING UP AT THE BOOTMAKER’S
The widow handing out
her husband’s last repair jobs,
each already newsprint-wrapped
sits meanwhile in their unlit shop
hands open in her lap.
Bitter grief has nearly smoothed her skin.
Kneeling up in Mediterranean black,
reaching down the numbered parcels
as if returning all their wedding gifts.
THE BLACK BEACHES
Yellow rimming the ocean
is mountains washing back
but lagoons in cleared land often
show beaches of velvet black
peat of grass and great trees
that were wood-fired towers
then mines of stary coals
fuming deep in dragon-holes.
This morning’s frost dunes
afloat on knee-sprung pasture
were gone in a sugar lick
leaving strawed moisture
but that was early
and a change took back the sun
hiding it in regrowth forest.
Coal formed all afternoon.
INSPECTING THE RIVERMOUTH
Drove up to Hahndorf:
boiled lamb hock, great scoff!
Lamplit rain incessant.
Next morning to the Murray mouth,
reed-wrapped bottlings of view
grigio and verdelho.
Saw careers from the climbing bridge,
the steel houses it threw
all over Hindmarsh Island,
the barrages de richesse,
film culture, horseradish farms,
steamboats kneading heron-blue
lake, the river full again.
Upstream, the iron cattle bridges.
So. Then a thousand miles
home across green lawn.
THE CANONISATION
ROME, 17 OCTOBER 2010
Mary MacKillop, born 1842,
what are the clergy giving you
on my birthday, Mother Mary?
Sainthood? So long after God did?