by Les Murray
colours aren’t yet mortal in Australia.
It was only our equestrian team cap
that you had given me, but I took
the warning, folded, to Coleraine.
There I found hospitality
and Bushmills and the Giant’s Causeway.
No bush near the Mills
but a coracle sea and the Giant’s columns
massing on out, a basalt grandstand
of rain-cup pillars, crimped like Rubiks
from cooling out of their rock floor
all of half way from America.
BIG RABBIT AT THE VERANDAH
Big rabbit at the verandah
fleecy-chested and fawn
nibbling clover, Easter rabbit
not much like the humble
face-scratched hordes we would shoot
clear-shack! pea-shack! with rifles,
leave straining, boil for the pigs
or let stink, underground mutton
in days when yellow cows
would crop to our house doors
because undermined pasture was collapsing
seawards. We buried toothed traps
because it was war and we were losing.
Only with the cushion-udder Holsteins
our land was hard put to support
did science send our enemy
to tremble blind on dung-stony hills
Even dairy children
eased off shooting those for sport.
Grown sons restless to dress modern
compared town wages with Dad’s will
and came back as grasses were healing.
Our old brindle war sickened new
settlers. Cow peas stopped being grown
and dogs gentled four-wheel-drive cattle
in through wire gates. Dairy roofs
dried to blood. After snuffed billions
Rabbit, you look edible and risen.
BEING SPARED THE INQUESTS
A toddler’s scream –
the bared leap of a dingo,
the boy’s father running
with shouts and shovel blade.
Our valley came this close
to a deadly later fame.
TIME TWINS
A youth, rusty haired
as I was in my time,
rocked atop a high stool
as he read a book from
the stock he was to sell.
His left leg kinked under
his right knee, as mine does.
We had likely both of us
floated that way before birth
in separate times and wombs.
THE PLASTER EATER
Back to hospital again,
on the meals list, on the drip,
in for yet another stay
over an artificial knee
put in to replace a
born bone sideways wobbler.
Nurtured by mother cow
I have no idea how
a clunky knee can stop
your breath in pure pain,
unstring you as with a nerve-chop,
millions have jumped at prostheses:
a week, and they hip-hop
delightedly. Even you had six
weeks’ cure, before return of agony.
Since then will have cost us a year.
Just after you were born
Europe and her limestone cities
swirled with last-breath calcium
blasted into the air
yet you tell of chewing plaster
out of your nursery wall
and how at your
first refugee-child Christmas
you ignored the candled sweets
and gnawed the pine tree’s base
of calcareous brittle.
No wonder I became a teacher!
But after five children, I’m
perhaps chalk just down so far.
I, butter boy, sipper of vinegar,
am amazed as ever how you,
dear pardoner, kindest wife,
always blame yourself
as now, beyond hospital staph
and the overworking knife.
THE GLORY AND DECLINE OF BREAD
Sliced bread (sic)
a centimetre thick
staling on forty surfaces
fit for soggy sandwiches
real bread excels all this:
high top, Vienna, cob
baguettes three times daily
breads poignant as a sob
Jewish rye and German
brothers from the hob
Tall grass waving gluten
foreshadowed cultivation
its unbloody skin-oil scent
displaced the hunting tent
for prayer and work in season –
Rice eaters do not yet disdain
all meals centering on one grain
but potatoes came, and pasta
and boi meat from old Masta
and bread put butter on the heart
the idle svelte would dine apart
once designer chefs had risen
bread turns to landfill on the shelf
or, like salt, gets smuggled in
to sit below itself.
EATING FROM THE DICTIONARY
Plucked chook we called Poultry, or Fowl,
a meat rare in our kitchens, crepe-skinned
for festivity or medicine.
As Chooks alive, they were placid
donors of eggs and mild music.
Perches and dark gave them sleep.
Then came the false immigration
of millions crying in tin hell-ships
warmed all night by shit-haloed bulbs,
the coarsest species, re-named Chicken,
were fresh meat for mouths too long corned.
Valleys south of ours deigned to farm them.
When our few silver-pencilled Wyandottes
went down with a mystery plague,
their heads trailing back on their wings
no vet could diagnose them.
Chickens don’t live long enough
to get sick, laughed battery keepers.
Much later, when all our birds were dead
a boy of eleven who kept
name breeds said they had suffered
spinal worm. And was there a cure?
Sure. Garlic in their drinking water.
He named a small ration per year.
His parents vouched for him. No need.
We’d seen his small flock, and the trust
that tottered round him on zinc feet.
O.K. PRIMAVERA LIPS
The coral tree grows
in cowyards and old sties.
Thorny, tan in winter
it bears scarlet bracts,
red lipstick crescents.
Of Earth’s most spoken word,
okay, just one suggested origin
is neither cheesy nor far-fetched:
Only Kissing. From saucy times.
Only kissing, Pa. O.K.?
In fertile soil
coral trees pout lips
all over, before greening.
Ours didn’t, until drugged
with superphosphate. Now
it grips itself with carmine nails
to the heights of wisteria
that cascades rain-mauve
down wonga vines and gum trees
and the Chinese tallow boughs
ticketed with new green.
ORDER OF PERCEPTION: WEST KIMBERLEY
Water like a shambles of milk
at the end of the Wet
crowding down an ironstone flume
in the continent’s roared walls
Two pinholes in England
shine their name on two lands
this one has inverted boab trees
flowering on plateaux
and water aerating its atoms
in the ocean’s pumped comb
<
br /> THE MUSSEL BOWL
Of adventures by palate
lately, my finest was a soup
in which mussels had been served
and, the shellfish being shared,
no one minded my lifting up
the bowl to play
a whispered in-continuo of sup
in that yacht club down the Melbourne bay.
GROWTH
One who’d been my friendly Gran
was now mostly barred from me,
accomplishing her hard death
on that strange farm miles away.
My mother was nursing her
so we couldn’t be at home.
Dad had to stay out there, milking,
appearing sometimes, with his people,
all waiting for the past.
Hiding from the grief
this day, I dropped off a verandah
and started walking
barefoot through the paddocks
until the gravel road
gave me my home direction.
Cool dust of evening,
dark moved in from the road edges
and the sky trees, pencilling
across the pale ahead.
Bare house lights slowly passed
far out beside me.
No car lights. No petrol.
It was the peak of war
but no one had taught me fear
of ghosts or burnout streaks
from the stars above my walking.
Canter, though, gathered behind
and came level. The rider
pulled me aloft by the wrist
Now where are you off?
Back, where a priest had just been
cursed out of the morphine room,
I was hugged and laughed over
for the miles I’d covered.
Years later, it would come down
to me that Grannie’s death had
been hidden away, as cancer
still was then, a guilt in women.
One man was punched for asking
Did Emily have a growth?
A DENIZEN
The octopus is dead
who lived in Wylies Baths
below the circus balustrade
and the chocked sea tiles.
Old legerdemain of eight
died of too much chlorine
applied to purify the amenities
of urine and algal slippage.
Favourite of chivvying children
the one who could conform
its elastics with any current
or hang from its cupped feet
now lies, slop biltong,
beak and extinct pasta
out in the throwaway tide
and will leave with the wobbegong.
RADIANT PLEATS, MULGOA
Rectangular mansion, sunburnt pink,
embracing its half-round portico
of radiant pleats, all revival Greek,
skirt or soldier’s kilt: who’d know?
At least the house still stands, from back
when fellow statelies used to ring
the slopes of Sydney, issuing smoke,
watching for ships that brought everything.
Most such palaces died of equality
or of prone soldiers tucked in white.
Scant call for film backgrounds killed others
and a few were razed for spite –
Rectangular mansion, road-gang red,
tall behind its half mushroom
of swooped wood rafters, fanning to fit
the pillared curve of their bow rim.
BIRD SIGNATURES
Tiny spinnakers
of blue wrens wag among waves
of uncut lawn grass
o
Dapper lyre bird:
wonder what he’s typing there
below the study
o
A shrike thrush whistling
so piercingly it unseats the
ballast of our mind
o
Old river port, flooded
to mush, with bottles pacing
in it as avocets
o
Wood sawn by Nippon,
Oz nail pulled out for a cry:
the Nankeen night heron
LAST WORLD BEFORE THE STARS
These days that we’re apart
are like standing on Pluto,
there in the no-time of thought,
bijou world the area of West Australia
contra-rotating farthest out
with its three moons and little mountains,
looking off the short horizon,
the Sun a white daystar of squinch
glazing the ground like frozen twilight,
no life, no company, no nearness,
never a memory or a joke,
no pinned placket of dearness
just months gone in afternoon sleep
and cripple-hikes with beeping monitors.
1960 BROUGHT THE ELECTRIC
Old lampblack corners
and kero-drugged spiders
turn vivid and momentary
in the new yellow glare
that has reached us at last
a lifetime after stoves
put aside the iron pans
in which the skinned koala,
pelican and echidna
were laid on the coals.
How long Grandmother still
had to study whether boxwood
or mahogany baked longer
or hotter or better,
all that axed splinter cookery.
Now ah! the snapped dazzle
in the eyes of whatever
has fallen on the bed
and the wood cabinet streaming
ice cream and saltless meats.
VERTIGO
Last time I fell in a shower-room
I bled like a tumbril dandy
and the hotel longed to be rid of me.
Taken to the town clinic, I
described how I tripped on a steel
rim and found my head in the wardrobe.
Scalp-sewn and knotted and flagged
I thanked the Frau Doktor and fled,
wishing the grab-bar of age might
be bolted to all civilisation
and thinking of Rome’s eighth hill
heaped up out of broken amphorae.
When, any time after sixty,
or any time before, you stumble
over two stairs and club your forehead
among rake or hoe, brick or fuel-tin,
that’s time to call the purveyor
of steel pipe and indoor railings
and soon you’ll be gasping up landings
having left your balance in the car
from which please God you’ll never see
the launchway of tyres off a brink.
Later comes the sunny day when
street detail gets whitened to mauve
and people hurry you, or wait, quiet.
HOLLAND’S NADIR
Men around a submarine
moored in Sydney Harbour
close to the end of wartime
showed us below, down into
their oily mesh-lit gangway
of bunks atop machines.
In from the country, we
weren’t to know our shillings
bought them cigars and thread
for what remained of Holland’s Glory:
uniforms, odd rescued aircraft
and a clutch of undersea boats
patrolling from Fremantle. The men’s
country was still captive, their great
Indies had seen them ousted,
their slaves from centuries back
were still black, and their Queen
was in English exile.
The only ripostes still open
to them were torpedoes
and their throaty half-
<
br /> American-sounding language.
Speaking a luckier one
we set off home then. Home
and all that word would mean
in the age of rebirthing nations
which would be my time.
DOG SKILLS
From his high seat, an owner
of cattle has sent dogs
to work a mob of Angus.
They hit the gravel running
and draft as ordered.
In the old milking days
dogs were apt to be
untrained mixed-breed biters
screamed at from the house
since cows had farmers
imprisoned, unable to go
anywhere, including field days
where expertise and the laconic
style were fostered. Where
whistling reshaped fingers
and words were one syll.
Now new breeds and skill
silence the paddocks
a murmured vowel
brings collie and kelpie flying
along the road-cutting
till each makes its leap
of judgement into the tractor
tray, loose-tongued and smiling front.
RAISING AN ONLY CHILD
Dad, this is none of your business!
You never had sisters or brothers
to fight. And you stand abashed
again, an only child. Lone species
from two multi-sibling parents
who found you a mystery.
You can be made an only child
by rivals who fail early
and give back your lullaby.
You can see sibbling taught
by the instant rally of a cohort
that, were you theirs, would defend you
though with the same giggles
about bossiness or dalliance –
You do have brains, but no sense!
Expecting rejection, you tell
stories of yourself to the hills,
confused by your few instincts.
Employable only solo or top,
making friends from your own kind
is relief with blades in it,
assorted long adolescences
with whoop and giddy wit:
You can’t have anything!
and I, the only true human.
But also reproach from your own:
Dad, you laughed and joked way more
with your rat-pack adopted children
than with us. And you stammer
I wasn’t answerable for them –
Unable to flirt