they have been buried in the moon so long.
Beyond all wars
in the noonday lands of wheat,
the whistle summons shouters from the bar,
refills the train with jokes and window noise.
This perfect plain
casts out the things we’ve done
as we jostle here, relaxed as farmers, smoking,
held at this siding
till the red clicks green.
BLOOD
Pig-crowds in successive, screaming pens
we still to greedy drinking, trough by trough,
tusk-heavy boars, fat mud-beslabbered sows:
Gahn, let him drink, you slut, you’ve had enough!
Laughing and grave by turns, in milky boots,
we stand and yarn, and whet our butcher’s knife,
sling cobs of corn – Hey, careful of his nuts!
It’s made you cruel, all that smart city life.
In paper spills, we roll coarse, sweet tobacco.
That’s him down there, the one we’ll have to catch,
that little Berkshire with the pointy ears.
I call him Georgie. Here, you got a match?
The shadow of a cloud moves down the ridge,
on summer hills, a patch of autumn light.
My cousin sheathes in dirt his priestly knife.
They say pigs see the wind. You think that’s right?
I couldn’t say. It sounds like a fair motto.
There are some poets – Right, he’s finished now.
Melon-sized and muscular, with shrieks
the pig is seized and bundled anyhow
his twisting strength permits, then sternly held.
My cousin tests his knife, sights for the heart
and sinks the blade with one long, even push.
A wild scream bursts as knife and victim part
and hits the showering heavens as our beast
flees straight downfield, choked in his pumping gush
that feeds the earth, and drags him to his knees –
Bleed, Georgie, pump! And with a long-legged rush
my cousin is beside the thing he killed
and pommels it, and lifts it to the sun:
I should have knocked him out, poor little bloke.
It gets the blood out if you let them run.
We hold the dangling meat. Wet on its chest
the narrow cut, the tulip of slow blood.
We better go. We’ve got to scald him next.
Looking at me, my cousin shakes his head:
What’s up, old son? You butchered things before …
it’s made you squeamish, all that city life.
Sly gentleness regards me, and I smile:
You’re wrong, you know. I’ll go and fetch the knife.
I walk back up the trail of crowding flies,
back to the knife which pours deep blood, and frees
sun, fence and hill, each to its holy place.
Strong in my valleys, I may walk at ease.
A world I thought sky-lost by leaning ships
in the depth of our life – I’m in that world once more.
Looking down, we praise for its firm flesh
the creature killed according to the Law.
THE ABOMINATION
Long before dawn, I rose by Paddy’s Lantern,
lit up my own and walked through miles of dew
with my striding shadow, adze and burlap bag
to check my traps. The woods were cold and deep,
the fence on the ridgeline tingled, wet with stars.
Away below, in a gully facing in
towards the dark, a stumphole fire glowed
but I looked away and went on with my round,
killing each rabbit with a practised chop
and dropping it, still straining, in my bag.
A winding course of unhurried killings led
me down the dark to my farthest trap, which lay
a short walk from the fire. Here I killed
one final time, and slung my heavy bag
to approach the blaze – as I had known I would.
Behind the black terrazzo of old heat
light glared from crumbling pits. Old roots are tough
but when they catch, their blinding rings inch deep
and rage for months and suck your breath away
if you kneel before them too long, peering in …
as I knew I had by the pallor of the sky.
Scrambling up to go, I told myself
no harm in this. I was just looking down
to see how far back the earth might be unsafe.
It wouldn’t do to break through on such heat.
Budded with light on light, the butts of glare
in their fire-burrows were a deeper fact
that stared down my evasions, and I found
a rabbit in my hands and, in my mind,
an ancient thing. And it was quickly done.
Afterwards, I tramped the smoking crust
heavily in on fire, stench and beast
to seal them darkly under with my fear
and all the things my sacrifice might mean,
so hastily performed past all repair.
ONCE IN A LIFETIME, SNOW
FOR CHRIS AND MARY SHARAH
Winters at home brought wind,
black frost and raw
grey rain in barbed-wire fields,
but never more
until the day my uncle
rose at dawn
and stepped outside – to find
his paddocks gone,
his cattle to their hocks
in ghostly ground
and unaccustomed light
for miles around.
And he stopped short, and gazed
lit from below,
and half his wrinkles vanished
murmuring Snow.
A man of farm and fact
he stared to see
the facts of weather raised
to a mystery
white on the world he knew
and all he owned.
Snow? Here? he mused. I see.
High time I learned.
Here, guessing what he meant
had much to do
with that black earth dread old men
are given to,
he stooped to break the sheer
crust with delight
at finding the cold unknown
so deeply bright,
at feeling it take his prints
so softly deep,
as if it thought he knew
enough to sleep,
or else so little he
might seek to shift
its weight of wintry light
by a single drift,
perceiving this much, he scuffed
his slippered feet
and scooped a handful up
to taste, and eat
in memory of the fact
that even he
might not have seen the end
of reality …
Then, turning, he tiptoed in
to a bedroom, smiled,
and wakened a murmuring child
and another child.
RECOURSE TO THE WILDERNESS
FOR PETER BARDEN
Towards the end of the long Australian peace
when I was a twenty-two-year-old with failings,
ostentatious, untravelled, with a gift for dependence,
penury had grown stale; my childhood was in danger,
so I preceded you, in all but spirit,
to the Outside country
where the sealed roads end,
the far, still Centre.
Today, a sequence from that equivocal season
danced in my memory:
I saw myself away in South Australia,
still a novice, but learning,
having already felt frost through my blanket,
learned how to dig a hip-hole, to sleep quickly,
how to camp in good cover, especially in cities.
A month from home, barely,
and I’d even made a beginning
in the more advanced, more fruitful major subjects:
jettisoning weight, non-planning, avoidance of thought
in favour of landscape, stones and the travelling sky.
All that day, I had traversed the German country
– vast fields of September, distant adobe houses –
hungry, such was my mood, for the exotic,
I’d listened for German in casual talk overheard
in winecellar towns at peace with their horizons.
Now it was night. Damp furrows smelt of spring,
cool iron and thistle-stems. Far-off windows shone
approaching, receding. Cars dipped below the world’s edge
on unknown roads.
And I walked on and on
upbraiding myself with melancholy pleasure
for past insufficiencies, future humiliations:
You are always at fault. Nor will this ever change,
etcetera, etcetera.
Later that night
the horror of Hell stared down at me for a great time,
silent, with horns,
till I reared awake, and found
myself bedded down on hay in a dawn-wet paddock
with twenty curious rams foregathered round me.
Under that augury, I hitchhiked on all that day
out of the fenced and fertile south-east districts
and, just on sundown, entered the waterless kingdom.
o
In the silent lands
time broadens into space.
Approaching Port Augusta, going on,
iron-brown and limitless, the plains
were before me all day. Burnt mountains fell behind
in the glittering sky.
At dawn, the sun would roll up from his lair
in the kiln-dry lake country, fire his heat straight through
the blind grey scrub, awaken me beside wheeltracks
and someone’s car, and I would travel on.
At noon, far out in a mirage, I would brew
tea with strangers, yarn about jobs in the North
which I meant not to get
and, chewing quietly, watch maybe an upstart
dust-devil forming miles off, going high
to totter, darken
and, quite suddenly, vanish,
leaving a formless, thinning stain on the heavens.
Where the spirits of sea-cliffs
hovered on the plain
I would remember routines we had invented
for putting spine into shapeless days: the time
we passed at a crouching trot down Wynyard Concourse
telling each other in loud mock-Aranda and gestures
what game we were tracking down what haunted gorge,
frivolous games
but they sustained me like water,
they, and the is-ful ah!-nesses of things.
THE COMMERCIAL HOTEL
Days of asphalt-blue and gold
murmurous with stout and flies,
lorries bought, allotments sold,
and recent heroes, newly old,
stare at their beer with bloating eyes.
Days of asphalt-blue and gold
dim to saloon bars, where unfold
subtleties of enterprise,
lorries bought, allotments sold,
where, with fingers burnt, the bold
learn to be indirect, and wise.
Days of asphalt-blue and gold
confirm the nation in its mould
of wages, contract and supplies,
lorries bought, allotments sold,
and the brave, their stories told,
age and regard, without surmise,
days of asphalt-blue and gold
lorries bought, allotments sold.
THE INCENDIARY METHOD
Hungry that year
for a quick resolution
a blasting reply
to clean out the mind
of the year’s slow piling
of question on question
I fumbled a match
and lit the grey, tattered
fuse of a paperbark
tree in the swamps
and watched it howl up
a tower of flame,
sweet oil and smuts
for my summer banner
over the pools
and startled beasts
feeding on rushes.
The fire swarmed
and then petered out
in a trickle of remnant
sparks and small candles
and I said to myself
in the guilt of my gleeful
search for more tea-trees
with tarpaper trunks,
there are more ways than one
of cleansing the spirit
and while I may know
this way can burn cities
it won’t burn them here
in the dark of this swamp
a sixty-foot blaze
in the dark of this poem
with only beasts watching
over the pools
and smoking rushes.
AN ABSOLUTELY ORDINARY RAINBOW
The word goes round Repins,
the murmur goes round Lorenzinis,
at Tattersalls, men look up from sheets of numbers,
the Stock Exchange scribblers forget the chalk in their hands
and men with bread in their pockets leave the Greek Club:
The traffic in George Street is banked up for half a mile
and drained of motion. The crowds are edgy with talk
and more crowds come hurrying. Many run in the back streets
which minutes ago were busy main streets, pointing:
There’s a fellow weeping down there. No one can stop him.
The man we surround, the man no one approaches
simply weeps, and does not cover it, weeps
not like a child, not like the wind, like a man
and does not declaim it, nor beat his breast, nor even
sob very loudly – yet the dignity of his weeping
holds us back from his space, the hollow he makes about him
in the midday light, in his pentagram of sorrow,
and uniforms back in the crowd who tried to seize him
stare out at him, and feel, with amazement, their minds
longing for tears as children for a rainbow.
Some will say, in the years to come, a halo
or force stood around him. There is no such thing.
Some will say they were shocked and would have stopped him
but they will not have been there. The fiercest manhood,
the toughest reserve, the slickest wit amongst us
trembles with silence, and burns with unexpected
judgements of peace. Some in the concourse scream
who thought themselves happy. Only the smallest children
and such as look out of Paradise come near him
and sit at his feet, with dogs and dusty pigeons.
Ridiculous, says a man near me, and stops
his mouth with his hands, as if it uttered vomit –
and I see a woman, shining, stretch her hand
and shake as she receives the gift of weeping;
as many as follow her also receive it
and many weep for sheer acceptance, and more
refuse to weep for fear of all acceptance,
but the weeping man, like the earth, requires nothing,
the man who weeps ignores us, and cries out
of his writhen face and ordinary body
not words, but grief, not messages, but sorrow,
hard as the earth, sheer, present as the sea –
and when he stops, he simply walks between us
mopping his face with the dignity of one
man who has wept, and now has finished weeping.
Evading believers, he hurries off down Pitt Street.
WORKING MEN
Seeing the telegram go limp
and their foreman’s face go grey and stark,
the fettlers, in their singlets, led him
out, and were gentle in the dark.
A WALK WITH O’CONNOR
A winter’s day of wind, and no horizon.
Out of the vagueness, breakers on cold grey sand.
Leaving Bondi behind, we followed the dim coast south
over tongues of land
between the Pacific and the red-tiled homes,
exulted our way over heights with talk of heroes,
disputed down through scrub to famous coves
and scaled low cliffs, position by quotation,
hand over hand.
At Waverley, where the gravestones stop at the brink,
murmuring words, to the rebel’s tomb we went,
an exile’s barrow of Erin-go-bragh and pride
in grey-green cement:
we examined the harps, the hounds, the lists of the brave
and, reading the Gaelic, constrained and shamefaced, we tried
to guess what it meant
then, drifting away,
translated Italian off opulent tombstones nearby
in our discontent.
On a farther beach, though,
where mile-long water, folding, crashed on sand
with a shudder of glee
we caught up drift battens, invoking Cuchulain sent mad,
and fought with the sea,
persuading each other that, in our own lives, this
was how it might be,
how, in the nature of purpose and of men,
it might well be.
But farther again
in a place of thorn and cliff
discussing ways
with nightfall closing in
we came to the old forts with their low tomb doors,
ladders of rust, gaunt casemates loud with wind
and the stench of man
and we spoke of the gun crews and the great oiled guns
that all the heydays of our childhood war
had never once engaged an enemy
or made much more than urgent spouts of boil
far out on the shining grid
of a fire-plan …
I looked at O’Connor
and he spoke to me,
but these were as many aspects of our quest,
I mean the Quest that summons all true men,