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Les Murray


ATLANTIC PAVEMENTS

In Rio, cobalt peaks wore
ochre suburbs and children
and stair-stepping samba
convoyed tipped nudes down.

In Lisbon, a singer
acknowledged (obrigada!)
coins plinked on the dado
(obrigada!) of her fado:

from no love again
men trailed back to ships
and the ropes they wing-walked
made a vast wind-lobed brain.

Black, chipper and white
street mosaics of Lisbon,
pavement-scrolls of Rio,
sargasso between.

GREASEPROOF ROSE

Which produced more civilizations,
yellow grass or green?

Who made poverty legal?
Who made poverty at all?

Eating a cold pork sandwich
out of greaseproof paper
as I cross to Circular Quay
looking down the last Harbour miles

that the world-ships furrowed
bringing poverty
dates this day to my midlife.

Out of my approaching then city
rise towers of two main kinds:
glass ones keyed high to catch money
and brown steeples to forgive the poor

who made poverty illegal.

And the first Jumbo jets descend
like Mates whose names you won't recall,
going down behind the city.

This midlife white timber ferry
scatters curly Bohemian glass

one molecule thick, afloat on green
dark of laws far older than poverty

and I hold aloft my greaseproof rose
for hand-to-mouth, great hoister of sails.

THE SPHERE

She is delighted afresh
every dawn, to unlid
perfect nothing. That sphere

which extends from the blue
beneath her lashes
clear out to the horizons

of the detail-balloon
that contains all the air.
Blues she sang for years

through colour washes
are gone with the thickening
glasses that narrowed reading

and blind-girl craft work,
the contacts that sucked, bleeding.
Since technology got up

off a Red conveyor,
razored an aqueous ring
and, lasing a layer,

skimmed all that history
off her inner sky,
side clouds have vanished.

She needn't stand demurely
fuming, among ignorers.
Now she rises to her character.

Hugo Williams


IN MY WILDEST JEANS

If these are the hollow eyes of "mid maturity,"
the map of veins beside the nose, the beard
showing up like iron filings underneath the skin,
then these must be the over-stuffed jeans
of material success, the ones with a zip
that shyly presents itself to the world,
a hint of underpants and vest
suggesting a breakthrough into seriousness.

Am I a better person now, with a fat arse,
flip-flops and a back-support for the car?
In my wildest dreams I never looked like this.
I walked around like "The Man fom Laramie,"
practising my cross-draw and return.
I leapt in the air and fell, clutching my stomach,
twitching occasionally. In my wildest dreams
I was only pretending to be dead.

PEACH

What were we thinking about,
when we climbed up into the fork
of the lookout tree
and kicked the ladder away?

It was almost impossible to get down.
That was the whole point.
We wanted to eat a peach somewhere interesting.
We wanted to dribble peach juice on the world.

Untitled Poem
(previously unpublished and firmly attributed to Philip Larkin
- see Writers page)


Shooting your spunk into a girl
Is life's undoubted crown,
But leading up to it isn't
And neither is leading down.

Terese Svoboda


THE DAY MOTHER CRIED

                              everyone and I stopped breathing

                                                                 Frank O’Hara

Word bubble suspended, an Xmas ornament,
everyone in bits in reflection, maybe
even thought, a confluence of broken glass
and not enough light. Baby’s O’s

almost a pucker, could it be a kiss?
Faux night day night in answer. No elves.
The “justs” arrive. Repeat is one thing,
e.g. the man could be Dad behind

the paper, or Man. The dog chews
off the front page. Qualms in the kitchen,
the ham incense, prayer someone drops
into the forkfuls, the air cubed hard.

The dishtowels wet themselves,
Baby flails, our hands come clean,
all the chairs in the room an ad for home--
let quiet swans swim in it.

BANANA RITES

The banana plant ails, an onion
really, no tree, all furl. Bugs
plug its leaf sheaths, dust
if you don’t look close.

Entrapped tropics: all summer
a miracle of shoots, the spume
of a magician’s scarves, fruit
an embarrassment, so sexed.

No giant overwinters. Instead,
cut and bound, just the plume,
the susceptible engine. You spray
a last rites, glory over. Dust in review.

Hannah Baker


JULIA FLYTE

Charles is Julia’s but only after her brother
Sebastian, who meets Charles from drinking
then throwing up in his rooms at Oxford,

has him. The next morning jonquils
alter the first impression. Out of one bouquet
a note to come to lunch at noon,

signed by Sebastian, and his silly bear,
who, too, could ask forgiveness
for last night’s walk of shame.

At lunch there are plover’s eggs to start with,
a passionate speech by a guest stuttering
strangely. When Sebastian has Charles

many more times at his real home,
Brideshead, mansion turned playhouse,
chapel turned gallery, turned actual

fortress, the Flyte who stands out, threatening,
is Julia, with her lap dog burrowing
in the dark place that is actually

warmer for her childless marriage,
vacuous adultery, airy religion,
the dog called a baby, a flirt, a toy.

It’s as if Charles is already lighting Julia’s
cigarette in the car together,
Charles Ryder and Julia Flyte.

Charles, clock without a pendulum,
clock good for a ship, the time ball
crashing down the spoke atop a kind of steeple,

at one in the afternoon, several ships fire,
giving mariners everywhere something
to go by, for their own chronometers.

MARY DELANY

Who shall go in for the scraps,
after Charlotte would botanize charmingly,
who is the child, naked, but twelve,
standing before the adult cutting her nails,

is a cutter. Kristeva says nail parings
are no different from menstrual blood, urine,
black feces, wounds, cuts, red vomit,
not unlike a corpse, in the Powers of Horror,

when the inside is mixed with outside,
life with death, Eros with Thanatos.
Who marries young to the father’s friend,
paints and cuts paper into a piece so small

you couldn’t touch it apart from
your fingernail sticking to it.

PEBBLES AND BONES FROM NATURAL PLACES

Fast drinker with no Zen tea left in the square-shaped purple mug, you’re help in some rooms,
help-help in another kind of lighting with the flexibility of this: Now how much time

do you have? All the tea urns, silver samovars, all on the table, worth collecting,
if not worth having such as the sideways but tall UPS package that your younger brother
                                                                                                                              knifing

into it hits an artery, trying to open. Your brother says, I was trying to open my scooter.
Pound says the girl asks her mother if she can open the light. The light of Henry-Moore-

of-Pebbles-and-Bones-from-Natural-Places fame. Outside, winter light rather than Irina
on the Sun Porch, Mary with her Father, Moore Carving on Vacation in Italy.

Winter with competing interests such as earlier silence. What are you trying to remember?
If it’s not the riddle about fishnets, then reliving stops along one line of the train, trainwreck

songs, suicide on the train track, by 7 a.m., the body’s gone, the human hambone song,
                                                                                                                              nursery
rhyme, name songs, someone’s name whose father moves South, opens a frame shop, kills

himself, time when agency-existence isn’t in jeopardy, when there’s a touch-your-shoulder
                                                                                                                               song
without your shoulder—and your latest shoulder, if it’s still life-like as a good ear.

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