Les Murray

THE BACKROAD COLLECTIONS

Verandah shops with history
and houses up dry gully-bends
proffer gouts of laundered colour
out into their gala weekends,

recycled fashion displayed
under bullnose eaves, down corridors,
cerise, magenta, nubbled teal,
lilac overalls that were a steal,

yellow bordure and buttony rib,
pouched swimsuits, cretonne ad lib
in front of blush crimson sleeves.
City buyers carry off sheaves,

tie dye, mai tai, taupe lingeries -
and cattle who haven't yet entered
a building wander, contented,
munching paddock under their last trees

till a blowsy gold-ginger horizon
built up out of the day's talk
glorifies and buries the sun.
A nude moon burns the newsprint version.

James Sutherland-Smith

SNAKE SWIMMING

I saw a snake swimming in the stream.
It moved in time with the minute changes
Of the ripples over silt and pebbles.
So at first I thought it was a reed
Or a long wild iris leaf folded double.

But then it seemed to tilt of its own accord
Against the cool current and I made out its head
As it broke the surface then paused,
A mottled yellow like a linden bud,
On a stepping stone’s rough, warmer edge.

It withdrew once more into the water
So nonchalantly at ease in the cold
Until the liquid and mineral mutter
Accelerated and the snake rolled
Sideways to slip between tree roots in the bank.

I left the cabin that night with you to look
First at the stars and meteors burning up
In the atmosphere of our dying planet,
Then watched the stream with its scintillants of light,
The tail-end of a galaxy shaped like a snake.

There was a rustling near us. Not the creeping
Of a mouse. It was too continuous, too slight
Like a breath avoiding words which wait on the tip
And back of our tongues so that language fails
And stays unformed in the dark heat of our throats.

A HAUNTING

Something is crawling up the side of the house.
It has been all my life.
Bony or scaly, it’s not ivy or clematis,
But a matter of belief.

Someone not entirely friendly is dancing on the roof
Though his rhythm can’t be caught.
Neither waltz nor jig nor galloping hoof
That tapping could be fate.

Breath that’s icy cold spirals up from the cellar
And speaks with a serpent’s hiss.
The fire that enchanted like a storyteller
Dies away to wordlessness.

It’s not the cat on the doorstep, the dog whining
For me to let him in.
It’s not a bird or the wind in the chimney,
But my sense of mortal sin.

For this is not how I thought love would call to me.
It chills me like winter rain.
Neither angelic nor human nor beastly
It whispers to me in pain.

BAT FLYING IN DAYLIGHT

It must have been like this for those two little girls
A hundred years ago in a magical wood
Through which a stream intoned arcane syllables:

A sudden erratic swoop, a hovering
Above glinting water, tumbling over itself,
Then off, its return immediate, quivering

In a frantic exhilaration of paper thin wings
Through which the sun poured so the fairy caught fire
Yet did not burn. Instead it seemed to be beckoning.

I watched it flicker away again then glide
Close to the tarry surface of a telephone pole
Its claws scraping purchase, its head to one side

Attempting to make sense out of the daylight air
Through birdsong and insect rustle, its own soundings
Beyond my hearing crying, “Where, where? Where, where?”

Jennifer Compton

AFTER THE WAKE

Just us left
some were in the kitchen washing dishes
someone swept
tables were stacked
chairs chocked into teetering towers
the baked meats wrapped
the rubbish bagged
all set square
then someone said
a photo of you four
the children
and what a lucky mother to die
before any of us
we took hands
stood like a palisade
one of us quipped
we know what this photo is for
how we laughed
the one who had scanned the family album
for the funeral slide show had complained
how there were shocking gaps
no photo of her with this one or that
so now whichever of us went first
there would be a pic of all of us
together
holding on to each other’s hands.

John Whitworth

WISH LIST

I wish I lived in Texas
And owned an oil well.
I wish I had a Lexus,
The longest car in Texas
And people craned their necks as
I drove it. Bloody Hell,
A Lexus down in Texas
And a lot of oil to sell!

Each year to Monte Carlo
I’d travel in my yacht.
As tall as Philip Marlow,
I’d stroll round Monte Carlo,
A rich man’s pastoral – O
How happy then my lot,
The Prince of Monte Carlo,
And what a lot I got!

I toast you in the fizzness
Of vintage fine champagne,
Its fundamental Is-ness,
Resides inside the fizzness,
And thus transacts the business.
I drink to you again –
The Is-ness, fizzness business
Of vintage fine champagne.

BOG TROTTING

O’Malley is an unfrocked priest,
Siobhan an evil nun.
Blackbush, a bald, bog-trotting beast,
Leaves half the countryside deceased.
He is their bastard son.

Bereft of ordinary joys
He thrives on blood and guts.
Alas that peasant girls and boys,
Poor, ignorant hobbledehoys,
Forsake their peasant huts!

He tears their flesh, he drinks their gore,
Oblivious to their moans.
When he has crammed his cursed craw
He flings the corpses to the floor
And crunches up the bones.

Of course we know the Catholic Church
Is more or less to blame.
High time we knocked it off its perch.
Vile Priestcraft left them in the lurch.
It’s always been the same.

Hannah Baker

FRINGE FESTIVAL

How the bulldog barks at every bird it sees,
leaving its game. Once he crashes through the window
onto the balcony to defend against

the parade of installation artists
marching in the Fringe Festival, and breaks half a pane to see
the bicycle decorated as a lobster, scuttling.

How Lonnie Glosson’s harmonica says back to him, I want my mama,
and then, I want a drink of water. He plays with his talking harmonica
Why Don’t You Haul Off and Love Me?

When you sit alone, you hear that teenage boy again, saying his nerves
hurt. You swear you hear the quietest shudder in your body,
from fear, unyielding self-abasement, disgust, or the cold,

but don’t see the flash which would have been a dead giveaway.
Your dog doesn’t even look at the three chickens in the yard,
not the one with zig-zag zebra stripes and a rooster’s cockscomb.

Burton says the causes of melancholy are God,
parents, and old age. With all the kinds as diverse
as the sections of the head opened, cut up.

WEDGWOOD'S PYROMETER

Josiah Wedgwood’s jasper version of Flaxman’s Portland vase,
engraved by Blake, perfect in Dr. Erasmus Darwin’s Botanic Garden,
also the name of his book, The Botanic Garden: The Loves of the Plants,
the cheapest copy sold at Lightning Source.
Another kind of copy, your playing Scrabble with your mother,
your playing mother and child, where one’s much smaller,
the other a mountain, two mouths, wise, undeservingly
kind, which is why Henry Moore keeps up

with Henry Moore: turning the Madonna into knee, elbow, oval
with points, row of sleepers, all inventions
on the level of Reproductive Physiologist Howard’s work
with panda births or on the level of the penlight in the month-old
giant panda’s mouth like yours.
You might be quiet in the kitchen tonight,
but you have things to say
that you can write in a journal for now, the way an assault victim tries

to remember behind which building,
with which witnesses there before the blackout, how his eye got to
looking like this, how long
before his neck isn’t swollen and he can get a haircut,
and ultimately, where his friends went.
You can draw something instead of taking a picture
right away. You can make a concept map they teach you in school.
You can see how others have done it, yelling, codes, away messages,

marking, notes in the margins. See Sir Isaac Pitman’s Stenographic
Sound-Hand leaves us dashes and curves for consonants,
dots and pecks for vowels, Milton and the Bible in the Mikmak language,
complaints to the New Church, and what are complaints without a vowel scale
and a shorthand system? If unmedaled in every event,
can this make you more famous,
more in line to find eight golds wheeling around your neck?
When the mouth dies, who misses you?

LAMENT

And to destroy Earwig,
Captain John Smith talks to his diary,
you would lay Kexes
near the bottoms of trees,
set the section
of woods aflame.
To gather weasels, you would take a lizard’s
gut, beat it in half a pint of water,
and pour it on the ground
near the weasel haunts.
But to gather moles,
stop the live mole
closed in an earthen pot over a fire.
When the mole feels the heat,
she will cry,
which will draw all the moles
in hearing about her.
Maybe for Smith, her shorter
and shorter sobs
mean her pain diminishes
like saltwater the dry rice draws out of
your destroyed cell phone battery
after you’ve cried into it and it won’t
turn on. But you still feel awful.
The adders in the out-house,
occasionally, to get rid of them,
you would burn Wall-wort,
scatter Rue and Worm-wood,
and the scent of these will drive them,
all venomous creatures, away.
As will the smoke of the burnt soles of shoes.

Bert Almon

ENTER DALILA

Then, swollen with pride, into the snare I fell
Of fair fallacious looks, venereal trains. . . .
John Milton, “Samson Agonistes”

1 Handel Oratorio, St. George’s Church, London

Samson in a tenor rage waited at the altar
for his disloyal wife to appear and offer him
freedom from the prison in Gaza, and tender ease
in his old age. He waited and waited, and waited
for her to enter. After five minutes, the conductor said,
“I’ll just go see what’s keeping her.” A long time after
he came back to tell us Dalila had been locked in
the borrowed changing-room at Sotheby’s next door,
the fair singer imprisoned in the temple of Mammon.
Finally, she entered, smiling, with all her venereal trains.

2 Seminar Room, Texas

The teacher who approached Milton through the footnotes
smiled and asked who could explain Dalila’s “venereal trains”.
He loved nothing better than to hear wrong answers,
but was struck dumb by the raised hand
of the southern belle, who’d never spoken up before:
“Professor Sonnichsen, would that be some kind of gonorail?”

Previous Qualms