New Selected Poems

The Burning Truck

i.m. Mrs Margaret Welton

It began at dawn with fighter planes:

they came in off the sea and didn’t rise,

they leaped the sandbar one and one and one

coming so fast the crockery they shook down

off my kitchen shelves was spinning in the air

when they were gone.

They came in off the sea and drew a wave

of lagging cannon-shells across our roofs.

Windows spat glass, a truck took sudden fire,

out leaped the driver, but the truck ran on,

growing enormous, shambling by our street-doors,

coming and coming …

By every right in town, by every average

we knew of in the world, it had to stop,

fetch up against a building, fall to rubble

from pure force of burning, for its whole

body and substance were consumed with heat

but it would not stop.

And all of us who knew our place and prayers

clutched our verandah-rails and window-sills,

begging that truck between our teeth to halt,

keep going, vanish, strike … but set us free.

And then we saw the wild boys of the street

go running after it.

And as they followed, cheering, on it crept,

windshield melting now, canopy-frame a cage

torn by gorillas of flame, and it kept on

over the tramlines, past the church, on past

the last lit windows, and then out of the world

with its disciples.

Driving Through Sawmill Towns

1

In the high cool country,

having come from the clouds,

down a tilting road

into a distant valley,

you drive without haste. Your windscreen parts the forest,

swaying and glancing, and jammed midday brilliance

crouches in clearings …

then you come across them,

the sawmill towns, bare hamlets built of boards

with perhaps a store,

perhaps a bridge beyond

and a little sidelong creek alive with pebbles.

2

The mills are roofed with iron, have no walls:

you look straight in as you pass, see lithe men working,

the swerve of a winch,

dim dazzling blades advancing

through a trolley-borne trunk

till it sags apart

in a manifold sprawl of weatherboards and battens.

The men watch you pass:

when you stop your car and ask them for directions,

tall youths look away –

it is the older men who

come out in blue singlets and talk softly to you.

Beside each mill, smoke trickles out of mounds

of ash and sawdust.

3

You glide on through town,

your mudguards damp with cloud.

The houses there wear verandahs out of shyness,

all day in calendared kitchens, women listen

for cars on the road,

lost children in the bush,

a cry from the mill, a footstep –

nothing happens.

The half-heard radio sings

its song of sidewalks.

Sometimes a woman, sweeping her front step,

or a plain young wife at a tankstand fetching water

in a metal bucket will turn round and gaze

at the mountains in wonderment,

looking for a city.

4

Evenings are very quiet. All around

the forest is there.

As night comes down, the houses watch each other:

a light going out in a window here has meaning.

You speed away through the upland,

glare through towns

and are gone in the forest, glowing on far hills.

On summer nights

ground-crickets sing and pause.

In the dark of winter, tin roofs sough with rain,

downpipes chafe in the wind, agog with water.

Men sit after tea

by the stove while their wives talk, rolling a dead match

between their fingers,

thinking of the future.

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:

There’s a fellow crying in Martin Place. They can’t stop him.

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.

Vindaloo in Merthyr Tydfil

The first night of my second voyage to Wales,

tired as rag from ascending the left cheek of Earth,

I nevertheless went to Merthyr in good company

and warm in neckclothing and speech in the Butcher’s Arms

till Time struck us pintless, and Eddie Rees steamed in brick lanes

and under the dark of the White Tip we repaired shouting

to I think the Bengal. I called for curry, the hottest,

vain of my nation, proud of my hard mouth from childhood,

the kindly brown waiter wringing the hands of dissuasion

O vindaloo, sir! You sure you want vindaloo, sir?

But I cried Yes please, being too far in to go back,

the bright bells of Rhymney moreover sang in my brains.

Fair play, it was frightful. I spooned the chicken of Hell

in a sauce of rich yellow brimstone. The valley boys with me

tasting it, croaked to white Jesus. And only pride drove me,

forkful by forkful, observed by hot mangosteen eyes,

by all the carnivorous castes and gurus from Cardiff

my brilliant tears washing the unbelief of the Welsh.

Oh it was a ride on Watneys plunging red barrel

through all the burning ghats of most carnal ambition

and never again will I want such illumination

for three days on end concerning my own mortal coil

but I signed my plate in the end with a licked knife and fork

and green-and-gold spotted, I sang for my pains like the free

before I passed out among all the stars of Cilfynydd.

Incorrigible Grace

Saint Vincent de Paul, old friend,

my sometime tailor,

I daresay by now you are feeding

the rich in Heaven.

The Pure Food Act

Night, as I go into the place of cattle.

Night over the dairy

the strainers sleeping in their fractions,

vats

and the mixing plunger, that dwarf ski-stock, hung.

On the creekstone cement

water driven hard through the Pure Food Act

dries slowest round tree-segment stools,

each buffed

to a still bum-shine,

sides calcified with froth.

Country disc-jocks

have the idea. Their listeners aren’t all human.

Cows like, or let their milk for, a firm beat

nothing too plangent (diesel bass is good).

Sinatra, though, could calm a yardful of horns

and the Water Music

has never yet corrupted honest milkers

in their pure food act.

The quiet dismissal switching it off, though,

and carrying the last bucket, saline-sickly

still undrinkable raw milk to pour in high

for its herringbone and cooling pipe-grid

fall

to the muscle-building cans.

His wedding, or a war,

might excuse a man from milking

but milk-steeped hands are good for a violin

and a cow in rain time is

a stout wall of tears.

But I’m britching back.

I let myself out through the bail gate.

Night, as I say.

Night, as I go out to the place of cattle.

József

M.J.K. 1882–1974 In Piam Memoriam

You ride on the world-horse once

no matter how brave your seat

or polished your boots, it may gallop you

into undreamed-of fields

but this field’s outlandish: Australia!

To end in this burnt-smelling, blue-hearted

metropolis of sore feet and trains

(though the laughing bird’s a good fellow).

Outlandish not to have died

in king-and-kaiserly service,

dismounted, beneath the smashed guns

or later, with barons and credit

after cognac, a clean pistol death.

Alas, a small target, this heart.

Both holes were in front, though, entry

and exit. I learned to relish that.

Strange not to have died with the Kingdom

when Horthy’s fleet sank, and the betting

grew feverish, on black and on red,

to have outlived even my Friday club

and our joke: senilis senili

gaudet. I bring home coffee now.

Dear God, not one café in this place,

no Andrássy-street, no Margaret’s Island …

no law worth the name: they are British

and hangmen and precedent-quibblers

make rough jurisprudence at best.

Fairness, of course; that was their word.

I don’t think Nature speaks English.

I used to believe I knew enough

with gentleman, whisky, handicap

and perhaps tweed. French lacked all those.

I learned the fine detail at seventy

out here. Ghosts in many casinos

must have smiled as I hawked playing cards

to shady clubs up long stairways

and was naturalized by a Lord Mayor

and many bookmakers, becoming a

New Australian. My son claims he always

was one. We had baptized him Gino

in Hungary. His children are natives

remote as next century. My eyes

are losing all faces, all letters,

the colours go, red, white, now green

into Hungary, Hungary of the poplar trees

and the wide summers where I am young

in uniform, riding with Nelly,

the horseshoes’ noise cupping our speeches.

I, Mórelli József Károly,

once attorney, twice gunshot, thrice rich,

my cigarettes, monogrammed, from Kyriazi,

once married (dear girl!) to a Jew

(gaining little from that but good memories

though my son’s uniforms fitted her son

until it was next year in Cape Town)

am no longer easy to soften.

I will eat stuffed peppers and birds’ milk,

avoid nuns, who are monstrous bad luck,

write letters from memory, smoke Winstons

and flex my right elbow at death

and, more gently, at living.

Kiss of the Whip

In Cardiff, off Saint Mary’s Street,

there in the porn shops you could get

a magazine called Kiss of the Whip.

I used to pretend I’d had poems in it.

Kiss of the Whip. I never saw it.

I might have encountered familiar skills

having been raised in a stockwhip culture.

Grandfather could dock a black snake’s