Collected Poems (1958-2015) Read online

  I think of time’s hourglass and bladed stave,

  Of how we waste the few days that we’ve got,

  Of how my youth is gone and shan’t return.

  I must turn over or my back will burn.

  I’m writing now in the supine position,

  A posture more conducive to high thoughts

  Of Culture and the means of its transmission.

  From here on in I think you’ll find all sorts

  Of pundits prophesying the perdition

  Awaiting you, complete with boils and warts,

  If you should go on proving so appealing

  To the unclean, unthinking and unfeeling.

  I don’t imply, I hasten to assure you,

  Your fate’s to be a pop star like Kate Bush.

  Though seas of spellbound faces stretch before you

  The bodies underneath won’t pee or push.

  I know the more you’re buttered up the more you

  Will stay as untouched as the Hindu Kush.

  Endowed with inspiration of such purity

  You’d gladly follow it back to obscurity.

  It’s obvious that you’re a heavyweight:

  Your harshest critics can’t say otherwise.

  Your status would remain inviolate

  Though Jeff Nuttall should praise you to the skies.

  In that regard you’ve got it on a plate,

  Whence comes the shamrock tinge of certain eyes.

  While hitting the jackpot in all essentials

  You’ve managed to hang on to your credentials.

  You write intensely and you’re entertaining.

  For those of us less apt to do the first,

  Apart from silence there’s one course remaining –

  Which is to do the second. At the worst

  (And when this happens it’s no use complaining)

  The public clamours to be reimbursed,

  But on the whole there’s some cause to be proud

  If what one writes makes people laugh aloud.

  Or so I think when critics in terms drastic

  Inform the world my feet are half trochaic.

  It seems my scansion’s absolutely spastic.

  Even my best iambics are spondaic.

  The poor fool’s sense of rhythm is elastic!

  His diction is archaic Aramaic!

  As for his rhymes, let’s send him back to Kogarah! Hell,

  The stuff he drivels isn’t even dogarahhell!

  It’s useless to invoke the semi-vowel

  And point out ‘bevel’ is a rhyme for ‘Devil’.

  The cloth-eared scribes who write prose with a trowel

  Will smugly wonder if I’m on the level.

  One really might as well throw in the towel.

  Fulke Greville’s brother was called Neville Greville …

  No, let the critics stew in their pale juice:

  A joke’s a joke and it needs no excuse.

  Far out on their twin-fin potato chips

  The young star surfers sprint to climb astride

  A wave as smooth as spit feels on your lips

  And when it breaks you see them there inside –

  Born acrobats trained to their fingertips.

  Meanwhile here at the thin edge of the tide

  A man pretending he’s a submarine

  To please his children’s also in the scene.

  A Boudin painted by Tiepolo,

  A beige and azure fresco two miles long;

  The sky brushed pink, the sable d’or aglow,

  The plump swell dimpled like a silver gong;

  The beach lit by le ciel, laved by les flots,

  An airy glittering shantung sarong,

  Unfolds into the south where with a stain

  Of Monet nenuphars France turns to Spain.

  And though down there the Basques will bomb your car,

  Up here they are a people touched with grace.

  They know the sweet years only go so far

  And life is more than just a pretty face.

  However poor and sick and old they are

  The sun shines for them, too. They have a place.

  A fact which would provoke me to deep thinking

  Were not the sun now on the point of sinking.

  Clear plum juice simmers in the solar disc.

  The soft light off the pale blue water stipples

  With gold the green cliff-clothing tamarisk.

  The breathing sea sends in its silken ripples.

  High on the sea wall the last odalisque

  Looks down with mute approval at her nipples.

  La mer, la mer, toujours recommencée.

  But that’s enough of versing for one day.

  I’ll get up now and put on thongs and hat.

  I’ll gather up your books and these few pages.

  I’ll shake and roll my tatty rattan mat

  And up the cliff trottoir by easy stages

  I’ll dawdle with a feeling of that’s that –

  Great talents may write poems for the ages,

  But poetasters with their tongues in fetters

  When all else fails at least can still write letters.

  To Gore Vidal at Fifty

  To Gore Vidal at – how should I commence?

  The trick is to strike sparks and still make sense.

  To Gore Vidal at fifty – sounds a lot.

  Should I be flippant about that, or not?

  To Gore Vidal at fifty years of age –

  That slights the sprite, though it salutes the sage.

  To Gore Vidal at fifty years of youth –

  A trifle twee, but closer to the truth,

  Since you (I speak in awe, not animosity)

  Remain the incarnation of precocity,

  A marvellous boy whose man-sized aureola

  Still scintillates like fresh-poured Pepsi-Cola

  (If I can mention safe from repercussions

  The formula that Nixon sold the Russians),

  Whose promise is renewed in the fulfilling,

  A teenage thrill that goes on being thrilling,

  A pledge kept firm with no recourse to perjury

  Save incidental, mainly dental, surgery.

  And yet you will admit you are no chicken.

  Admit? Insist. The Peter Panic-stricken

  Might cling to childhood out of self-delusion,

  But that or any similar confusion

  You’ve always held in absolute contempt –

  The only absolute that you exempt

  From your unwearyingly edifying

  Assault on mankind’s thirst to be undying:

  A hope you’ve never ceased to make a mock of

  Or boldly nominate what it’s a crock of.

  Small wonder you admire that far-off era

  The clear lens of your style brings that much nearer,

  In which, as Flaubert wrote (and here I quote,

  Or, rather, quote what you said Flaubert wrote)

  The gods were dead and Christ was not yet born,

  A quick, cold night dividing dusk from dawn,

  When man was quite alone, with nothing holier

  To call his own than clear-eyed melancholia –

  That penetrating gaze into infinity

  Revealing it devoid of all divinity

  And transcendental only in its endless

  Detachment from our dread of feeling friendless –

  A universe which neither plans our grief

  Nor pampers us in payment for belief,

  But rings its changes utterly unheeding

  Though sadist die in bed or saint lie bleeding.

  Committed in its course beyond retrieval,

  Indifferent to all talk of good and evil,

  Unreachable by prayer, untouched by curses,

  It tirelessly assembles and disperses,

  Created and destroyed and recreated –

  Reduced, reprocessed and repristinated;
r />   Its victories defeats, retreats advances,

  Its triumphs tragedies, disasters dances,

  Its involuted curves of time and distance

  All adding up to one fierce, flat insistence –

  That its immensities will still be there

  When we are not. It simply doesn’t care.

  This is the void that you with the cool grace

  Of your prose style help teach us how to face.

  This is the pit from which none can escape

  Your wit lights up that we might see its shape.

  But to convince the world the soul of Marcus

  Aurelius must perish with his carcass

  Was hard even for him. Most men prefer

  To hide their heads in warm sand and not stir.

  That public probity, not sexuality,

  Is really the foundation of morality –

  That justice plays no active part in fate,

  Not even when fate leads to Watergate –

  That all the prayers and powers of the Kennedys

  Buy not one moment’s rest from the Eumenides –

  That Caesar is not God, nor the good Lord

  Someone who walks and talks like Gerald Ford –

  With facts like these we find it hard to grapple,

  And much prefer to think Eve plucked the apple

  Specifically so that redemptive love,

  Beamed down on her descendants from above,

  Could ease the pangs of her initial blunder

  And make us grateful as we knuckle under.

  My own view is that mankind would be worse

  Than ever should that cloud of dreams disperse,

  But your view is the one we’re here to praise

  For how it penetrates the wishful haze

  Which forms when all-too-human self-delusion

  Allied with solipsism breeds confusion –

  A mist that men call vision as they grope

  And choking on it give the name of hope.

  So dense a fog will be a long time thinning

  So let’s call your work thus far a beginning,

  And for our own sake wish your life that too –

  And, friends before, years more be friends to you.

  The Great Wrasse: for Les Murray at sixty

  Mask wet and snorkel dry, I’m lying loose

  On the glass roof of time, and forty years

  Straight down I see it teeming, the bombora

  Of Manning House. Tables like staghorn coral

  Chewed at by schools of poets. Frensham girls

  (Remember Xanthe Small and Joanne Williamson,

  Those blouses and tight skirts? You little beaut

  We breathed into our fried rice. God, what dreams:

  By now they must be grandmothers) glide by

  Like semicircle angelfish. Psychologists

  With teeth like wahoos turn their heads as one,

  Torn from discussion of the Individual,

  Their Watch Committee late-lunch seminar

  Prorogued pro tem.

  Poised Andersonian squid

  Explain to freshettes peeping from their shells

  If dualism allows no real division

  There can be no real connection. Fusiliers,

  Trevallies, sweetlips, damselfish, hussars

  Patrol in Balbos, split up, feed, re-form,

  Waved at by worshipping anemones.

  The food chain and the mating dance, the mass

  Manoeuvring, the shape-up and the shake-out,

  The pretty faces pumping pain through spines:

  It’s all there, displayed in liquid crystal,

  No further than my fingertips adrift

  (A year in time is just an inch in space) –

  And there you are, and I can see you now

  For what you were, most brilliant of the bunch,

  The Great Wrasse.

  But to know that, I had first

  To see the thing itself, in all its glory,

  Five years ago. Sleeping on Lizard Island,

  My family was recovering its strength

  From too long in the cold. On the second day

  We woke at noon and rolled into the water

  To join the turtles feeding on the seagrass

  Between the beach and sandbar. Serious fish

  Were just around the point, at the big bommie.

  We drifted off the platform at the back

  Of the launch and let the current take us over

  A chunk of reef that came up to arm’s length:

  Just what the doctor ordered. We could see

  The whole aquarium in action, hear

  The parrotfish at work on the hard coral

  Like journalists around the Doric porch

  Of some beer-froth tycoon whose time had come

  To be cast out of Toorak.

  Then it was there –

  Beside us, as if to share our view:

  Materializing, as is its marvellous way,

  With no preliminary fanfare,

  Like an air-dropped marching band that opens up

  Full blast around your bed. Lord, I can see,

  I said in silence, smiling around my rubber

  Dummy like a baby. Powered by pearls

  On fire inside its emerald envelope,

  The Wrasse comes on like a space invader

  In docking mode, filling the vision full:

  The shock of its appearance stops the swimmer

  Dead in the water, flippers frozen solid,

  Stunned by a sudden nearness so aloof.

  As if the Inca, walking his lion’s walk

  In soft shoes, were to pass by from behind

  Preoccupied by his divinity,

  So with this big fish and its quiet storm,

  Its mute Magnificat.

  Bigger fish yet

  Plumb deep holes of the Outer Barrier –

  Potato cod in mottled camouflage

  Like Japanese Army Kawasaki fighters

  Parked in the palms, franc-tireur Tiger sharks

  With Kerry Packer smiles, the last few marlin

  To keep their swords – but nothing quite as massive

  As the daddy of all wrasses, the Daimyo number,

  Shows up at the bombora, and nothing as bright

  Is known the whole reef over.

  Over the reef,

  You realize, is where this fish belongs –

  Above it and not of it. Nothing is written there,

  Enjoyed or cherished. Even the beautiful,

  There in abundance, does not know itself.

  ‘Sex is a Nazi’ you once wrote, and so

  It is here. Killing to grow up so they can screw,

  Things eat, are eaten, and the crown-of-thorns

  Starfish that eats everything looks like

  A rail map of the Final Solution,

  But all it adds to universal horror

  Is its lack of colour.

  Even in full bloom

  The reef is a jardin des supplices:

  The frills, the fronds, the fans, the powder puffs

  Soften the razor’s edge, the reign of terror.

  Lulled by the moon snail and the Spanish dancer

  With choreography by Carlos Saura,

  By feathery platoons of poules de luxe

  Cute as the kick-line of the Tropicana,

  The tourist feels this is the show for him –

  Atlantis in an atrium, a rumpus room

  For slo-mo willy-willies of loose chips

  From bombed casinos, a warehouse arcade

  For love seats, swansdown pouffes and stuffed banquettes

  That he could snuggle up to like a prayer

  Of Hasidim against the Wailing Wall

  And soothe his fevered brow in yielding plush –

  But only an expert should ever touch it

  Even with rubber gloves.

  Buyer beware,

  The forms of death a
re not just for each other

  But for us too, and not all are as ugly

  As the stonefish, toadfish, puffer and striped Toby

  In his leather jacket. Even a child can see

  That these are kitted out for bio war:

  They pull the face of neurotoxic venom.

  But the cone shells that beg to be picked up

  By writers are like antique fountain pens

  Proust might have held except he would have written

  A short book, and that dreamboat with the sulk

  Like Michelle Pfeiffer lolling in the glass

  Elevator in Scarface is a breed

  Of butterfly whose class would set you raving

  At closer quarters, anguish cloaked in floating

  Come-hither chiffon veils that spell curtains

  At the first kiss.

  Rising above it all,

  A benign airship poised over New York –

  The Hindenburg without the Hakenkreuz

  Or parking problems – just by its repose

  The dawdling Wrasse siphons up Hell’s Kitchen

  And turns it to serenity, the spectrum

  Of helium in Rutherford’s radon tube,

  The clear, blue light of pure polonium,

  The green, fused sand of Trinity, the silent

  Summary, the peaceful aftermath.

  Something, someone, must be the focal emblem,

  The stately bearer of the synthesis

  To make our griefs make sense, if not worthwhile.

  That the young you, in a red-striped sloppy joe

  Like Sydney Greenstreet cast as Ginger Meggs

  Progressing through the Quad the very year

  Of the first Opera House Lottery draw,

  Would be the Great Wrasse, few could guess

  But now all know, glad that the time it took

  Was in their lives, and what you made of it –

  Those new and strange and lovely living things,

  Your poems – theirs to goggle at when born:

  Born from your mouth.

  Born fit to breathe our sea,

  Which is the air I surface to drink in

  (My mask a nifty hat by Schiaparelli)

  Having seen wonders – how our lives once were,

  Nature’s indifference, time’s transparency,

  Fame’s cloud of pigment, fortune’s blood-tipped needles,

  And finally, most fabulous of all,

  A monumental fish that speaks in colours,

  Offering solace from within itself.

  To Leonie Kramer, Chancellor of Sydney

  University: A Report on My Discipline, on the

  Eve of My Receiving an Honorary Degree, 1999

  The brief is to report on what’s been done –