Collected Poems (1958-2015) Read online

  Until Singapore fell and the Yanks overtipped for a taxi –

  Yet still through the blacked-out streets he kept his own schedule

  Writing Eternity.

  But a mere word was ceasing to hold any terrors.

  Belief in the afterlife faded. Where was God

  When the Christmas snow came fluttering into the death camps?

  Those kindling children, their piles of little shoes,

  Condemned Divine Justice past hope of apology:

  To rage at the storm and expect it to stop made more sense than

  Writing Eternity.

  He wrote it on the same night Hitler burned.

  He wrote it as the Japanese cities melted

  And the tanks rolled into Budapest.

  While Sputnik skimmed through the stars he bent to his task

  As if we believed there was still any Hell except history,

  And Heaven could be rebuilt by one scuttling ratbag

  Writing Eternity.

  The rain didn’t always wash his word away.

  He sometimes used more than chalk. Near my place once

  I found it fingertip-deep in the new white concrete.

  It was lined with crimson enamel, a rune punched in

  By a branding-iron from space. Down on one knee

  I chipped out the paint with my penknife as if I could stop him

  Writing Eternity.

  He wouldn’t have known. He didn’t have time to go back,

  Not even to visit his real bravura efforts

  Which culminated in his famous Australia Square

  Incised masterpiece filled with stainless steel.

  Some snot-nosed kid with a grudge there would always be,

  But he put all that behind him and kept on going,

  Writing Eternity.

  By the time he died I was half the world away

  And when I came back I never gave him a thought.

  It was almost fifty years after I unpicked it

  That I pondered his word again,

  On the dawn of the day when the laughing stock was yours truly

  Who would have to go on alone and be caught in the spotlight

  Writing Eternity.

  From the thirty-third floor of the Regent I looked down naked.

  The Opera House was sold out. I was afraid,

  But the Harbour was flat calm all the way to the sea,

  Its shaped, linked loops flush with silver,

  And I suddenly saw what that showpiece of geology

  Had really been up to ever since the magma cooled –

  Writing Eternity.

  That word again, and this time I could read it.

  It said your life is on loan from those before you

  Who had no chance, and before it is even over

  Others will come to judge you, if only by

  Forgetting your name; so better than glittering vainly

  Would be to bend down in the dark half a million times

  Writing Eternity.

  Where will we spend it? Nowhere except here.

  Life everlasting ends where it begins,

  On Earth, but it is present at every moment.

  We must seek grace now and not for ourselves alone

  Was what that crazed saint meant in his ecstasy –

  Since time is always, with chalk made from children’s ashes,

  Writing Eternity.

  Reflections in an Extended Kitchen

  Late summer charms the birds out of the trees

  On to our lawn, where the cat gets them.

  Aware of this but not unmanned, Matisse

  Makes the whole room as sexy as the girl.

  ‘Distributed voluptuousness,’ he said,

  Matching the decor to her lazy gaze.

  Just book me on the first flight to Morocco.

  You see what I see? Feathers on the grass.

  Nothing so sordid in Henri’s back yard

  Where coloured shapes may touch, but not to crush.

  Look at that death-trap out there, lined with roses!

  We grew a free-fire zone with fertilizer.

  Caught on the ground like the Egyptian Air Force

  A wrecked bird on its back appears outraged:

  It could have been a contender. What a world

  Of slam-bang stuff to float one fantasy

  Amongst her figured curtains, blobs for flowers,

  Lolling unlocked in filmy harem pants!

  Where did we see her first? That place they called

  Leningrad. She looked like History’s cure,

  And even he could use that. When he turned

  An artful blank back on his wife and child

  They were arrested, leaving him to paint

  In peace a world with no Gestapo in it –

  A dream that came true. Agonies recede,

  And if his vision hid harsh facts from him

  It sharpens them for us. Best to believe

  He served an indispensable ideal:

  Douceur de vivre on a heroic scale –

  Heaven on Earth, the Land of Oobladee,

  Cloud Nine and Shangri-La hooked to the wall

  As bolt holes for the brain, square wishing wells.

  Suppose that like his brush my pen could speak

  Volumes, our cat might stay in shape to pounce,

  But only on the arm of that soft chair

  You sit in now and where you would lie lulled,

  An ageless, in-house odalisque couchée

  Never to be less languorous than this,

  Always dissolving in the air around you

  Reality’s cruel purr with your sweet whisper –

  And nothing would be terrible again,

  Nor ever was. The fear that we once felt

  For daughters fallen ill or just an hour

  Late home: it never happened. That dumb bird

  Stayed in its tree and I was true to you.

  In Praise of Marjorie Jackson

  In 1999, the year before the Sydney Olympics,

  Her face all laugh lines, regal in her scarlet coat,

  The gold in her teeth aglow like her set of gold medals,

  At the brand-new stadium she said exactly the right thing:

  ‘What a heritage for our kids! It’s lovely.’

  As usual her words rang bells all over Australia.

  She could always do that, tap into the national pride.

  Fifty years back, she was the fastest kid in Lithgow.

  She could run the boys into the earth,

  And when she ran the legs off Fanny Blankers-Koen

  (Who, visiting Sydney, expected to win in a walk)

  The good citizens of Lithgow were not surprised –

  Unlike the rest of Australia, whose collected sporting scribes,

  When their mouths had returned to the normal, merely open,

  position,

  Gave her an express train’s name to match the way she ran –

  She was the Lithgow Flash.

  Young Marjorie, who could always do the right thing,

  Went back to Lithgow with a modest, pre-cosmetic smile,

  Quietly amused at the ratbag outside world.

  Lithgow, hemmed in by its hills and one storey high

  At its highest, didn’t even have a running track.

  They cleared her a stretch of ground to prepare for the Olympics.

  Tired after work, she would train there in the dark:

  Lit up by car headlights that turned the loitering fog

  Into the nimbus of a legend about to happen

  As she sailed like an angel through the clouds of her first glory,

  The most brilliant thing Lithgow had ever seen –

  The right thing, the thing she could always do

  With a whole heart, putting one foot in front of the other

  Like the fists of Jimmy Carruthers tapping a punchball.

  At Helsinki she ran in metres instead of yard
s

  So the stretch for the sprints was just that little bit longer

  Each time, two ghosts of a chance for the others to catch her

  After her start that uncoiled like Hector Hogan’s –

  But they never got near her.

  In both events, she won scooting away like a wallaby

  With its tail on fire, and collared those twin gold medals

  With a smile for the camera that signalled her gratitude

  To God and the world, to Finland, Australia and Lithgow –

  The right smile, again the right thing exactly.

  She came home in triumph, with ninety-six miles of people

  From Sydney to Lithgow shouting congratulations –

  The kind of acclaim that used to make Roman generals

  Decide it might just be their turn to go for the title.

  It would go to anyone’s head, but it didn’t to hers

  Because it wouldn’t have been the right thing:

  She married her cyclist Peter and the people of Lithgow

  Collected a total of seventy-seven pounds for the wedding –

  The nearest she ever got to the big money

  And the nearest she wanted.

  When the last of Peter’s health melted, what could she do

  Except the right thing? She lent her undying lustre

  To fundraising for leukaemia research.

  She groomed herself as a speaker, walked with the poise

  That only those who have danced on air can possess

  (Or walked on water, like the RiverCat named for her

  You can catch tomorrow from the Quay to Parramatta,

  Watching the way its keels, like the spikes of a sprinter,

  In their lightweight trajectory barely impinge on the world)

  And still, with her seventieth year coming close to her heels,

  She looked fit to make that spanking new surface at Homebush

  Unroll from the balls of her feet like a belt going backwards

  Into the past, into the headlight-lit mist

  Where she was the quickest of all my fantastic girls –

  Than Shirley Strickland, than even Betty Cuthbert she was quicker –

  The very first of the fleet-foot females Movietone flung

  Flying towards me but forever out of reach

  Up there on the screen, their green and gold strip black and white

  To the lens, but to my pre-teen eyes spilling fire

  From the warmth of their bodies, the strength of their softness,

  the sweet

  Line of their slimness propelled by the will to excel

  And cold lamb cutlets for breakfast.

  Yes, still in short pants I was out of my mind for them all,

  But somehow I knew – I don’t know, it was something about her –

  That she – the unglamorous one but in motion a goddess –

  That she was the one who, had I been able to catch her

  And run at her side for a while as I gasped out my feelings,

  Would have done the right thing,

  And smiled without laughing before she raced on and away –

  Or even said, even though it wasn’t true,

  That if I’d had the luck to have been born and brought up in Lithgow

  Where the nights were cool, the stars were close and the people real,

  I could have been a sprinter too,

  And run for my country at the same amazing time

  As the Lithgow Flash shot through like the Bondi Special

  Into the language, and Australia rose to its feet –

  Cheering the champion, which, even when all are equal,

  And sometimes especially then, is the right thing to do.

  Simple Stanzas about Modern Masters

  If T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound

  Came back to life, again it would be found

  One had the gab, the other had the gift

  And each looked to the other for a lift.

  The Waste Land, had not Pound applied his blue

  Pencil, might well have seemed less spanking new.

  Pound was a crackpot but that made his critical

  Prowess particularly analytical.

  Embarrassing, however, there’s no doubt:

  Increasingly too crass to have about.

  While Eliot held discreetly right-wing views

  Pound yelled obscenities about the Jews.

  For Eliot, the time to cause a stir

  Was past, and dignity was de rigueur,

  But Pound preferred to hang out with the boys

  In boots and black shirts who made lots of noise.

  For Eliot the war brought veneration:

  He seemed to speak for his adopted nation.

  When Pound spoke it reminded Mussolini

  What it had cost them to lose Toscanini.

  Pound wound up in a cage and might have swung

  Or died strapped down if he had not been sprung;

  A big prize for the Cantos saved his neck

  Though even he half-guessed they were a wreck.

  The rackety campaign in Pound’s support

  Worked only because Eliot took thought

  On how il miglior fabbro might best be

  Saved for a dignified senility.

  His tactic was to let it be inferred

  That though he nowadays thought Pound absurd,

  The established master and his erstwhile mentor

  Were still somehow one creature, like a centaur.

  One was the head, the other the hindquarters

  (A point made by the more astute reporters)

  But few dared to protest at a free pass

  For such a well-connected horse’s arse.

  Pound in his dotage made no spark of sense

  But Eliot, still staunch in his defence,

  Remembered how it took a cocksure friend

  To help unscramble radium from pitchblende.

  Pound falling silent, Eliot sat in state.

  Though some said what he did was etiolate,

  Most regally he’d kept the palace rule –

  Never lose sight of what you owe your fool.

  Son of a Soldier

  My tears came late. I was fifty-five years old

  Before I began to cry authentically:

  First for the hurt I had done to those I loved,

  Then for myself, for what had been done to me

  In the beginning, to make my heart so cold.

  When the floodgates opened, the flood was not like rain.

  With the undammed water came the sad refuse:

  The slime, the drowned rats and the bloated corpse

  Of the man whose absence had plugged up the sluice

  That now gushed junk into my neat domain.

  Not older by all that much than my dear daughters

  He lay disfiguring a flower bed,

  As if by bubbling gas a shallow grave

  Of massacre had thrust up one of its dead,

  Not to be washed clean by the clearest waters.

  I took leave of my wife and knelt beside him

  Who could have been my son, though I was his,

  And everything he had not come back to tell me

  About how everlasting true love is

  Was a mouth of mud, so thick did woe betide him.

  ‘Had you come home, I would not be what I am,’

  I cried. ‘I could have loved my mother less

  And not searched for more like her among others,

  Parched for a passion undimmed by distress

  While you lay deep behind that looming dam.’

  The wet earth swallowed him. This time his grave

  Was marked: at least I knew now where he was.

  I turned to meet her eyes. ‘Let me explain,’

  I said to her. ‘My tears were trapped because

  He left me to be tender, strong and brave

  Who was none of those things. Infla
med by fright,

  The love that he did not return to make

  To the first woman I knew and could not help,

  Became in me a thirst I could never slake

  For one more face transfigured by delight,

  Yet needing nothing else. It was a doomed quest

  Right from the start, and now it is at an end.

  I am too old, too raddled, too ashamed.

  Can I stay in your house? I need a friend.’

  ‘So did I,’ she said truly. ‘But be my guest:

  God knows I too have waited wasted years

  To have my husband home. Our parents wept

  For history. Great events prised them apart,

  Not greed, guilt, lies and promises unkept.

  Pray they come not too late, these healing tears.’

  The house we live in and that man-sized mound

  Are a long walk between, yet both are real.

  Like family life, his flowers have their weeds

  To save them from a sanitized ideal.

  I hope this balance holds until the ground

  Takes me down, too. But I fear they will go on thronging,

  Those pipe-dream sprites who promise a fresh start –

  Free, easy furies haunting a cot-case

  That never lived, or loved, with a whole heart –

  Until for one last time I die of longing.

  What will I tell her then, in that tattoo

  Of the last breath, the last gasp, the death rattle?

  The truth: that in my life stolen from him

  Whose only legacy was a lost battle,

  The one thing that belonged to me was you.

  Where the Sea Meets the Desert

  Antony and Cleopatra swam at Mersa Matruh

  In the clear blue shallows.

  Imagine the clean sand, the absence of litter –

  No plastic bottles or scraps of styrofoam packing,

  No jetsam at all except the occasional corpse

  Of a used slave tossed off a galley –