Мернейн Джеральд. Green Shadows and Other Poems

Мернейн Джеральд
Green Shadows and Other Poems

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Table of Contents

Title Page

Also by Gerald Murnane

Contents

If this is a poem

A certain sort of atheist

Pinkish wrinkled rock

The ballad of G.M.

On first reading William Carlos Williams

Ode to Gippsland

The Darkling Thrush

Rosalie isn’t speaking

Angela is the first

In thick rough

There’s no such thing

Sparrows in Goroke

Political Philosophy

The Richardson House at Chiltern

Shy Breeders

Piss-weak

Poetic Topics (i)

Poetic Topics (ii)

Poetic Topics (iii)

Poetic Topics (iv) The Girls of St Kilian’s

Poetic Topics (v) Strange feelings when reading

Poetic Topics (vi) Faith; Religion; Catholic Church

Pettits’ Tap

Crap-books

Ode to the Western District

I’m sick of writing…

Non-travelling

Anzac Day 2015

Street Market

At Bordertown Races

The Ballad of R.T.M.

A Cistercian Life

Green Shadows

Forog a föld // The world turns

Azért annyira szeretlek // Why I love you thus

Igaz Mese // True Tale

Hangjaidban mindig hallom // I hear in your Asian vowels

Szerelmeslevél // Love-letter

Ode to the Mornington Peninsula

Private Papers

Coate Water to Glinton

Sunrise in the Antipodes

Mrs Balsarini

Poetic Truth

Last Poem

Gerald Murnane | Green Shadows and other poems

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Green Shadows | and other poems Gerald Murnane

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First published 2019

from the Writing and Society Research Centre at Western Sydney University by the Giramondo Publishing Company

PO Box 752

Artarmon NSW 1570 Australia

www.giramondopublishing.com

Typeset by Andrew Davies

in 10/16.5 pt Baskerville BT

Printed and bound by Ligare Book Printers Distributed in Australia by NewSouth Books A catalogue record for this book is available from the National Library of Australia.

ISBN: 978-1-925336-98-6

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher.

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Also by Gerald Murnane

Tamarisk Row

A Lifetime on Clouds

The Plains

Landscape With Landscape

Inland

Velvet Waters

Emerald Blue

Invisible Yet Enduring Lilacs

Barley Patch

A History of Books

A Million Windows

Something for the Pain

Border Districts

Collected Short Fiction

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Contents

If this is a poem

A certain sort of atheist

Pinkish wrinkled rock

The ballad of G.M.

On first reading William Carlos Williams

Ode to Gippsland

The Darkling Thrush

Rosalie isn’t speaking

Angela is the first

In thick rough

There’s no such thing

Sparrows in Goroke

Political Philosophy

The Richardson House at Chiltern

Shy Breeders

Piss-weak

Poetic Topics (i)

Poetic Topics (ii)

Poetic Topics (iii)

Poetic Topics (iv) The Girls of St Kilian’s

Poetic Topics (v) Strange feelings when reading

Poetic Topics (vi) Faith; Religion; Catholic Church

Pettits’ Tap

Crap-books

Ode to the Western District

I’m sick of writing…

Non-travelling

Anzac Day 2015

Street Market

At Bordertown Races

The Ballad of R.T.M.

A Cistercian Life

Green Shadows

Forog a föld // The world turns

Azért annyira szeretlek // Why I love you thus

Igaz Mese // True Tale

Hangjaidban mindig hallom // I hear in your Asian vowels

Szerelmeslevél // Love-letter

Ode to the Mornington Peninsula

Private Papers

Coate Water to Glinton

Sunrise in the Antipodes

Mrs Balsarini

Poetic Truth

Last Poem

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If this is a poem

If this is a poem –

I mean, if Lesbia Harford

might not disown

it or Thomas Hardy

might read it through,

then I’ve somehow betrayed

or never knew

my true vocation.

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A certain sort of atheist A certain sort of atheist perhaps

enjoys a peculiar pleasure whenever he hears or reads that God insists on this or that and even wrote a Book to make quite clear His views. My atheist feels blessed indeed to solve so simply thus the Great Equation: X equals 0, and to be thereby freed

from so much indecisive speculation.

I use myself that atheist’s technique,

or what I’d call a personalised variation.

I use it sometimes so as to be free

from a different sort of useless speculation: asking myself ‘Why am I what I am?

Why do I mostly avoid what most enjoy?’

I’ve known for long where I might find an answer; from this or that neat theory make my choice –

blame either of my parents or my own

wrong learning as a boy. But nowadays

I simply blame a god. On her alone

(it has to be a she) I place the blame.

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Pinkish wrinkled rock

Pinkish wrinkled rock in the railway cutting north of Darebin on the Hurstbridge line, whenever I pass, reminds me of nothing

so much as my old, old problem: to find

in the visible world one single trace

of whatever it is that we call the mind.

I think thus: if that rock were brain –

my brain, exposed for experiment or trial –

where are my thoughts and dreams and moods?

Why is it that crevice and gravel and boulder –

only these can be touched or viewed

but never the teeming stuff enfolded,

supposedly, in the pinkish grey?

The train travels on; I’m none the wiser

for my staring at mere rock yet again,

but tomorrow I’ll fall again to surmising; I’ll stare at the pink-grey cliffs and defend my claim; I’ll see it as no less absurd

that a mass of stone should master the feat of thinking than that every word

of this poem came out of a lump of meat.

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The ballad of G.M.

O, I was born in any old town

in no year that comes to mind.

What happened next is all I know

and all I’ll leave behind.

My father seemed often in two minds

as to what mattered most.

Did he feel his life slip through his hands or did he just give up the ghost?

My mother knew her American films;

I was often at her side

and I knew the end was not far off

when she took out her hankie and cried.

I was told we lived at the end of the earth, so I guessed where the centre lay.

It needn’t have been as far as I thought, but so much seemed in the way.

Our town had long-forgotten streets.

I should have followed them through

until they had nothing left to show –

there was little better to do.

The stuff in the windows of our church

was sunlight long ago –

or so I thought, and I searched it through for what I’ll never know.

The pepper-trees might have stood for years where nothing much could grow;

Still in the end they went to prove

something I yearned to know.

There was never a wind like the wind from the north that came on us out of the blue.

It was nothing to taste the desert all day, but we saw the summer through.

There was always this song on the radio,

whatever the afternoon,

that made me wish us all safe home

and our story ended soon.

I couldn’t have named whatever it was

that passed with us for time;

it was given to so few of us

to know it from inside.

There was always Melbourne, away to the south, whatever happened there.

Sometimes we saw a sign of life,

but it could have been anywhere.

I might have followed the railway north,

but what would have been to tell?

The plains were all I could ever expect –

I knew them only too well.

In the town that I laid out in the dust,

too far for going back,

I turned up a street that wasn’t there

if I could have believed my map.

I wonder, now all is said and done,

what more I had to find

and whether there was all that much to come in another time out of mind.

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On first reading William Carlos Williams By the road to the Contagious Hospital...

When I first read that line,

I told myself that anything was possible

in poetry. No rhyme

or metre was required so long as the rhythm was not quite that of prose,

and argument or narrative was stripped

of metaphors, those leftovers

from the past. The year was in the sixties.

I’d bought, just days before,

a Penguin anthology published in the fifties and I was feeling more

a man of nineteen-twenties USA

than of my native suburbs.

I wrote as though Drummond Street or Royal Parade was in Paterson, New Jersey,

when what I should have written was a poem such as would cause a man,

fifty years later, in Fair Lawn or Cedar Grove or Hawthorne or Hackensack,

to fail to find among his roadside weeds

and puddles rippled by wind

what came to my mind in Carlton on summer evenings, standing on islands of trim

green grass among streets of asphalt bubbled by heat, or what I felt

when cicadas in Parkville, sometimes in Melbourne Cup

Week, droned in every elm.

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Ode to Gippsland

My father had warned me against you and your green, leached hills where children whose throats would otherwise have swelled with goitre were issued by teachers in schools with iodine pills, and I was in my twenties before my first reconnoitre past Dandenong, where, as I may once or twice have recalled, my first girlfriend had lived. I wasn’t looking for any girlfriend – I thought I was merely exploring with boozy Don Raynor in his Beetle, and we took only till early afternoon to discover a pub where we settled for the day and drank pots and looked sometimes south-east

from our dot-on-the-map that was called Carrajung.

We were trying to see in the distance the Ninety Mile Beach which, the publican boasted, was visible in clear weather, but if this is an ode, I should be addressing you, Gippsland.

I should tell you in poetic language the complex effect that you had on me – I, who looked often inland from my native district but always towards comforting plains.

For all your cleared hills, I saw you as forested over –

damp forest with your back to the Alps and falling away in the south to rough coast and tumultuous ocean.

I had lived all my life with plains at the back of my mind and actual plains to my west if I needed to flee.

You made me uneasy; your topography seemed awry: an unwelcoming zone between snow and my enemy, the sea.

Fast forward, as they say, to nineteen sixty-four…

I was on the way to marrying. She had noticeable red hair;

she loved books; she was witty; and I decided to ignore her place of origin. When she first took me there I felt far from my plains, on the wrong side of my birthplace, and threatened by flames or floods from the looming high country.

But she was at home there, and she even explained how she stared, as a child, towards the Carrajung Hills from wonderment.

And neither of us forgot, for the rest of our lives, an hour that we spent near Licola with patches of muddy snow still in our clearing and palpable all through the cold air the power of your mountains and tall timber, Gippsland, you likeable bitch.

If I recall rightly, Shakespeare’s Marc Antony would sometimes address Cleopatra simply as ‘Egypt’.

In the worst of our rages, I called my wife simply ‘Gippsland’.

Used thus, the word had, perhaps, no agreed meaning but it distanced us one from the other just as surely as if I had banished her to somewhere far east of Bairnsdale and had taken myself to the peace of Hamilton or Horsham.

I won out in the end. Eventually, I persuaded her, late in life, to have her ashes buried with mine in this place near the South Australian border, almost as far as I could get from you, Gippsland. The very grasses and trees here are different indeed from yours.

Yes, after she died I brought here her casket of ashes –

brought them all the way from Melbourne to these scrublands and low, grassy hills:

to this subdued landscape that she surely seldom imagined, let alone longed for, but I continually did.

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The Darkling Thrush

In a book having pale illustrations,

the same title that I’ve given to this poem, and four stanzas that I’ve known

by heart for five decades,

not to mention seventy-odd pages

that I surely would have so learned

if only I hadn’t turned

to prose fiction at an early age –

in that book are a half-dozen poems

or more that I can’t read aloud

without, as they say, breaking down.

I recover by clearing my throat,

by blinking, by breathing deeply,

or, sometimes, by pacing the floor.

Now, I can’t recall having reported

this matter in writing or speech

to anyone previously. You, Reader,

are the first to whom I’ve entrusted

my secret – but wait a bit! I’ve just

become shy, or at least not so eager

to confide to you that I esteem

above all poems or passages of prose

those that put a lump in my throat.

Was I not taught long ago how Leavis

judged literature? Have I not sometimes tried to make sense of that book by Eagleton?

Has it not been said of me even

that my books go to justify some or another literary theory?

Yet, here am I as much as admitting

that I’m one of those ignorant critics

who rely on what they call feelings.

I have no intention of denying

what I wrote in those early quatrains,

but I’ll fend off, perhaps, some complaints if I point out that ‘Channel Firing’

or ‘Afternoon Service at Mellstock’

or ‘Afterwards’ or ‘A Commonplace Day’

or ‘In time of “The Breaking of Nations”’ –

that these or their like leave me not

only stricken, you might say, but urged

to examine my mood, then to find

its precise cause, and afterwards to try

to explain it in these sorts of words.

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Rosalie isn’t speaking Rosalie isn’t speaking to me now.

I’ve seen her only twice

since the funeral; each time I’ve come out with ‘Hello’ and each time

she’s turned away. Now, on the scale of things –

I mean, to such as myself –

Rosalie’s snubs should matter not a bit,

and yet they’re starting to tell.

She’s something of a hero around the town and rightly so, I suppose –

from an old local family, a widow, and now without three of her children. Of these

the latest was sent off by several hundred in our impressive hall.

I sat in the back row. I could only wonder how Rosalie was taking it. I recalled

only my relief when my wife’s last illness was over, and my children are all still alive.

Surely that’s not the problem. Surely Rosalie didn’t want me with tears in my eyes

in the cemetery. I’ve known her only since her husband spent his last years in the Men’s Shed.

I’m not the sort to ask her what the trouble is; nor will I ever guess it.

I can only hope to get over my unease

by finding its true source

by learning why I have this urge to appease

persons of no importance

to me – sorry, Rosalie! I shouldn’t give

a single flying feathered

fuck, but without her – I mean their – good opinion I’m strangely unsettled.

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Angela is the first

Angela is the first for nearly five years –

the first to attract me by looks alone,

to cause me to ignore my customary fear,

and, at least, to imagine how I might go

through a courtship after all this time.

I talked with her briefly three years ago and before her husband showed any sign

of his cancer – the same that took my own wife. Then we didn’t meet again until last night.

She was with the women in the golf clubhouse; I was barman. When she ordered her glass of white, I reminded her of what we’d talked about

on that earlier occasion: how she and my wife had grown up in the very same district,

five hundred kilometres away. She smiled

and claimed to remember. I was already wishing I hadn’t raised the matter – it seemed

to emphasise the symmetry of our situation.

I tried to change the subject while she

seemed genuinely pleased to renew our acquaintance.

And that was all and will be all

that happens in the visible world.

I now have images enough for recalling

or for making up one of the alternative

worlds that I often inhabit. Plus,

of course, I’ve written this poem. Surely she’ll never hear of its being published,

unless, you, Reader, make bold to inform her.

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In thick rough

In thick rough between certain of our fairways, I sometimes have an insight that I prize.

I glimpse, between the stringybark trunks and decayed banksias, a place that I fail to recognise.

Part of my pleasure is knowing that the grove or glade, so to call it, for all its allurement and strangeness, is on one of the eighteen familiar holes that I’ve played a hundred times in the past few years. My vagueness, though – is it really a subject for a poem?

In the old joke, the house-vendor, while reading the agent’s flowery description of her own house, supposes she has found the home of her dreams.

In the nineteen-forties, in my Grade Three Reading Book, was the story of the Good Little Goblin, who searched for years for Fairyland and found it – surprise! surprise! – when he looked into his own back garden with eyes at last clear.

I was hoping to move on from my bafflement on the golf course to my old dream of writing a piece so intricate and maze-like that I, its author, could readily get myself lost in it or, perhaps, to an even less likely attainment: my finding one day in my archive the journal or diary of the sort of writer I’ve always wanted to be.

But now, pressing on with my struggle to find this poem’s true subject-matter, I keep on seeing Mrs Pisani, no older than I am now,

wide-eyed, as though granted a revelation, at her grandson’s wedding in the sixties doing the rounds,

saying ‘I know you!’ to each of her near relations.

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There’s no such thing

There’s no such thing as sex –

only persons engaging

with one another in many

and various ways.

This is a problem for those

who never could uncover

the character or motives

of any other.

They, the baffled few,

being loath to chance their luck,

find better things to do

while the rest fuck.

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Sparrows in Goroke

In the very first year when I took an interest in birds, I seem to have thought of sparrows as unworthy of study. They swarmed around our shabby house, but in Leach’s Australian Bird Book I had found tiny coloured likenesses of the true

bird-citizens of Bendigo. These flew

and cried and foraged and nested far from my sight in the district’s original landscape. I often tried to see them in mind, drawing on what I’d read about them and ignoring the mob of sparrows that fed on my father’s poultry-grains and built their nests in full sight of me. I considered them pests, and less-than-real migrants compared with the unseen bright native birds that I read about in Leach.

Now, in this tiny grid of streets between vast paddocks and state forests, corellas screech, morning and evening, above me in their hundreds; rosellas flaunt their showy selves in front of me –

I see each day a dozen native species,

and that’s okay, of course, but would you believe I much prefer the company of the local sparrows, or spadgers, as we called them in Bendigo?

If ever I was urged to learn the secret

of the Australian bush or to read its meaning as the so-called First Australians are said to have read it, I am no longer. Now, I’m quite content

to have the bush in the distance: one small part

of my own Dreaming. And I’d rather parrots and such kept their mystery to themselves while I observe my totem-birds, these dwellers under roofs, these ditherers in backyards.

Their distant cousins are living thus in Carlisle or Bideford or Haywards Heath where my

own forebears came from around the time

these little guys’ ancestors, forty generations ago, had to endure their forced migration.

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Political Philosophy

I remember a Marxist colleague of mine,

back in the eighties, calling a meeting

to protest against something to the Dean

and, when some of us seemed disinclined

to join him, offering this argument:

‘When someone claims we can change nothing, I tell them unions were illegal once.’

Now, I’ve never been able to come up with smart rejoinders, and, anyway, my colleague’s case seemed reasonable, but I’ve just now found the words to express my life-long doubt

as to the wisdom of working for change.

Sorry, put a my in the previous line so that it reads my working. I won’t pass judgement on the many who hope

and work for betterment, but I confine

my efforts to purely impractical things:

recording the results of imaginary horse-races; poring over maps of the countless places

that I’ve never had any intention of visiting; talking to myself in the Magyar tongue;

hitting ball after ball on the practice fairway; or, in my library, as I call it, staring

at spine after spine of all the hundreds

of books I’ve decided I’ll never read;

and writing a little sometimes, as though to stop for a while the change and flow

of things. And if asked what I believe about – let’s call it the public weal,

I’d quote the landless farm-labourers I read about once who barely lifted their heads

in ’48, in their lordship’s field,

while their brave Magyar countrymen pursued the tyrant Austrians out of the motherland or, months later, when the same rebel bands fled past the same field, ragged and subdued.

Along the furrows the same phrase went –

hardly an utterance; more a sigh:

in Magyar Uradalmi baj! *

in English Trouble among the gentry!

* The Hungarian baj is pronounced similarly to the English buy.

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The Richardson House at Chiltern I’ve never been a tourist. I’ve never wandered in strange surroundings, gawking at stuff while knowing fuck-all about its provenance or history, but I couldn’t pass up

the chance to see the house ‘Lake View’ at Chiltern.

The folk who drove me there decided

to show me the whole town. The historic buildings bored me but I made polite

sounds in front of them until, at last, we got to ‘Lake View’. I can’t recall the look

of the place, which that day was unattended and locked and, of course, nothing like the house-in-the-book –

you know what I mean. Walking round it I couldn’t believe a man could go crazy in that pleasant setting until I pressed my right palm, for some reason, on a brick and, finding it warm, remembered the night when I arrived too late in the palliative care ward to help my wife die and when I touched

the hands on the bed. They were disconcertingly warm.

Like Mahony, she had gone crazy once,

and for no apparent reason, but in the end she came good. I tried to recall at ‘Lake View’

her reading the book and whatever she had said about it but decided instead that she knew by then all that anyone could ever need to know about fiction or madness or life or death –

as did Mahony-Richardson, of course. It was time to go.

Our obligatory minutes at the site had been spent.

I made a tourist’s comment. I had no urge to report my thoughts. The man of the house had talked of such stuff to his patients until the word that he was nuts was all over town.

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Shy Breeders

Arstall, Bellgrove, Cainey, and Dancy,

Enfield, Fewsdale, Gollogly, and Hurskin, Ivell, Jauffrey, Kitcher, and Lancy,

Mansborough, Nutter, Oldridge, and Pursley, Quittenden, Ratman, Shearwin, and Tantillage, Upshall, Vowell, Wardman, and Yardney,

you represent almost all of the alphabet

and suit my purpose, being wholly or partly Anglo-Celt and, whatever your looks,

your age or gender or profession, the one bearer of your name in the tattered phone book that provides me with all the random numbers for my horseracing game. Now, you may very well have sisters named Jones or Tran, but I like to think of you as kinless in all of Melbourne –

not friendless, of course, but with no one to invite to any sort of family gathering

and no one to sit with for hours reminiscing about childhood and parents. Your own kids, perhaps, have cousins but none they can easily visit.

You spend much less at Christmas than the average person, and although your in-laws may be serial pests, your spouse will never ban his or hers

from the house – if they’ve even met them.

Some of you, I suppose, are a sort of scout –

the first in these parts of your clan or tribe.

Some may be scapegoats or black sheep forced out

of your parents’ territory and way of life.

I prefer, however, to think of you all

as – no offence meant! – a race of shy breeders, which is what my father often called

his own branch of my family tree.

Your father, Jauffrey, sired just the one after marrying only in his forties.

Your mother, Fewsdale, spent years as a nun and required from your father a protracted courtship.

And among you all the most noticeable trait you’ve passed to your children, few as they are.

They’re circumspect and ready for a very long wait while rejecting many a possible partner

for reasons that most folk would deem trivial but not I – I can readily relate

to their keen discernment and I have much sympathy for all of you in your situation,

to the point where I feel obliged to help.

You may be only names in a poem,

but your hardship seems to transcend the text, as it were, and to merge with my own.

So, here goes…Clapper, I’ll have your son meet up with the lonely daughter of Mawley, who would suit him better, I reckon than Ms Munn –

her rarefied needs match those of Ordway.

You, Pedgeon, your middle-aged son’s still single but his search will be over when he meets Ms Ough, while Dowdney and Heagle, your solitary children will find their soulmates in Settler and Sowton.

But hang on! What sort of crap am I writing:

metrical match-making? poetic pandering?

Isn’t it rather much more likely

that Sarey and Clitterbuck and Enston and Handfield are far from wretched and that one or more are writing right now a vast work of fiction or a cycle of poems or a musical score

in an upstairs room like Emily Dickinson’s?

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Piss-weak

You join what they call a service-club

in a little township to pay the place back for its welcoming you, so you say, but in fact, the club recruited you, and you didn’t have the guts to refuse. So, anyway, you find yourself

one of three singles in a group of sixteen.

You’re a widower yourself and, you like to believe, content with your lot. There’s another fellow who’s a lifelong bachelor but certainly not queer, and then there’s this woman; you can’t tell her age but she has a son in another State

and she lives alone – in fact, very near

your own house. You faithfully attend the meetings and dinners, and nothing much happens, but when the wives all turn up you have again,

just like fifty years ago, the feeling

that you had when you turned up at social events, as you mostly did, all on your ownsome,

hoping no one would mention or even notice your being still, at your age, without a girlfriend.

So, you have the old feeling and you put it aside, but it keeps coming back. One night last winter you were being driven home from a formal dinner through dark and empty countryside

by a kind-hearted husband and his wife.

(That’s one of the things that happens to singles –

married couples tend to offer them lifts;

but that was okay; you could drink and not drive.) The couple, of course, were in the front seat, and you were in the back – but not on your own.

That woman was beside you, and you supposed it had all been arranged, and you’re so weak when it comes to standing up to others,

and so frightened of letting people down, as you see it, that you spent the whole trip home foreseeing your hand reaching out in the dark and covering her hand and gripping it, and hers gripping back.

And I reckon the only thing that saved

you was the beer you had drunk – it made you feel brave.

Now, I ask you: how piss-weak was all that?

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Poetic Topics (i)

Beside me is a closely written page

in pen and ink from sixty years ago:

a list I made at seventeen years of age

of all the subject-matter for the poems

I felt qualified to write. I’ve done a quick count of my poetic topics, as I called them.

They’re grouped under eighteen headings, and I’ve found just on three hundred items. I seem to recall that my comprehensive list was meant to last for the rest of my life, which meant that I needed no more experience – I could live as a recluse with my one great task my excuse for my staying mostly behind closed doors and devoting myself to a single massive achievement.

(Many a topic, by the way, was meant to give rise to a number of poems.) I must have hoped to complete a minutely detailed, many-faceted cycle

of both the recollected and the purported experiences of – what should he be called?

a puerile Proust? a Pepys of boyhood? or

an idiot-savant, Mr Total Recall?

But I would not have the reader of these lines suppose my purpose is to mock or even to express a patronising sympathy for the young compiler of his four- or five-hundredfold literary monument.

I admire him for setting down his list and nothing more –

nothing about aesthetics or moral purpose or even technique, as though merely to record

phrases, proper nouns, and an occasional terse

‘Find more such items!’ or ‘Cover every aspect!’

was all his sort of poet could possibly need in future; as though his Complete Works only lacked one last detail: the words to make them readable.

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Poetic Topics (ii)

I wonder whether I properly explained myself near the end of the previous poem in this series.

He who compiled his list was sure of himself in the literal sense of that expression. Many years later he would read William Wordsworth’s ponderous pronouncement about emotions being calmly recollected

and still later T.S.Eliot’s profound-

sounding stuff about an objective correlative but would learn nothing from either. When, at last, he read the claim by Marcel Proust’s narrator that Life writes ceaselessly our book-in-the-heart, he of the poetic topics felt vindicated.

He was hardly nearer to being any sort of poet, but about his subject-matter he had been correct: whatever else about it was not yet known, it had had, from the first, the feeling of a text.

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Poetic Topics (iii)

McIvor Road – afternoons…at first I thought it odd that this was one of hardly any

such topics under the heading Bendigo/the North, considering all the countless hours I’ve spent recalling the city or Bassett, its fictional version in TAMARISK ROW. I gave the compiler of topics no credit for foresight. Now, just those three words, McIvor Road – afternoons have set me off in one of a hundred possible directions…

From my earliest years, I seem to have preferred words to scenery. I recall the very lettering on signs I passed but hardly any trees or birds.

Aged five or six, I read twice daily WOOL, HIDES, SKINS & TALLOW BROKERS on a fence beside McIvor Road. I understood

the first three items and got also a sense of a message that was something of a boast, but for perhaps a year was teased and challenged to see in mind the mysterious TALLOW BROKERS.

The sound of the first word yielded a series of yellow imagery. The second word, through its seeming link with the verb to break, led me to visualise fractures, comings-apart, or splinterings.

Golden or amber objects were being prised easily open, and what was thus revealed

unfailingly surpassed in opulence

whatever had been its earlier appearance.

I was envious of the persons behind the fence, who could use, whenever they chose, the very skills that I most needed to acquire; who had long ago learned what drooping foliage of pepper-trees on still, hot days was hinting at; who interpreted

readily the most guarded of adults’ remarks; who with lamps and screens could brilliantly have projected the inner richness of my prized glass marbles; who could write and read impenetrable-seeming texts.

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Poetic Topics (iv)

The Girls of St Kilian’s

Anne Buck and Kathleen Goss are two that come readily to mind. I’ve met people

who claim to recall from their early childhood nothing but a few names; I can still see

the swaying of Anne’s brown plaits and her mincing gait as she wields the feather-duster

in the empty classroom while we, the mob, have to wait outside for our morning muster.

I can see, too, Kathleen’s way of pursing her mouth when, having taken from the locked cupboard a swatch of white art-paper, she hands out the pristine pages to us,

the mob, with our sweaty hands. Anne and Kathleen were called helpers by Sister Collette.

They were called by most of the mob, with myself being among the exceptions, her pets.

I felt towards them almost the respect and awe that I felt towards the bad-tempered nun, but her power came from her robes and her withdrawal from the mundane – the girls moved among

us in the same gravel playground and could not always answer in class what I answered with ease.

Their being far above me was due to their faces, their fancy clothes, and their pale, flawless knees.

Word after newly learned word I was quick to apply to either: attractive, gracious, charming,

and even glamorous. Why did I never aspire to have them learn of my regard?

No such question would ever have been likely to present itself at the time, and even now

I’ve asked it only for the sake of the persons mentioned in lines 2 to 4, who’ve forgotten how

they felt urged as children to look for objects worthy not of love but rather of veneration.

That seemed the only appropriate response to girls with white, starched blouses, faces

from which nothing simple or definite could be construed, secrets shared only with others of their kind, and always the ready response ‘Stop being rude!’

to the lout who crossed an invisible line.

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Poetic Topics (v)

Strange feelings when reading

Strange feelings when reading old racebooks – exactly these words comprise the third of the seventeen entries under the heading Horse Races, but what they refer to I just can’t recollect.

I had a strange feeling or two while I read my fountain-pen script from the fifties,

but then I recalled the long-ago reviewer who alleged that I’d grafted an adult’s sensibility

onto a child’s in my first book, TAMARISK ROW.

So, I won’t go there, as they say.

And if I’m not careful, I’ll begin to sound like those would-be profound fiction writers whose pages have far too much tedious stuff about memory being fallible or sometimes easy to confuse

with what we’ve imagined. Plus, I lost years ago my valued hoard of old racebooks. I know what I’ll do: I’ll take out and read the oldest of the very few racebooks in my archive, and even though it dates from eight years after Poetic Topics, one or two strange feelings may come to me again.

After writing the previous lines, I looked briefly through the palm-sized booklet that cost me two shillings on a fine but chilly Saturday, the 20th of June, in 1964. There was scribbled

on the cover With CML – our first outing.

(That quaint to go out with – is it used still?)

And yes, it seemed strange, but I thought, while I read, more about some names in the book than her whose initials changed slightly two years later after our wedding, and I saw more clearly the image-faces

of men I never met than that of my red-

haired new girlfriend at Caulfield races.

Yes, I felt close again to Arthur Prentis, Charlie Sanderson, Joe Rolfe,

Stan Smithers, Ronnie Morrisey, Ted Jenkins, Alby Garton, Jack Bond,

and other such. They were mostly smallish men, being former jockeys, heavy smokers,

and boozers too, who dragged themselves out of bed between three and four every morning, and most never made it to seventy. They were some of the many trainers who waited during most of their careers

for a champion, the dream-horse that seldom came to their sort of stable; who for year after year scrounged a living by cunning, astuteness, deceit, and scant luck. What I admired most

was their being able to cope with the narrow defeats that happen so often in racing, the close finishes when the margin of a nose would deprive my men of the equal of their income for half a year.

They not so much failed as almost succeeded again and again. Their greatest achievements were near-misses. And I did have a rather strange feeling when I saw a likeness between the life

of my hero-trainers and that of the woman who went out with me that day and was later my wife.

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Poetic Topics (vi)

Faith; Religion; Catholic Church

One eighteenth expressed as a percentage, correct to one decimal place,

is five point six, or rather less

than six per cent. What should I make

of this figure? At the foot of the page,

and less than six per cent, as it were,

of all the stuff that gave me inspiration, stands Faith; Religion; Catholic Church.

Did I work at it, or did it come by chance –

the perfect metre of those words arranged thus: syllable, iambus, syllable, iambus?

Who knows? Nor can I decide today

whether I wanted the words to have the sound of a symphony’s last bars:

to keep the three impressive, resonant nouns as a climax at the very last

or whether my schoolboy’s conscience was at work, reminding me I was not just any

sort of poet; my duty was to assert

the truth, which was no mere six per cent of my subject-matter but ought to pervade the whole.

Just recalling all this has made me tired in the way I so often grew tired of old –

tired of having to reconcile

two baffling but undeniable facts.

My religion, a matter of supreme importance,

never reached the part of me that reacted to poems, novels, even horseracing, yet these, though irrelevant to my salvation stirred me as I supposed I was meant

to be stirred by prayer or ritual or the speculations of theologians. In the end –

but surely no one reading this has to be told the inevitable ending? I need only mention that this poem comprises one forty-fifth of the whole book; two point two as a percentage.

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Pettits’ Tap

For Brody Gray

Your mother told me how you fronted

calmly up to the schoolground bully,

not to defend yourself or punch

or grapple, but to ask him coolly

how it felt to bring to tears

his weakling victim. The bully’s reply

I wasn’t told, but sixty years

and more ago, thus questioned, I

would have struggled to find an answer,

not only for your sort but for myself.

Along one wall of St Kilian’s shelter

shed was a row of drinking taps.

The basin at the further end

was mottled and stained, and every kid knew it was Pettits’ tap. No one but Len

or his older sisters must ever use

the filthy thing. Who devised this law?

Enforcing it was all we cared

about. And why the Pettits? They wore

patched hand-me-downs. For lunch they shared bread smeared with jam from a newsprint parcel.

Len’s hair was shaggy, and he talked all strange, and he never fought back. Once, he even farted when we had him cornered. On a notable day, there was only the pair of us near the taps when I caught him gulping a handful of water

from one of ours. It was no satisfaction for me alone to react. I called

to the Mob. They had their usual fun.

Len blubbered as usual, and I was proud

to be with the majority, and if someone

of your sort, Brody, had asked me how

I felt, I would probably not have obliged him. Few feelings can be aptly described

or last but, Brody, this one survived

and has stuck with me through a long lifetime.

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Crap-books

Here’s a list of some of the crap-

books that I forced myself to read

when I was still a nervous young chap

who supposed that every overseas

writer knew more than I. I’ll start

with Anna Karenina – utterly unreadable.

If Leo Tolstoy, that pompous old fart,

were alive today, he’d be writing TV

scripts. Next, Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain –

what is it about Germans and philosophy

that makes even their fictional characters spout tedious arguments and preposterous

would-be intellectual stuff?

Any list like this must include Saul Bellow.

His wordy novels are proof enough

that he took up every fashionable, shallow habit of thinking from the eastern states of the USA, which reminds me to include

Scott Fitzgerald’s grossly overrated

books. Their narrators all seem to assume there’s only one view of the world – the Yankee’s.

A so-called major English writer,

by name McEwan, once used a cranky

theory about the weather to inspire

him. I suppose when you have a total lack of original ideas, the news headlines

can help you out. Now I’m thinking back

to the seventies and eighties…what were the titles of those Latin American magical realists?

Or, a better question, can I remember

a single passage from all their dreary,

forgettable prose? I thought I’d extend

this list for twenty stanzas at least,

but it’s petering out already. I reckon

it’s because the instinct or whatever that keeps us from recalling in detail the worst of our memories has helped me forget not only my reading

so many flawed texts but even such facts

as titles or names of authors and even

that I ever once thought they were anything but crap.

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Ode to the Western District Where do I start? Perhaps I ought to report that I saw you first not as west but as somewhere north.

You offered the security of grasslands as opposed to the dangers I saw in the unpredictable ocean.

My father’s brothers tossed me into the green frothing water and laughed all the more when I screamed.

My revenge was to choose as my element the shimmering land that I saw from the clifftops as soon as I’d turned my back on the much-overrated sea. You were still in the distance, but that was all right; I was in no hurry to visit you, never have been…and I may as well admit

that I’ve never spent a single night within your conjectured boundaries: lines between Ballarat, Camperdown, Hamilton, and back through Ararat.

Nor was I ever ambitious to have as my address some such evocative name as Chatsworth, Hexham, Darlington, Westmere, or even Skipton, whence came a Melbourne Cup winner during my childhood. In the same way that I’ll put off for years my reading of a book that promises much, I still haven’t really looked at you, not that your sort of landscape yields its meaning to peering eyes. Each year in May when I’m speeding across you and back, to and from the Warrnambool races, I stare ahead, confident that one or two precious traces of your essence will reach me days, or even weeks, later, when I see by chance, in the way of Proust’s narrator, something slight in itself yet inextricably linked with all that defines you: something that probably winked from a distance or just caught the corner of an eye while I stared ahead: the distant flash of an iron shearing-shed roof; two walls of ornamental stone, a cattle-pit, an avenue, but no sight of any home

this side of the farthest visible slopes; the slow shadow of a cloud as it crosses vast paddocks below.

Of the lucky few thousand who live in your blessed zone I know not one. I’ve peopled you with my own legendary race derived from what I’ve read of the Golden Age of the Squatter and what I was led to believe by my aunt who read the Society Pages in newspapers during my childhood, taking note of the ladies photographed in the Members’ Enclosure at Flemington meetings.

My myth, so to call it, depends on there being in at least one of your two-storey homesteads a room set aside as a library, with books around the walls. Never mind if recent generations have given up adding new titles –

all I need is those few thousand books and a verandah outside overhung with dense flowering creepers and trailing vines such that even the harshest sunlight can only be surmised and likewise the long, level vistas, the imprecise horizons, or the dome-shaped arrangements of clouds in the eye-taking sky.

I’ve considered you my heartland for just about all of my life, but I’ve always approached you through reading or dreaming or writing about images of you. How often in that book-lined room has a man not unlike myself, in the yellow-green gloom, seated himself, turned many a page of a book about landlocked and mostly level places before looking around him and noticing at last the female person reading at a distant table and with her back turned, and then understood that she heard his quiet entry but was too busy reading to look in his direction?

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I’m sick of writing…

I’m sick of writing long,

slack poems. Why can’t I write

something that sounds like a song

or yields a sharp insight

such as I had just now

while reading my favourite Border

Ballads and thinking of how

such works have no known authors?

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Non-travelling

In the early nineteen-sixties, I heard

from a teacher in the far south-west of this State about a retired council worker

who was in the pub on most afternoons until late and who sometimes mentioned, but not as if it mattered, that the Mount was the biggest place he had ever been to. (The Mount was the city of Mount Gambier in the far south-east of SA, as our man would have called South Australia, and would have had at that time rather less than twenty thousand for its population.) That summer, the teacher from the far south-west and I planned, as usual, our boozy trip

to some or another district with plenty of pubs, and I tried to persuade him we ought to call in on the man who had been for seventy years holed up, so to speak, in a thousand square miles

or so of pastoral country and small towns. My mate was not an imaginative person. I tried

and failed, but I’d find it hard even today to explain to you, Sympathetic Reader, my strange

reaction whenever I learn about someone’s staying put.

Philosophy baffles me, but my favourite

practitioner of it is Kant, who not once forsook his native Königsberg. The visual arts

hardly interest me, but I’m a great admirer of the painter Ensor who, apart

from a two-day trip to Paris spent his whole life in provincial and unremarkable Ostend.

I revere the poet John Clare not only for his writings but for his losing his reason when

he was forced from the district he had wanted as his for life.

What I called above a strange reaction begins with my asking what body of knowledge replaces in the mind of a stay-put the countless trashy recollections of barely known people and places –

I mean, while others are ‘seeing the world’

or ‘broadening their minds’ what images are piling up in their minds whose only concerns are routine, the familiar, or, at most, a few adjustments to same? Perhaps the stay-at-homes

can see with more intensity and penetration than the world-wanderers, so that those

square miles I mentioned are teeming nations or continents. Perhaps my heroes

bring into focus details that the wide-

rangers overlook, thus finding near

at hand much exotica needing to be classified.

Or, perhaps, and this is what I most

hope for, the stickers-in-the-mud, as many would call them, although they’re never heard to boast of it, see not sights but the very thing we’d all like to see. I’ll call it the Real

or the True or the Ultimate, even though I, a noted non-traveller, have not yet had it reveal itself while I’ve stood my ground and kept my eyes open.

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Anzac Day 2015

No close relation of mine fought in either War, a fact that I used to attribute to the luck of the draw –

my rellies being all in the right places at the right times.

Or, should I have written there wrong instead of right?

Anyway, the nearest I had to medal-earning kin were Louis, my father’s young brother, and Norman Horne, the husband of one of my mother’s sisters. His in-fluence with his local MP kept Louis in a stores depot in Melbourne among wealthy bookmakers and Jews, so he said, who had got their way into the place with bribes and who pilfered half the stuff that was meant to be used by the troops overseas. My Uncle Norman survived with even less glory. He went A-W-L

for the duration. He jumped ship in Brisbane and melted into the crowd. I never learned what became of him after that. The MPs regularly raided the rented shack at Olinda where Norm’s young wife and three kids saw out the war, but Norm must have used the skills of someone trapped behind enemy lines.

He was never caught and after the war was amused to find work as a steward in an air-force officers’ mess.

When the bugle sounded this morning under the pale sky in my favourite month, it seemed the rest of the crowd wore medals and ribbons, and none of the names on our main-street memorial were of anyone I knew.

I wanted to write Louis and Norman on a wall where a few people would pass and to leave some petals for the sort

of men who turn wimp or runaway in time of war.

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Street Market

Some recent arrivals in our quiet little town, wanting to take advantage of the crowd

that comes each year from afar to one of our lakes to listen to country music for two days,

decided we’d have our very own street market.

No one seemed to find this in any way alarming except your Poet, and in order to explain his problem I’ll have to go back a rather long way.

He’s been subject all his life to doubts and fears that never bother others. Seventy years

ago, when hungry stray dogs roamed the streets and sniffed around schoolyards, he would always flee from each skinny mongrel but only so as to avoid meeting its eye and thereby giving it cause to follow him home, only to be turned away, for such was his parents’ ruling, at the front gate.

It was not just dogs that he feared to disappoint –

he would wait outside a shop in order to avoid witnessing the cruel scene when his mother calmly rejected one after another

item fetched and set out just for her.

And even on the footpath, he soon learned never to stare but only to glance at displays in shop windows. That way, he’d never raise the expectations of anyone inside.

He’s had this as his policy all his life: never to enter a shop unless he knows

exactly what he wants, and if it so

happens they can’t supply it, then to buy some compensatory trifle instead. He tried to get his milk and papers on market day

before the stalls were up. He was dismayed

to see a good-looking woman near the door of the newsagent’s shop. He never saw

what she was selling. He tried to stare ahead like someone lost in thought, and when she said

‘Good morning,’ warmly he wanted to reply

‘This crazy scheme was none of mine. If I could possibly have done so, I’d have voted it down for fear of raising anyone’s hopes.’

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At Bordertown Races

I might well have made a case

for that day’s being my best

so far. Of the hundreds of faces

in the crowd, none looked in my direction, not even the few young women

I had to look twice at. Before long

I was no more an elderly widower

new to the district; I had gone

back to a time when my true

life, so to call it, was one

of a dozen possibilities. I knew

nothing of any wife or sons

or books with my name on their covers.

No more need to pretend! I could be

my true self at last: none other

than the solitary boy of fifteen

who loved racing first, just ahead

of poetry and whose teachers and parents

never preached or recommended

higher goals. I spent much time staring

at trainers from Naracoorte

or Murray Bridge or Mount Gambier

and deciding which one I ought

to work for as a stablehand.

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The Ballad of R.T.M.

Reg was born in a dairying district

where the languid Hopkins flows.

Hand-milking cows was endless work;

at eighteen, he took to the road.

But that’s to make it all too simple –

Reg was a driven man

if ever there was; he could never have stayed put under any circumstances.

For sixteen years in the twenties and thirties, and in four different States,

he was jackeroo, labourer, prison warder, and strictly celibate.

I believe he proposed to at least two girls.

If so, their knocking him back

must have riled a man who always supposed he stood out from the pack.

He saw himself as he was on Saturdays

in the betting ring, in his bespoke

suit, not as someone from a boarding house or a warder in his blue serge coat.

But if he made little impression on girls, he had much more success

with men who mattered. At Caulfield one day, the Victorian Chief Secretary

and a QC greeted him and chatted.

He had introduced himself

to them and to other such over the years.

No, Reg would never sell

himself short among men but he ended up

with a girl about half his age

who was carrying someone else’s child.

She deferred to him and obeyed

him in most matters and never seemed

to resent his leaving her at home

and going to the races or to visit his friends like a bachelor, alone.

I was stuck with him for twenty-one years –

thirty-eight per cent of his life.

During that time, he had eighteen addresses, eleven jobs and twice

that many schemes for extra income,

most involving horses.

He pitied those who skimped and saved,

but his own last recourse

was to work at two jobs and to stay awake by dosing himself with pills.

The doctor couldn’t explain the death.

I would have said Reg was killed

by the weight of his debts, most still unpaid when we buried his remains

near the mouth of the Hopkins, in Warrnambool, with all the other Murnanes.

They left behind farms or houses or bank balances. Reg left to me

binoculars, a white-gold Rolex Prince,

two grey felt hats with pea-

cock feathers glinting in their bands,

two cuff-links with opals, a third of a Peugeot he was buying on hire-purchase, and all of his way with words.

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A Cistercian Life

Does anyone now remember Thomas Merton?

I got his Elected Silence as a prize for fifth-form English in 1955

and read it in one day. I was hugely stirred.

Merton, a pagan, had found his way to the Church and then to a monastery in the USA.

As a monk, he was vowed to silence but he persuaded his abbot to let him go on writing verses and books extolling the monastic way of life.

Brother Louis, to use his religious name, achieved, especially with Catholics, a widespread fame, and I would have been among his most fervent admirers.

His was the life for me! No having to search for a girlfriend! No trying not to look

at cheesecake photos in the Argus! I could put to rest even my dread of university

and studying books I reckoned were not worth reading.

And if my abbot would let me go on writing at an upstairs desk, what more could I desire than pen and paper and a view of rural scenery?

I nearly applied to be a novice at Yarra Glen, but that’s another story. (That Merton’s Order had their only Australian house in what was almost an outer suburb counted very much against them in my peculiar youthful scale of things.

I wanted to live my lifetime of seclusion somewhere past Edenhope or Mallacoota.)

Anyway, for forty years I used to think sometimes about my white-robed image-men

at prayer on freezing mornings in a bare chapel or sweating in summer among their sheep or cattle.

I gave my own life seven out of ten,

but I reckoned the Cistercians, on the same scale, scored only two or three at most.

(That was by worldly standards; I supposed their spiritual life, whatever, more than made up for their privations.) Then my son

Gavin, no churchgoer, spent a week alone

in their guesthouse for reasons of his own.

This was in the summer of nineteen ninety-one.

I should have mentioned already that I read in the nineteen-eighties a frank biography of Merton.

He was full of himself. He hardly ever observed the Cistercian rule. He used to write to celebrities with feigned humility but clearly believing he was one himself. That was one of my bubbles burst, but Gavin came back from Yarra Glen with worse to report. The monks had mostly now no need for hard work. The cattle were gone. The abbot had leased their land for growing grapes. They made their guesthouse available to women, and every evening they pestered Gavin to discuss programs he had never seen on telly – these men whose motto was Work and pray and who were once famed for their silence. As for their vow of stability – never to leave the monastery – now they could take each year a fortnight’s holiday to wherever they pleased. I’m working on these lines

at a student’s desk in a room of unlined stone where I live without radio, TV, telephone, or computer. A fold-away camper’s stretcher suffices as a bed. The only other furnishings are ward-robe, bookshelf, and thirteen filing-cabinets.

I’ve made no vow of silence but I haven’t spoken since yesterday when I called at the store.

I last took a holiday back in the nineteen-seventies, for my young sons’ sake. Through my only window I see mostly wall, but the view from each end of my street is of countryside, level and seemingly empty.

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Green Shadows

You’d think a man who’s nearly eighty,

who buried his parents and his brother,

who nursed his wife through a year of suffering from terminal cancer, and who once had to wait for fifteen minutes in an emergency ward

while they went on trying to restart the heart in one of his sons (they did it at last) –

you’d think such a man would be able to call on reserves of strength or something whenever he felt that second-hand pain or grief

that you feel for someone else in deep

trouble. You’d think so, but I’ve resolved never again to look into Green Shadows, A Life of John Clare, by one June Wilson, Hodder and Stoughton, nineteen fifty-one. I was able to read it right

through in the eighties; I couldn’t not

learn the facts about one of my saints.

But today, while I read, I recalled again what was ahead and I couldn’t read on.

Of course, I tried the usual ploy:

I told myself that they were all dead;

that their sufferings long ago came to an end, but I knew all along I could never avoid

the truth I’d discovered when I first

engaged with texts: the self-evident fact of there being no reader nor subject-matter –

only images and feelings in a sort of eternity.

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Forog a föld // The world turns Forog a föld;

süt a nap.

Furcsa irást mutat föl

egy óriási lap.

The world turns;

the sun burns

on a giant page

a strange message.

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Azért annyira szeretlek // Why I love you thus To a young female farm-labourer at Rácegres Puszta, in Tolna County, in the Kingdom of Hungary, who took her own life in about 1910

Azért annyira szeretlek,

mert meghaltál évtizedek

ȍta es elfelejtetted

már a meleg testedet.

I love you to excess

because of your early death

and because you now forget

that ever you were flesh.

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Igaz Mese // True Tale Hol volt, vagy hol nem –

így legjobban kezd-

ȍdne az életem

igaz meséje.

It wasn’t, or it was –

with such words each Magyar

fairytale begins.

I ought to use the same

words to explain away

my own strange history.

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Hangjaidban mindig hallom // I hear in your Asian vowels To the Hungarian language

Hangjaidban mindig hallom

a szelet a pusztán át

és az ó szép ajkán

ismeretlen dalt.

I hear in your Asian vowels

the wind across the Great Plain

and, from her perfect rounded

lips, a mysterious refrain.

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Szerelmeslevél // Love-letter Tolna megyében, Rácegres pusztán, zord volt az éjjeli fagy, s néma csendben várt a sötét víz a kút jégtáblája alatt.

Milyen hang hallatszott röviden mikor te ugortál be én éjjel-nappal hallom, de leírni nem kell; rá eléggé emlekszel

és a reménytelenségedre. Jobb ha súgom neked ezt: jövök; majd mentelek.

On Rácegres Puszta the cold was severe.

The labourers’ quarters were dark and silent.

In the sweep-arm well, as your time drew near, the surface was a layer of ice.

You don’t need me to report here the sounds that I hear day and night. You recall

every last detail: your leap, your drowning, and what drove you there. So, all

I need tell you a hundred years later

is: I hear you; I’m coming to save you.

Author’s note: The Hungarian text was composed to fit the tune ‘Sarie Marais’.

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Ode to the Mornington Peninsula I wrote in a poem in the early nineteen-sixties that I wanted to eat the whole of you, beginning from your toothsome tip at Portsea all the way to your chunky, bite-size bulk at Canadian Bay.

I could make the claim that I thought of your yellow sand as caramel-tasting and of your red-and-green band of roofs and trees as a sort of rich fruitcake, and that this was simply because of your reputation as a place for Sunday drives or summer holidays –

a feel-good place, as we’d call you nowadays.

Now, this would have been a credible pretence; past Frankston, I would always feel less tense; the Mornington races in December meant more than Christmas to me as a boy; and after her first brief visit to Flinders, my wife-to-be had found the place for our honeymoon. In truth, though, I’m able to trace the prompting for my young man’s poem to a week that I once spent at Sorrento and the view of the beach that I had every day from the beer garden where I sat with other young males, how many of them unattached like myself I could only guess. By mid-afternoon I seemed, for whatever reason, to be doomed always to be at a distance from girls or women.

I wrote passable poems but I couldn’t dance or swim or keep up a conversation with a female.

I had hated the beach as a child, and now it seemed the crowded sand at Sorrento was meant to provoke

me. I saw in mind half-naked bodies exposed; mile after mile of skin exquisitely tanned; half the peninsula telling my sort of man what he missed out on. No wonder I said in my poem that I wanted to eat you! But that was long ago.

I got rather close to two women during my life.

(My mother was neither of them.) I suppose the price I paid for this achievement was not too steep.

Anyway, we’re far apart now, and I can be my essential self, a solitary sort of chap, while you go back to being a shape on a map.

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Private Papers

I read that Thomas Hardy, late in life,

made of his private papers a great blaze

and, what was worse, conspired with his wife so that she, after his death, could claim to be the author of his expurgated

autobiography. Until then he had been

one of my heroes. Straight away I downgraded the old wimp, wondering why he needed

to keep his shabby secrets from posterity.

He had no kids – he didn’t need to pose

as any sort of example to anyone.

My fourteen filing cabinets form a long row around my walls. The stuff inside is safe from fire and paper-shredders, and what’s more, I’ll never white-out a word on any page.

And yet, I often wonder what my four

grandkids will think in future when they learn who kind old Grandpa Gerry was unmasked.

Or will they be so full of their own concerns that all their dreaded questions will stay unasked?

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Coate Water to Glinton I’ve never been in an aeroplane

or travelled far beyond Adelaide

or Sydney, but here’s a brief account

of the only trip I regret missing out

on. It might have started deep in Dorset; I owe a great deal to the implied author

of Hardy’s fiction, but the man himself

was a snob and a sneak, or so I’ve read.

I once knew A Shropshire Lad by heart and fifty years ago would have started

from Ludlow, Clunton, or Clun. I still

bear poor old Housman no ill will;

yet, when he turned out not to be

deprived of female company

but love-sick for an actual lad,

I just couldn’t sympathise. Too bad!

I’ll start in the district sacred to a writer who was honest with his readers and whose life was exemplary. I’ll start at Coate

Water, where young Richard Jefferies would note the sun’s rising over the Lambourn Downs

and would feel what he tried all his life to spell out –

mystical atheism I might

call it or a pantheism that defies

exposition: a religion with one

priest and his puzzling scripture. Then I’ll run my finger – but I’d better explain:

this journey, so to call it, is taking place on the pages of Philip’s Motoring Atlas of Britain, 2004. I’m back

now travelling roughly north-east

past Abingdon. I haven’t the least

interest in Oxford, but I want to pass

by Cumnor, which is mentioned in Matthew Arnold’s

‘The Scholar Gipsy’. How often have I wished to have lived as he is supposed to have lived?

(I mean not Arnold but the man in the poem.) Why didn’t I live according to my own

lights? Now, Reader, you expect me to go

north-west, past Witney and Stow-on-the-Wold towards Stratford-upon-Avon, but the Bard, I’ve decided, was too much a know-all for my liking,

with his motto, so I’ve now worked out,

Put a soliloquy in every mouth.

In his world, everything’s reduced to chatter and shouts and gestures. Nothing matters

unless the noisy, costumed cast

can act it out. I’ll give the Bard

a miss. I’ll go past Leamington Spa

and west of Rugby so as to pass

by Coventry, home-town of Philip Larkin.

Like Hardy, the man was a bit of an arse-

hole, but the writer taught me most

of what I know about writing poems.

I’m travelling due east, but don’t suppose I’m heading for Cambridge. Once, there arose in that accursed place a sort of cult

whose members devised a way to discuss texts as though they, the initiated,

had once and for all evaluated

every sort of writing, past and to come.

At Melbourne University, I was one

of those they tried to brainwash. I some-

how survived, but many another

was put off literature forever.

I’m thrusting along past Kettering.

I’ll turn north-east by way of Oundle,

Tansor, Yarwell, Southorpe, and now

I’m nearing holy ground indeed.

I’ve read there’s nothing special to see

around Helpston, Ufford, or Marholm

unless you’re a special sort of poet.

Reader, I don’t expect you to share

my reverence for the poet John Clare,

who was born at Helpston and who died

in Northampton a certified

lunatic, but learn a little

about his life and then you’ll pity

him. He enjoyed not one advantage

except his talent, and circumstances

crushed him. I’ve written enough already

about him, but my trip’s not over – I’m heading for Glinton, two miles away, the home

of Mary Joyce. I’ll never know

how she looked, but she was the close

companion of John Clare when they both

were children. She was younger by a few

years, but Clare claimed later each knew

the other’s mind and heart. Nothing came of this. Her farmer-father was dismayed

by his daughter’s interest in a labourer’s son.

She died, unmarried, at forty-one,

while Clare, though a husband and a father, when drunk or troubled in mind would rather talk to an image of his lost friend

than to persons around him. This is the end of my finger’s travelling across a few pages, but believe me, Reader, the sort of space I’ve crossed while writing these lines leads farther away than the farthest known star.

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Sunrise in the Antipodes The easternmost point of the two land masses is Cape Remote. This, as it happens,

is forty miles from the nearest racecourse, (yes, miles – not ks) which is Merricks. Thirty horses are stabled there in the care of four trainers.

(The place is an outpost, I should explain.) The most notable trainer is Beverley Jardine, whose stable-colours are violet and cream.

So, if you’re trying to visualise

the day breaking over the two huge islands, think first of Beverley, with her long, plain face, telling her jockey, Hilton Faulkner what pace to set for the filly Kiss and Tell.

(Her owners’ colours are red and yell-

ow stripes, white sleeves and cap.) Try to see in the background Hugh Tomlinson (white and green), Glenn Oliphant (pink, dark green, and white), and Christopher Crabbe (yellow, purple, and lilac) –

not that these colours are being worn

at a training session, but they set much store, the Antipodeans, by racing colours.

Horse-racing is a huge part of their culture; so many take part in the Sport of Kings

that you learn a man’s colours as one of the things that defines him. Anyway, at Merricks by now the sun is up and for the next hour

the horses canter, amble, or sprint.

Their trainers look for the merest hint

of how well each animal will compete

at Brighton or Bromsgrove in coming weeks.

‘But where are these places?’ I hear you ask.

I can’t perform the impossible task

of drawing here a map of New Eden and New Arcady, British Commonwealth dominions comprising part of a sort of alternative universe

that only I am privileged to interpret,

but if you could see in mind, Reader, a blend of Tasmania, New Zealand, and the eastern end of Australia in the middle of the empty space that these three entities ought to have graced, then you’d see your own approximation

of – what can I call it? – the perfect summation of my lifelong belief in the sport of horse-racing as a better source of inspiration

than opera, theatre, film, you name it.

But I shouldn’t even be making this claim.

This poem was meant to be a tour

of forty-two courses and a thousand and more stables on a fine spring morning only weeks before the Devonport Gold Plate, the elite event on the calendar. Reader, if you’re urged to learn more about this imagined world,

outlive me and my siblings and visit the library where my archives end up. You’ll find there a filing cabinet full of the sort of detail

that I wanted to include in this poem but failed.

You’ll read thousands of pages, though you’ll never see, unfortunately, what they revealed to me.

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Mrs Balsarini

I was walking in Skene Street, Bendigo,

exactly seventy years ago,

with my mother, my two brothers, and Mrs Warde, when she, the last-named, pointed towards a neat timber house painted mostly white

with orange trimmings. I relished the sight.

I had never seen that combination

of colours on a house, and my admiration

for the person responsible I recall to this day.

But Mrs Warde pointed only to complain.

She first announced the owner’s name,

Balsarini, which was so strange

to my ear that I heard the first syllable as bell and saw in mind not a silvery object but an orange-gold like the sills

and eaves of the house. Mrs Warde thought ill of the woman of that name, who was probably inside as wives mostly were in 1945.

Mrs Warde called the woman a silly young sausage for the reason that each of the buff-coloured holland blinds in the front rooms was drawn fully down.

Whole months of that year are forgotten, wiped out, but I feel again now precisely the bond

that I felt with the woman somewhere beyond the blinds, she of the melodious name

who preferred rare colours and who stayed deep indoors devoted to her one great task, whatever it was. Seventy years had to pass before I understood the importance

of those moments in Skene Street; of my turning towards an ideal female and an ideal life

of reading about her or writing.

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Poetic Truth

In my early twenties, I went through a craze for what I thought of as deep knowledge of things: a sort of inter-disciplinary penetration

into the truths-beyond truths that underpinned such fields as psychology and philosophy

and newer areas such as general semantics, linguistics, and structural anthropology.

I dreamed of finding an underlying plan

that would – what? reassure me or uplift

me? I forget. Anyway, I learned bugger-all.

Each specialist, it seemed, could only think of making finer and finer distinctions; the more I read, the farther off seemed my one

precious insight. Other things took over: my wife and children, my writing, my un-congenial jobs. For fifty years I supposed my quest had been a bit of youthful folly, but what impelled me to begin this poem

was a strange presentiment: what if the knowledge that I sought to acquire is not something known but something to be exercised, put into play; not possessed and mulled over but wielded and used, in which case, the best poems that I’ve made have the look and the sound of a truth I never knew?

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Last Poem

Reader, I’d like you to note

that this, my final poem,

contains no figure of speech

and has a fairly regular metre

with rhymes or, at the least,

half-rhymes. It makes no appeal

to your better nature and no reference

to music or painting or scenic

or exotic places. It ignores

politics and the sorts

of issues that arouse

most people. It merely tells how,

for sixty years, I wrote

about only what mattered most

to me, and whether or not

my stuff was read, and then stopped.

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The Giramondo Publishing Company acknowledges the support of Western Sydney University in the implementation of its book publishing program.

This project has been assisted by the Commonwealth Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.

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Document Outline

• Title Page

• Copyright

• Also by Gerald Murnane

• Contents

• If this is a poem

• A certain sort of atheist

• Pinkish wrinkled rock

• The ballad of G.M.

• On first reading William Carlos Williams

• Ode to Gippsland

• The Darkling Thrush

• Rosalie isn’t speaking

• Angela is the first

• In thick rough

• There’s no such thing

• Sparrows in Goroke

• Political Philosophy

• The Richardson House at Chiltern

• Shy Breeders

• Piss-weak

• Poetic Topics (i)

• Poetic Topics (ii)

• Poetic Topics (iii)

• Poetic Topics (iv) The Girls of St Kilian’s

• Poetic Topics (v) Strange feelings when reading

• Poetic Topics (vi) Faith; Religion; Catholic Church

• Pettits’ Tap

• Crap-books

• Ode to the Western District

• I’m sick of writing…

• Non-travelling

• Anzac Day 2015

• Street Market

• At Bordertown Races

• The Ballad of R.T.M.

• A Cistercian Life

• Green Shadows

• Forog a föld // The world turns

• Azért annyira szeretlek // Why I love you thus

• Igaz Mese // True Tale

• Hangjaidban mindig hallom // I hear in your Asian vowels

• Szerelmeslevél // Love-letter

• Ode to the Mornington Peninsula

• Private Papers

• Coate Water to Glinton

• Sunrise in the Antipodes

• Mrs Balsarini

• Poetic Truth • Last Poem

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