#lesmurray

- by Les Murray

Sprawl is the quality of the man who cut down his Rolls-Royce into a farm utility truck, and sprawl is what the company lacked when it made repeated efforts to buy the vehicle back and repair its image.

Sprawl is doing your farming by aeroplane, roughly, or driving a hitchhiker that extra hundred miles home. It is the rococo of being your own still centre. It is never lighting cigars with ten-dollar notes: that’s idiot ostentation and murder of starving people. Nor can it be bought with the ash of million-dollar deeds.

Sprawl lengthens the legs; it trains greyhounds on liver and beer. Sprawl almost never says Why not? with palms comically raised nor can it be dressed for, not even in running shoes worn with mink and a nose ring. THat is Society. That’s Style. Sprawl is more like the thirteenth banana in a dozen or anyway the fourteenth.

Sprawl is Hank Stamper in Never Give an Inch bisecting an obstructive official’s desk with a chainsaw. Not harming the official. Sprawl is never brutal though it’s often intransigent. Sprawl is never Simon de Montfort at a town-storming: Kill them all! God will know his own. Knowing the man’s name this was said to might be sprawl.

Sprawl occurs in art. THe fifteenth to twenty-first lines in a sonnet, for example. And in certain paintings; I have sprawl enough to have forgotten which paintings. Turner’s glorious Burning of the Houses of Parliament comes to mind, a doubling bannered triumph of sprawl – except, he didn’t fire them.

Sprawl gets up the nose of many kinds of people (every kind that comes in kinds) whose futures don’t include it. Some decry it as criminal presumption, silken-robed Pope Alexander dividing the new world between Spain and Portugal. If he smiled in petto afterwards, perhaps the thing did have sprawl.

Sprawl is really classless, though. It’s John Christopher Frederick Murray asleep in his neighbours’ best bed in spurs and oilskins but not having thrown up; sprawl is never Calum who, drunk, along the hallways of our house, reinvented the Festoon. Rather it’s Beatrice Miles going twelve hundred ditto in a taxi, No Lewd Advances, No Hitting Animals, No Speeding, on the proceeds of her two-bob-a-sonnet Shakespeare readings. An image of my country. And would that it were more so.

The Meaning Of Existence - Poem by Les Murray

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Everything except language knows the meaning of existence. Trees, planets, rivers, time know nothing else. They express it moment by moment as the universe. Even this fool of a body lives it in part, and would have full dignity within it but for the ignorant freedom of my talking mind.

Les Murray

Who reads poetry? Not our intellectuals; they want to control it. Not lovers, not the combative, not examinees. They too skim it for bouquets and magic trump cards. Not poor schoolkids furtively farting as they get immunized against it. Poetry is read by the lovers of poetry and heard by some more they coax to the café or the district library for a bifocal reading. Lovers of poetry may total a million people on the whole planet. Fewer than the players of skat. What gives them delight is a never-murderous skim distilled, to verse mainly, and suspended in rapt calm on the surface of paper. The rest of poetry to which this was once integral still rules the continents, as it always did. But on condition now that its true name’s never spoken: constructs, feral poetry, the opposite but also the secret of the rational. And who reads these? Ah, the lovers, the schoolkids, debaters, generals, crime-lords, everybody reads them: Porsche, lift-off, Gaia, Cool, patriarchy. Among the feral stanzas are many that demand your flesh to embody themselves. Only completed art free of obedience to its time can pirouette you through and athwart the larger poems you are in. Being outside all poetry is an unreachable void. Why write poetry? For the weird unemployment. For the painless headaches, that must be tapped to strike down along your writing arm at the accumulated moment. For the adjustments after, aligning facets in a verb before the trance leaves you. For working always beyond your own intelligence. For not needing to rise and betray the poor to do it. For a non-devouring fame. Little in politics resembles it: perhaps the Australian colonists’ re-inventing of the snide far-adopted secret ballot, in which deflation could hide and, as a welfare bringer, shame the mass-grave Revolutions, So axe-edged, so lictor-y. Was that moral cowardice’s one shining world victory? Breathing in dream-rhythm when awake and far from bed evinces the gift. Being tragic with a book on your head.

Les Murray

AN ABSOLUTELY ORDINARY RAINBOW

The word goes round Repins, the murmur goes round Lorenzinis, at Tattersalls, men look up from sheets of numbers, the Stock Exchange scribblers forget the chalk in their hands and men with bread in their pockets leave the Greek Club: There's a fellow crying in Martin Place. They can't stop him. The traffic in George Street is banked up for half a mile and drained of motion. The crowds are edgy with talk and more crowds come hurrying. Many run in the back streets which minutes ago were busy main streets, pointing: There's a fellow weeping down there. No one can stop him. The man we surround, the man no one approaches simply weeps, and does not cover it, weeps not like a child, not like the wind, like a man and does not declaim it, nor beat his breast, nor even sob very loudly - yet the dignity of his weeping holds us back from his space, the hollow he makes about him in the midday light, in his pentagram of sorrow, and uniforms back in the crowd who tried to seize him stare out at him, and feel, with amazement, their minds longing for tears as children for a rainbow. Some will say, in the years to come, a halo or force stood around him. There is no such thing. Some will say they were shocked and would have stopped him but they will not have been there. The fiercest manhood, the toughest reserve, the slickest wit amongst us trembles with silence, and burns with unexpected judgements of peace. Some in the concourse scream who thought themselves happy. Only the smallest children and such as look out of Paradise come near him and sit at his feet, with dogs and dusty pigeons. Ridiculous, says a man near me, and stops his mouth with his hands, as if it uttered vomit - and I see a woman, shining, stretch her hand and shake as she receives the gift of weeping; as many as follow her also receive it and many weep for sheer acceptance, and more refuse to weep for fear of all acceptance, but the weeping man, like the earth, requires nothing, the man who weeps ignores us, and cries out of his writhen face and ordinary body not words, but grief, not messages, but sorrow, hard as the earth, sheer, present as the sea - and when he stops, he simply walks between us mopping his face with the dignity of one man who has wept, and now has finished weeping. Evading believers, he hurries off down Pitt Street.