Kenneth Slessor

At five I wake, rise, rub on the smoking pane A port to see—water breathing in the air, Boughs broken. The sun comes up in a golden stain, Floats like a glassy sea-fruit. There is mist everywhere, White and humid, and the Harbour is like plated stone, Dull flakes of ice. One light drips out alone, One bead of winter-red, smouldering in the steam, Quietly over the roof-tops—another window Touched with a crystal fire in the sun’s gullies, One lonely star of the morning, where no stars gleam. Far away on the rim of this great misty cup, The sun gilds the dead suburbs as he rises up, Diamonds the wind-cocks, makes glitter the crusted spikes On moss-drowned gables. Now the tiles drip scarlet-wet, Swim like birds’ paving-stones, and sunlight strikes Their watery mirrors with a moister rivulet, Acid and cold. Here lie those mummied Kings, Men sleeping in houses, embalmed in stony coffins, Till the Last Trumpet calls their galleries up, And the suburbs rise with distant murmurings. O buried dolls, O men sleeping invisible there, I stare above your mounds of stone, lean down, Marooned and lonely in this bitter air, And in one moment deny your frozen town, Renounce your bodies—earth falls in clouds away, Stones lose their meaning, substance is lost in clay, Roofs fade, and that small smoking forgotten heap, The city, dissolves to a shell of bricks and paper, Empty, without purpose, a thing not comprehended, A broken tomb, where ghosts unknown sleep. And the least crystal weed, shaken with frost, The furred herbs of silver, the daisies round-eyed and tart, Painted in antic china, the smallest night-flower tossed Like a bright penny on the lawn, stirs more my heart, Strikes deeper this morning air, than mortal towers Dried to a common blindness, fainter than flowers, Fordone, extinguished, as the vapours break, And dead in the dawn. O Sun that kills with life, And brings to breath all silent things—O Dawn, Waken me with old earth, keep me awake!

Uncles who burst on childhood, from the East, Blown from air, like bearded ghosts arriving, And are, indeed, a kind of guessed-at ghost Through mumbled names at dinner-tables moving, Bearers of parrots, bonfires of blazing stones, Their pockets fat with riches out of reason, Meerschaum and sharks’-teeth, ropes of China coins, And weeds and seeds and berries blowzed with poison— So, from the baleful Kimberleys of thought, From the mad continent of dreams, you wander, Spending your trophies at our bloodless feet, Mocking our fortunes with more desperate plunder; So with your boomerangs of rhyme you come, With blossoms wrenched from sweet and deadly branches, And we, pale Crusoes in the moment’s tomb, Watch, turn aside, and touch again those riches, Nor ask what beaches of the mind you trod, What skies endured, and unimagined rivers, Or whiteness trenched by what mysterious tide, And aching silence of the Never-Nevers; Watch, turn aside, and touch with easy faith Your chest of miracles, but counting nothing, Or dumbly, that you stole them out of death, Out of death’s pyramids, to prove us breathing. We breathe, who beat the sides of emptiness, We live, who die by statute in steel hearses, We dance, whose only posture gives us grace To squeeze the greasy udders of our purses— (Look in this harsher glass, and I will show you The daylight after the darkness, and the morning After the midnight, and after the night the day After the year after, terribly returning). We live by these, your masks and images, We breathe in this, your quick and borrowed body; But you take passage on the ruffian seas, And you are vanished in the dark already.

‘Talbingo River’—as one says of bones: ‘Captain’ or ‘Commodore’ that smelt gunpowder In old engagements no one quite believes Or understands. Talbingo had its blood As they did, ran with waters huge and clear Lopping down mountains, Turning crags to banks. Now it’s a sort of aching valley, Basalt shaggy with scales, A funnel of tobacco-coloured clay, Smoulders of puffed earth And pebbles and shell-bodied flies And water thickening to stone in pocks. That’s what we’re like out here, Beds of dried-up passions.

After the whey-faced anonymity Of river-gums and scribbly-gums and bush, After the rubbing and the hit of brush, You come to the South Country As if the argument of trees were done, The doubts and quarrelling, the plots and pains, All ended by these clear and gliding planes Like an abrupt solution. And over the flat earth of empty farms The monstrous continent of air floats back Coloured with rotting sunlight and the black, Bruised flesh of thunderstorms: Air arched, enormous, pounding the bony ridge, Ditches and hutches, with a drench of light, So huge, from such infinities of height, You walk on the sky’s beach While even the dwindled hills are small and bare, As if, rebellious, buried, pitiful, Something below pushed up a knob of skull, Feeling its way to air.

At last I know—it’s on old ivory jars, Glassed with old miniatures and garnered once with musk. I’ve seen those eyes like smouldering April stars As carp might see them behind their bubbled skies In pale green fishponds—they’re as green your eyes, As lakes themselves, changed to green stone at dusk. At last I know—it’s paned in a crystal hoop On powder-boxes from some dead Italian girl, I’ve seen such eyes grow suddenly dark, and droop Their small, pure lids, as if I’d pried too far In finding you snared there on that ivory jar By crusted motes of rose and smoky-pearl.

To the memory of William Hickey, Esq. Coming out of India with ten thousand a year Exchanged for flesh and temper, a dry Faust Whose devil barters with digestion, has he paid dear For dipping his fingers in the Roc’s valley? Who knows? It’s certain that he owns a rage, A face like shark-skin, full of Yellow Jack, And that unreckoning tyranny of age That calls for turtles’ eggs in Twickenham. Sometimes, by moonlight, in a barge he’ll float Whilst hirelings blow their skulking flageolets, Served by a Rajah in a golden coat With pigeon-pie . . . Madeira . . . and Madeira . . . Or in his Bon de Paris with silver frogs He rolls puff-bellied in an equipage, Elegant chariot, through a gulf of fogs To dine on dolphin-steak with Post-Captains. Who knows? There are worse things than steak, perhaps, Worse things than oyster-sauces and tureens And worlds of provender like painted maps Pricked out with ports of claret and pitchcocked eels, And hubbubs of billiard-matches, burnt champagne, Beautiful ladies ‘of the establishment’ Always in tempers, or melting out again, Bailiffs and Burgundy and writs of judgment— Thus to inhabit huge, lugubrious halls Damp with the steam of entrees, glazed with smoke, Raw drinking, greasy eating, bussing and brawls, Drinking and eating and bursting into bed-chambers. But, in the end, one says farewell to them; And if he’d curse to-day—God damn your blood!— Even his curses I’d not altogether condemn, Not altogether scorn; and if phantoms ate— Hickey, I’d say, sit down, pull up, set to: Here’s knife and fork, there’s wine, and there’s a barmaid. Let us submerge ourselves in onion-soup, Anything but this ‘damned profession of writing.’

You can shuffle and scuffle and scold, You can rattle the knockers and knobs, Or batter the doorsteps with buckets of gold Till the Deputy-Governor sobs. You can sneak up a suitable plank In a frantic endeavor to see— But what do they do in the Commonwealth Bank When the Big Door bangs at Three? Listen in the cellars, listen in the vaults, Can’t you hear the tellers turning somersaults? Can’t you hear the spectres of inspectors and directors Dancing with the phantoms in a Dead Man’s Waltz? Some are ghosts of nabobs, poverty and stray bobs, Midas and his mistress, Mammon and his wife; Other ones are sentries, guarding double entries, Long-forgotten, double-dealing, troubled double-life. Down among the pass-books, money lent and spent, Down among the forests of the Four Per Cent., Where the ledgers meet and moulder, and the overdrafts grow older, And the phantoms shrug a shoulder when you ask ’em for the rent. They are bogies of Grandfather’s cheques, They are spectres of buried accounts, They are crinoline sweethearts with pearls on their necks, Demanding enormous amounts. They are payment for suppers and flowers, For diamonds to banish a tear, For sweet, pretty ladies in opulent hours . . . And tombstones . . . and bailiffs . . . and beer . . . Down in the bowels of the bank, the ledgers lie rank upon rank, The debts of the ages come out of their pages, The bones of old loans creak and clank— Oh, if you could peep through the door To day at a Quarter Past Four, You’d find all the ghosts at their usual posts, And you wouldn’t sign cheques any more!

Ranks of electroplated cubes, dwindling to glitters, Like the other pasture, the trigonometry of marble, Death’s candy-bed. Stone caked on stone, Dry pyramids and racks of iron balls. Life is observed, a precipitate of pellets, Or grammarians freeze it into spar, Their rhomboids, as for instance, the finest crystal Fixing a snowfall under glass. Gods are laid out In alabaster, with horny cartilage And zinc ribs; or systems of ecstasy Baked into bricks. There is a gallery of sculpture, Bleached bones of heroes, Gorgon masks of bushrangers; But the quarries are of more use than this, Filled with the rolling of huge granite dice, Ideas and judgments: vivisection, the Baptist Church, Good men and bad men, polygamy, birth-control . . . Frail tinkling rush Water-hair streaming Prickles and glitters Cloudy with bristles River of thought Swimming the pebbles— Undo, loosen your bubbles!

I Cook was a captain of the Admiralty When sea-captains had the evil eye, Or should have, what with beating krakens off And casting nativities of ships; Cook was a captain of the powder-days When captains, you might have said, if you had been Fixed by their glittering stare, half-down the side, Or gaping at them up companionways, Were more like warlocks than a humble man— And men were humble then who gazed at them, Poor horn-eyed sailors, bullied by devils’ fists Of wind or water, or the want of both, Childlike and trusting, filled with eager trust— Cook was a captain of the sailing days When sea-captains were kings like this, Not cold executives of company-rules Cracking their boilers for a dividend Or bidding their engineers go wink At bells and telegraphs, so plates would hold Another pound. Those captains drove their ships By their own blood, no laws of schoolbook steam, Till yards were sprung, and masts went overboard— Daemons in periwigs, doling magic out, Who read fair alphabets in stars Where humbler men found but a mess of sparks, Who steered their crews by mysteries And strange, half-dreadful sortilege with books, Used medicines that only gods could know The sense of, but sailors drank In simple faith. That was the captain Cook was when he came to the Coral Sea And chose a passage into the dark. How many mariners had made that choice Paused on the brink of mystery! ‘Choose now!’ The winds roared, blowing home, blowing home, Over the Coral Sea. ‘Choose now!’ the trades Cried once to Tasman, throwing him for choice Their teeth or shoulders, and the Dutchman chose The wind’s way, turning north. ‘Choose, Bougainville!’ The wind cried once, and Bougainville had heard The voice of God, calling him prudently Out of the dead lee shore, and chose the north, The wind’s way. So, too, Cook made choice, Over the brink, into the devil’s mouth, With four months’ food, and sailors wild with dreams Of English beer, the smoking barns of home. So Cook made choice, so Cook sailed westabout, So men write poems in Australia. II Flowers turned to stone! Not all the botany Of Joseph Banks, hung pensive in a porthole, Could find the Latin for this loveliness, Could put the Barrier Reef in a glass box Tagged by the horrid Gorgon squint Of horticulture. Stone turned to flowers It seemed—you’d snap a crystal twig, One petal even of the water-garden, And have it dying like a cherry-bough. They’d sailed all day outside a coral hedge, And half the night. Cook sailed at night, Let there be reefs a fathom from the keel And empty charts. The sailors didn’t ask, Nor Joseph Banks. Who cared? It was the spell Of Cook that lulled them, bade them turn below, Kick off their sea-boots, puff themselves to sleep, Though there were more shoals outside Than teeth in a shark’s head. Cook snored loudest himself. One day, a morning of light airs and calms, They slid towards a reef that would have knifed Their boards to mash, and murdered every man. So close it sucked them, one wave shook their keel, The next blew past the coral. Three officers, In gilt and buttons, languidly on deck Pointed their sextants at the sun. One yawned, One held a pencil, one put eye to lens: Three very peaceful English mariners Taking their sights for longitude. I’ve never heard Of sailors aching for the longitude Of shipwrecks before or since. It was the spell Of Cook did this, the phylacteries of Cook. Men who ride broomsticks with a mesmerist Mock the typhoon. So, too, it was with Cook. III Two chronometers the captain had, One by Arnold that ran like mad, One by Kendal in a walnut case, Poor devoted creature with a hangdog face. Arnold always hurried with a crazed click-click Dancing over Greenwich like a lunatic, Kendal panted faithfully his watch-dog beat, Climbing out of Yesterday with sticky little feet. Arnold choked with appetite to wolf up time, Madly round the numerals his hands would climb, His cogs rushed over and his wheels ran miles, Dragging Captain Cook to the Sandwich Isles. But Kendal dawdled in the tombstoned past, With a sentimental prejudice to going fast, And he thought very often of a haberdasher’s door And a yellow-haired boy who would knock no more. All through the night-time, clock talked to clock, In the captain’s cabin, tock-tock-tock, One ticked fast and one ticked slow, And Time went over them a hundred years ago. IV Sometimes the god would fold his wings And, stone of Caesars turned to flesh, Talk of the most important things That serious-minded midshipmen could wish, Of plantains, and the lack of rum Or spearing sea-cows—things like this That hungry schoolboys, five days dumb, In jolly-boats are wonted to discuss. What midshipman would pause to mourn The sun that beat about his ears, Or curse the tide, if he could horn His fists by tugging on those lumbering oars? Let rum-tanned mariners prefer To hug the weather-side of yards, ‘Cats to catch mice’ before they purr, Those were the captain’s enigmatic words. Here, in this jolly-boat they graced, Were food and freedom, wind and storm, While, fowling-piece across his waist, Cook mapped the coast, with one eye cocked for game. V After the candles had gone out, and those Who listened had gone out, and a last wave Of chimney-haloes caked their smoky rings Like fish-scales on the ceiling, a Yellow Sea Of swimming circles, the old man, Old Captain-in-the-Corner, drank his rum With friendly gestures to four chairs. They stood Empty, still warm from haunches, with rubbed nails And leather glazed, like aged serving-men Feeding a king’s delight, the sticky, drugged Sweet agony of habitual anecdotes. But these, his chairs, could bear an old man’s tongue, Sleep when he slept, be flattering when he woke, And wink to hear the same eternal name From lips new-dipped in rum. ‘Then Captain Cook, I heard him, told them they could go If so they chose, but he would get them back, Dead or alive, he’d have them,’ The old man screeched, half-thinking to hear ‘Cook! Cook again! Cook! It’s other cooks he’ll need, Cooks who can bake a dinner out of pence, That’s what he lives on, talks on, half-a-crown A day, and sits there full of Cook. Who’d do your cooking now, I’d like to ask, If someone didn’t grind her bones away? But that’s the truth, six children and half-a-crown A day, and a man gone daft with Cook.’ That was his wife, Elizabeth, a noble wife but brisk, Who lived in a present full of kitchen-fumes And had no past. He had not seen her For seven years, being blind, and that of course Was why he’d had to strike a deal with chairs, Not knowing when those who chafed them had gone to sleep Or stolen away. Darkness and empty chairs, This was the port that Alexander Home Had come to with his useless cutlass-wounds And tales of Cook, and half-a-crown a day— This was the creek he’d run his timbers to, Where grateful countrymen repaid his wounds At half-a-crown a day. Too good, too good, This eloquent offering of birdcages To gulls, and Greenwich Hospital to Cook, Britannia’s mission to the sea-fowl. It was not blindness picked his flesh away, Nor want of sight made penny-blank the eyes Of Captain Home, but that he lived like this In one place, and gazed elsewhere. His body moved In Scotland, but his eyes were dazzle-full Of skies and water farther round the world— Air soaked with blue, so thick it dripped like snow On spice-tree boughs, and water diamond-green, Beaches wind-glittering with crumbs of gilt, And birds more scarlet than a duchy’s seal That had come whistling long ago, and far Away. His body had gone back, Here it sat drinking rum in Berwickshire, But not his eyes—they were left floating there Half-round the earth, blinking at beaches milked By suck-mouth tides, foaming with ropes of bubbles And huge half-moons of surf. Thus it had been When Cook was carried on a sailor’s back, Vengeance in a cocked hat, to claim his price, A prince in barter for a longboat. And then the trumpery springs of fate—a stone, A musket-shot, a round of gunpowder, And puzzled animals, killing they knew not what Or why, but killing . . . the surge of goatish flanks Armoured in feathers, like cruel birds: Wild, childish faces, killing; a moment seen, Marines with crimson coats and puffs of smoke Toppling face-down; and a knife of English iron, Forged aboard ship, that had been changed for pigs, Given back to Cook between the shoulder-blades. There he had dropped, and the old floundering sea, The old, fumbling, witless lover-enemy, Had taken his breath, last office of salt water. Cook died. The body of Alexander Home Flowed round the world and back again, with eyes Marooned already, and came to English coasts, The vague ancestral darknesses of home, Seeing them faintly through a glass of gold, Dim fog-shapes, ghosted like the ribs of trees Against his blazing waters and blue air. But soon they faded, and there was nothing left, Only the sugar-cane and the wild granaries Of sand, and.palm-trees and the flying blood Of cardinal-birds; and putting out one hand Tremulously in the direction of the beach, He felt a chair in Scotland. And sat down.