Les Murray

Last time I fell in a shower room I bled like a tumbril dandy and the hotel longed to be rid of me. Taken to the town clinic, I described how I tripped on a steel rim and found my head in the wardrobe. Scalp-sewn and knotted and flagged I thanked the Frau Doktor and fled, wishing the grab-bar of age might be bolted to all civilization and thinking of Rome’s eighth hill heaped up out of broken amphorae. When, anytime after sixty, or anytime before, you stumble over two stairs and club your forehead on rake or hoe, bricks or fuel-drums, that’s the time to call the purveyor of steel pipe and indoor railings, and soon you’ll be grasping up landings having left your balance in the car from which please God you’ll never see the launchway of tires off a brink. Later comes the sunny day when street detail whitens blindly to mauve and people hurry you, or wait, quiet.

Routines of decaying time fade, and your waking life gets laborious as science. You huddle in, becoming the deathless younger self who will survive your dreams and vanish in surviving. Dream brings on its story at the pace of drift in twilight, sunless color, its settings are believed, a library of wood shingles, plain mythic furniture vivid drone of talk, yet few loves return: trysts seem unkeepable. Urgencies from your time join with the browner suits walking those arcades with you but then you are apart, aghast, beside the numberless defiling down steep fence into an imminence — as in the ancient burrow you, with an ever-changing cast, survive deciding episodes till you are dismissed and a restart of tense summons your waking size out through shreds of story.

One and one make two, the literalist said. So far they've made five billion, said the lateralist, or ten times that, if you count the dead.

Come our one great bushfire pigs, sty-released, declined to quit their pavements of gravel and shit. Other beasts ran headlong, whipping off with genitals pinched high. Human mothers taught their infants creek-dipping. Fathers galloped, gale-blown blaze stripping grass at their heels and on by too swift to ignite any houses. One horse baked in a tin shed, naked poultry lay about dead having been plucked in mid flight but where pigs had huddled only fuzzy white hoofprints led upwind over black, B B B and none stayed feral in our region.

Where I lived once, a roller coaster's range of timber hills peaked just by our backyard cliff and cats undulated scream-driven round its seismograph— and climbed up to us with an indrawn gasp of girls. Smiles and yelling could be exchanged as they crested then they'd pitch over, straining back in a shriek that volleyed as the cars were snatched from sight in the abyss, and were soon back. Weekdays they rested, and I rested all days. There was a spider in my head I'd long stay unaware of. If you're raped you mostly know but I'd been cursed, and refused to notice or believe it. Aloof in a Push squat, I thought I was moral, or dead. Misrule was strict there, and the Pill of the day only ever went into one mouth, not mine, and foamed a Santa-beard. I was resented for chastity, and slept on an overcoat. Once Carol from upstairs came to me in bra and kindness and the spider secreted by girls' derision-rites to spare women from me had to numb me to a crazed politeness. Squeals rode the edge of the thrill building. Cartoonist Mercier drew springs under Sydney. Push lovers were untrue on principle. It's all architecture over there now. A new roller coaster flies its ups and downs in wealth's face like an affront. I've written a new body that only needs a reader's touch. If love is cursed in us, then when God exists, we don't.

All me are standing on feed. The sky is shining. All me have just been milked. Teats all tingling still from that dry toothless sucking by the chilly mouths that gasp loudly in in in, and never breathe out. All me standing on feed, move the feed inside me. One me smells of needing the bull, that heavy urgent me, the back-climber, who leaves me humped, straining, but light and peaceful again, with crystalline moving inside me. Standing on wet rock, being milked, assuages the calf-sorrow in me. Now the me who needs mounts on me, hopping, to signal the bull. The tractor comes trotting in its grumble; the heifer human bounces on top of it, and cud comes with the tractor, big rolls of tight dry feed: lucerne, clovers, buttercup, grass, that’s been bitten but never swallowed, yet is cud. She walks up over the tractor and down it comes, roll on roll and all me following, eating it, and dropping the good pats. The heifer human smells of needing the bull human and is angry. All me look nervously at her as she chases the dog me dream of horning dead: our enemy of the light loose tongue. Me’d jam him in his squeals. Me, facing every way, spreading out over feed. One me is still in the yard, the place skinned of feed. Me, old and sore-boned, little milk in that me now, licks at the wood. The oldest bull human is coming. Me in the peed yard. A stick goes out from the human and cracks, like the whip. Me shivers and falls down with the terrible, the blood of me, coming out behind an ear. Me, that other me, down and dreaming in the bare yard. All me come running. It’s like the Hot Part of the sky that’s hard to look at, this that now happens behind wood in the raw yard. A shining leaf, like off the bitter gum tree is with the human. It works in the neck of me and the terrible floods out, swamped and frothy. All me make the Roar, some leaping stiff-kneed, trying to horn that worst horror. The wolf-at-the-calves is the bull human. Horn the bull human! But the dog and the heifer human drive away all me. Looking back, the glistening leaf is still moving. All of dry old me is crumpled, like the hills of feed, and a slick me like a huge calf is coming out of me. The carrion-stinking dog, who is calf of human and wolf, is chasing and eating little blood things the humans scatter, and all me run away, over smells, toward the sky.

They gave the city a stroke. Its memories are cordoned off. They could collapse on you. Water leaks into bricks of the Workers’ century and every meaning is blurred. No word in Roget now squares with another. If the word is Manchester it may be Australia, where that means sheets and towels. To give the city a stroke, they mixed a lorryload of henbane and meadowsweet oil and countrified her. Now Engels supports Max, and the British Union of beautiful ceramics is being shovelled up, blue-green tiles of the Corn Exchange, umber gloss bricks of the Royal Midlands Hotel. Unmelting ice everywhere, and loosened molecules. When the stroke came, every bottle winked at its neighbour.

The houses those suburbs could afford were roofed with old savings books, and some seeped gravy at stitches in their walls; some were clipped as close as fury, some grimed and corner-bashed by love and the real estate, as it got more vacant, grew blady grass and blowfly grass, so called for the exquisite lanterns of its seed, and the land sagged subtly to a low point, it all inclined way out there to a pit with burnt-looking cheap marble edges and things and figures flew up from it like the stones in the crusher Piers had for making dusts of them for glazes: flint, pyroclase, slickensides, quartz, schist, snapping, refusing, and spitting high till the steel teeth got gritty corners on them and could grip them craw-chokingly to grind. It’s their chance, a man with beerglass-cut arms told me. Those hoppers got to keep filled. A girl, edging in, bounced out cropped and wrong-coloured like a chemist’s photo, crying. Who could blame her among in-depth grabs and Bali flights and phones? She was true, and got what truth gets.