JUNE
(from “The Idyll Wheel”)
This deep in the year, in the frosts of then
that steeled sheets left ghostly on the stayed line,
smoked over verandah beds, cruelled water taps rigid,
family and visitors would sit beside the lake
of blinding coals, that end of the detached kitchen,
the older fellows quoting qoph and resh
from the Book of Psalms, as they sizzled phlegm
(some still did it after iron stoves came
and the young moved off to cards and the radio)
and all told stories. That’s a kind of spoken video:
We rode through from the Myall
on that road of the cedarcutter’s ghost.
All this was called Wild Horses Creek then;
you could plait the grass over the pommel
of your saddle. That grass don’t grow now.
I remember we camped on Waterloo that night
there where the black men gave the troopers a hiding.
The garden was all she had: the parrots were at it
and she came out and said to them, quite serious
like as if to reasonable people They are my peas.
And do you know? They flew off and never come back.
If you missed anything: plough,
saddle, cornplanter, shovel,
you just went across to Uncle Bob’s
and brought it home. If he
was there, he never looked ashamed:
he’d just tell you a joke,
some lies, sing you a poem,
keep you there drinking all night—
Bloody cruel mongrels, telling me the native bear
would grow a new hide if you skun it alive.
Everybody knows that, they told me. I told them
if I caught any man skinning bears alive
on my place, he’d bloody need a new hide himself.
Tommy Turpin the blackfellow said to me More better
you walk behind me today, eh boss.
Might be devil-devil tell me hit you with the axe
longa back of the head. I thought he was joking
then I saw he wasn’t. My word I stayed behind
that day, with the axe, trimming tongues on the rails
while he cut mortises out of the posts. I listened.
I wis eight year old, an Faither gied me the lang gun
tae gang doon an shuit the native hens at wis aitin
aa oor oats. I reasoned gin ye pit ae chairge
i the gun, pouder waddin an shot, ye got ae shot
sae pit in twa, ye’d get twa. Aweel, I pit in seven,
liggd doon ahint a stump, pu’d the trigger—an the warld
gaed milky white. I think I visited Scotland
whaur I had never been. It was a ferlie I wis seean.
It wis a sonsy place. But Grannie gard me gang back.
Mither wis skailan watter on ma heid, greetin. As they found
o the gun wis stump-flinders, but there wis a black scour thro the oats,
an unco ringan in ma ears, an fifteen deid native hens.
Of course long tongue she laughed about that other
and they pumped her about you can guess and hanging round there
and she said He’s got one on him like a horse, Mama,
and I like it. Well! And all because of you know—
Father couldn’t stand meanness.
When Uncle you-know-who
charged money for milking our cows
that time Isabel took bad
Father called him gutless,
not just tin-arsed, but gutless.
Meanness is for cowards, Father reckoned.
The little devil, he says to the minister’s wife
Daddy reckons we can’t have any more children,
we need the milk for the pigs. Dear I was mortified—
Poor Auntie Mary was dying Old and frail
all scroopered down in the bedclothes pale as cotton
even her hardworking old hands Oh it was sad
people in the room her big daughters performing
rattling the bedknobs There is a white angel
in the room says Mary in this weird voice And then
NO! she heaves herself up Bloody no! Be quiet!
she coughed and spat Phoo! I’ll be damned if I’ll die!
She’s back making bread next week Lived ten more years.
Well, it was black Navy rum; it buggered Darcy.
Fell off his horse, crawled under the cemetery fence.
Then some yahoos cantered past Yez all asleep in there?
All but me, croaks Darcy. They off at a hand gallop,
squealing out, and his horse behind them, stirrups belting it.
The worst ghost I ever saw
was a policeman and (one of the squatters)
moving cattle at night.
I caught them in my headlights.
It haunted me. Every time
I went in to town after that
somehow I’d get arrested—
I’ll swear snakes have got no brains!
The carpet snake we had in the rafters
to eat rats, one day it et a chook.
I killed it with the pitchfork, ran a tine
through the top of its head, and chucked it
down the gully. It was back in a week
with a scab on its head and another under its chin.
They bring a house good luck but they got no brain.
Then someone might cup his hand short of the tongue
of a taut violin, try each string to be wrung
by the bow, that spanned razor of holy white hair
and launch all but his earthly weight into an air
that breathed up hearth fires strung worldwide between
the rung hills of being and the pearled hills of been.
In the language beyond speaking they’d sum the grim law,
speed it to a daedaly and foot it to a draw,
the tones of their scale five gnarled fingers wide
and what sang were all angles between love and pride.