Uncollected: The Weatherboard Cathedral
The Weatherboard Cathedral was Murray's first 'solo' volume and contained An Absolutely Ordinary Rainbow. Less than half of the poems make it into the New Collected Poems (see Bibliography). The following is a selection of seven uncollected Weatherboard Cathedral poems enjoyed by the editor.
There is no place more vacant than this harmless
Wintry plain of marsh grass and grey farms
Stretching away cloud-darkened, dull with cold
Past where lone wind-pumps swivel iron arms,
Past where the river, dimmed with rotting soil
And static cloud, spreads wide amongst low islands,
Mosquito country, tea-tree rnudbanks, reeds,
To reach the shoreless gleam out past all farmlands.
Watching slow birds out near the sky, our talk
Clings to this marsh-plain like the smoke of winter,
Drifts among weed-wrack, hovers in fenced fields.
A mile off, a barn stands open. Our words enter,
Probe and withdraw, being attracted always
Back to the reeds, the margins, the sky's shallows.
"Somewhere out there, down in the east, the sea. . . ."
We picture the vast lake edged by crumbling billows.
Here are three kingdoms, earth and lake and sky
Meeting and mingling, softening at their edges,
The sky earth-grey, the fields absorbing salt-damp,
The river absorbing earth, sky-withered sedges:
We talk of many kingdoms meeting, merging,
The kingdom of legend bordering on Time,
All-crumbling shoreline, crossed both ways by horsemen,
Wanderers, ships, of the old realms of Dream
And their horizons, and what houses, peoples,
Mountains and moons lie out there, covered, drowned
For a season, then rise to fill the darkened heavens—
We stand on the flat shore, kicking sodden ground.
"I see this country diked and drained, grown fertile. . . ."
"I see that too. And I see what follows."
Our slow words falter, being drawn back always
To the sere reeds, the islets, the sky's shallows.
"What is that like?" "Log huts replacing houses,
Men leached of philosophy, minds grown cruel and slack,
Language decayed to a devious singsong flatness,
Distinctions crumbling, ploughlands going back—"
"And when is this?" "When the present silts the future."
"You mean when reason stagnates in the mind. . . .
But what if that sleep should sometimes bring forth modes,
Not thought, not dream, but wholly new in kind?"
From upriver, two fishermen in a country boat
With chicken-wire nets and fruit tins, drift and row.
We walk on the wet shore. Horses, feeding, raise
Their heads from the rushy grass to watch us go
Thoughtfully through their dreaming vision, while
In talk and silence, we tap and probe the future
And the great past for legends, patterns, tales
In which to see, and move, and know our nature
And be complete, a world of balanced kingdoms
In each of us, and each in such a world.
As evening comes, horizons slowly harden.
Shallows are deepened. Farm buildings shrink with cold.
And, as the rising east wind dulls the water
And bends brusque reeds for the passage of the sky,
We, growing weary, trudge miles out to high ground
And strike the world-road, firm and fast and dry.
Once in an April moon
Lapped in dark water
Or in some forest pool
Behind midsummer
You may discern him, still
In rippling shade,
Or see him tilt and glide,
Leaving few bubbles,
Sunk to the cool of his nest
In the roots of the creekbed.
Go down no further. Let us watch from here.
Shadows of scrub lie windless on the water.
Flat-headed, his otter-like body dark as soil,
Small eyes, crude fur and that patent-leather beak,
Blunt limbs and webbed feet
Held just below the light,
He floats and is there.
He has not heard us come.
Not strange, across so vast
A plain of time.
Twice born, and yet a mammal—with a beak.
But see, now he sinks away, perhaps to feed
On the leaf-dark bottom, or to find the mouth
Of his burrow and smear the earth wall as he climbs
And scrambles up to doze there in the darkness.
Hold the thought of him
Kindly to your skin.
It is good to have him in our country,
Unique, beneath our thoughts
To nurture difference.
Changeless beneath our thought
And its disjunctions.
Last year, the mountain slipped
And blocked a tumbling stream.
At first, we liked the novelty,
But, looking long, grew sad to see
Clear water stilled to slime.
But it was summer then,
Crow-black in field and tree.
When autumn blew with mountain rain
We saw the captive creek take on
A shining, deep placidity.
The reeds that grew this year
Are withered still, and brown.
No sign of spring—until a flight
Of shelduck whistled in last night
And scattered down the long lagoon.
I know, in months to come,
My first step will go deep
And with the next I'll swim,
And sometime dive to touch the dim
Boulders where lost summers sleep . . .
Seasons drowned beyond recall,
A bright, unending time—and yet
Could they return, we might well find
Those days grown shallow to our mind,
And that might bring a worse regret.
For where we paddled once
Is deep and long,
Cool with its shadows of wild bird,
And blackberry, and mountainside,
And the dam is strong.
What, of its age, the mountain gave,
Deep rock, compacted clay,
We could, with some hard work, remove
And once more let slim currents give
Speed to the longest summer day,
But now we've let a whole year pass
I and some others here believe
It might not profit us to lose
Or throw away this new repose,
This deep reserve.
I daresay that's the custom in your church:
You, seated, preached while I, the sinner, stood.
I thank you for this knowledge, Reverend Sir,
And for the lingering scent of your rich food.
Your charity of wind left me replete
With all the blessings I am notching here
Upon this stick with my small pocket knife
Beneath the moon, the mistress of the year.
I wish you coughing cows and withered corn,
Blood in your milk and scabies in your blood.
I wish you ten years' drought, and, when it rains,
A cold, persistent leak upon your bed.
May all your meals be burned, or underdone,
Your bacon taste of mildew, rats and smoke.
May your worst neighbours steal your finest bull,
Exhaust him, then castrate him for a joke.
May all the handles break off all your tools,
Or split and leave cruel splinters in your hand.
May every gun you buy kick like a horse
Yet never harm the birds that strip your land.
May both your daughters grow to look like you
And bear a crop of bastards by your son,
And may your wife grow teeth where never teeth
Grew in a woman since the world began,
Or rather, since the former would be no
More than is normal in your noble line,
And the latter, God forgive me, no great loss,
For you own cows and nanny goats and swine,
This final wish I make, this final notch
(At every cut, the virgin sapwood bleeds)
When at last, well watered with your tears,
Milady's garden sprouts black widow's weeds
May I be seated where I can see down
Far down to where, chained in sow's muck, you lie
Attended by cold worms and hedgerow priests
More hungry and less merciful than I.
Now human means transcend
All human measure
And pile up wealth
To impoverish the heart,
Men trace the heights of fear
The depths of pleasure,
Now human means transcend all
Human measure,
Simply to channel this
Blind wave of treasure
Regardless what bonds
Its bright streams wrench apart.
Now human means
Transcend all human measure
And pile up wealth
To impoverish the heart.
Where the great winds crashed
Strange suns appear
Gleaming with mud and shocks of thistle fur,
And walkers see them at the forest edge
And children, when the winter rains are past
Go hurrying there
And climb and scramble out on rays of wood
Among the antler tines and fluted sterns
Of galleons they rig with string and sail
High over the steep fall forest and the farms
As far as the islands of the summer air.
Tall as great barns
The weather-whitened roots all summer bear
Birdsong of children, rag and applecore,
But when the winds return
These disappear
And derelict altars lean in pits of rain,
Old writhen gods with shins of dirt and bare
Many-branching arms
Like an ancient blast that stuck
In time, and toughened, stained by the mother stone
Downward in blackness, slow as the seep of food
In crystal hair.
Time being stilled
Only here, in these frameworks of decay,
Moss comes, and rain, and the underpinning edge
Of the valley, letting go, releases one
To a sudden career as a rimless, wrenching wheel
Stopped short by brush
Its axle trunk snapped clear.
Another yields its tusks for firewood
In a distant year.
Turning to go
As lights come on in the farmlands everywhere
I look back once
At the few last forks and finials of grey
Still rising above dank mounds of vine and weed
And flowers there
And in the darkness of the valley edge
Above the glow, domed huts and sacred poles
Return to life and for a moment wear
Aspects of fire, and rustling talk, and sleep,
Dark face, bright spear . . .
And then the phantoms sink to leaves again.
But walking away from this last glimpse, I dare
To say to myself
For a little while yet, earth is the mind of man,
For a little time yet
Before strange suns appear.