July 23: Les Murray, "Vertigo", Feeling Really Old

Vertigo

by:  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.

________________________

Okay, ended up in the hospital yesterday with a case of vertigo. 

Yes, I felt really old when I was in that ambulance on the way to the hospital.  Thought I was dying.  I've gone from "ow, that hurts" when I get a headache to "this is how it all ends."  It doesn't help that my sister died of lymphoma of the brain.  So now, I've diagnosed myself with a brain tumor.

Saint Marty needs a nap.

June 3: Favorite Poet, Les Murray, "Poetry and Religion"

The poetry workshop I led on Thursday night was wonderful, despite the three hours of panic that preceded it.  When I arrived at the Joy Center, which is a lovely space for artists in the middle of the woods, I found myself immediately calm.  It was the kind of calm I usually experience when I'm writing a poem or praying.

Poetry and religion have always been linked in my life.  I don't know why.  Perhaps it's about creation or beauty.  Maybe it's the spiritual state in which I find myself when I hear a really great poem.  It makes me love the world a little bit more.  And I think that's all that God wants:  for us to love creation.

That may sound simplistic, but it guides my whole writing life.

God is Saint Marty's favorite poet.

Poetry and Religion

by:  Les Murray

Religions are poems. They concert
our daylight and dreaming mind, our
emotions, instinct, breath and native gesture

into the only whole thinking: poetry.
Nothing's said till it's dreamed out in words
and nothing's true that figures in words only.

A poem, compared with an arrayed religion,
may be like a soldier's one short marriage night
to die and live by. But that is a small religion.

Full religion is the large poem in loving repetition;
like any poem, it must be inexhaustible and complete
with turns where we ask Now why did the poet do that?

You can't pray a lie, said Huckleberry Finn;
you can't poem one either. It is the same mirror:
mobile, glancing, we call it poetry,

fixed centrally, we call it a religion,
and God is the poetry caught in any religion,
caught, not imprisoned. Caught as in a mirror

that he attracted, being in the world as poetry
is in the poem, a law against its closure.
There'll always be religion around while there is poetry

or a lack of it. Both are given, and intermittent,
as the action of those birds - crested pigeon, rosella parrot -
who fly with wings shut, then beating, and again shut.

June 2: All the Possibility, Les Murray, "Nursing Home"

Yes, I just came back from a graduation party.  So many young people in shorts and tee-shirts, walking around, trying to act like adults.  It was sort of intoxicating, the memory of that kind of hope.  All the possibility of those last days of high school, when teachers and parents and aunts and uncles are telling you that you can do anything.  Anything at all.

On the other side of the coin, there's the elderly, at the end of their long journeys.  They have done it all.  Seen it all.  But nobody wants to listen to them any more.

Maybe, as part of graduating from high school, every senior should be required to visit a nursing home and talk to at least ten residents.  Ask them about their lives.  Ask them for advice.  Thank them for making the world a better place.

Saint Marty thinks the class could be called "Growing Up 101."

Nursing Home

by:  Les Murray

Ne tibi supersis:
don't outlive yourself,
panic, or break a hip
or spit purée at the staff
at the end of gender,
never a happy ender -

yet in the pastel light
of indoors, there is a lady
who has distilled to love
beyond the fall of memory.

She sits holding hands
with an ancient woman
who calls her brother and George
as bees summarize the garden.

June 1: Leading Workshop, Les Murray, "The Cows on Killing Day"

Okay, I don't have a lot of time tonight.  I'm leading a poetry workshop this evening, something I haven't done in about two years.  I'm a little nervous.  Actually, I'm a lot nervous.

Tonight's poem I chose because it surprises me.  Makes me think.  Makes me jealous.  Basically, it reminds me why I am a poet.

Saint Marty needs that tonight.

The Cows on Killing Day

by:  Les Murray

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.

May 31: Mental Illness, Les Murray, "Panic Attack"

My life has been touched by mental illness in many ways.  Depressions.  Bipolar disorder.  Panic attacks.  Anxiety.  You name it, it has been a part of my life in some way.

It's really easy to stigmatize people who suffer from mental illness.  Someone walking down the street, talking to himself.  That someone will draw stares, laughter, finger points.  In most cases, not a single person will stop to help.  Because mental illness is scary.

When your mind turns against you, there's not a whole lot you can do.  Stay in bed all day, covers over your head.  Deep breathing.  Medication.  Therapy.  The problem is that most people with mental illness do not have the capacity to realize they need help.

My wife has bipolar.  Her uncle had bipolar.  Several years ago, he committed suicide.  My wife takes her medication faithfully because she has seen the cost of not taking her medication.

Saint Marty prays every night for people who suffer from mental illness.

Panic Attack

by:  Les Murray

The body had a nightmare.
Awake. No need of the movie.

No need of light, to keep hips
and shoulders rotating in bed
on the gimbals of wet eyes.

Pounding heart, chest pains -
should it be the right arm hurting?

The brain was a void
or a blasted-out chamber -
shreds of speech in there,
shatters of lust and prayer.

No one can face their heart
or turn their back on it.

Bowel stumbled to bowl,
emptied, and emptied again
till the gut was a train
crawling in its own tunnel,

slowly dragging the nightmare
down with it, below heart level.
You would not have died

the fear had been too great
but: to miss the ambulance moment -

Relax. In time, your hourglass
will be reversed again.

May 30: Ravenous Blob of Plasma, Les Murray, "Science Fiction"

In keeping with my previous post, I found out that Les Murray has something to say about science fiction, as well.  I'm not sure Murray's vision of the future is very comforting, but it proves that science fiction isn't just about a ravenous blob of plasma that oozes all over town, absorbing everything in sight and growing to the size of a blue whale.

No.  Science fiction can be about hope and loneliness and pain, as well.  It's about possibilities.

Saint Marty sees a cheeseburger in his future.

Science Fiction

by:  Les Murray

I can travel
faster than light
so can you
the speed of thought
the only trouble
is at destinations
our thought balloons
are coated invisible
no one there sees us
and we can't get out
to be real or present
phone and videophone
are almost worse
we don't see a journey
but stay in our space
just talking and joking
with those we reach
but can never touch
the nothing that can hurt us
how lovely and terrible
and lonely is this.

May 29: Poet of the Week, Les Murray, "Bottles in a Bombed City"

It's late, but I have a new Poet of the Week.  He's Australian, and he is amazing.

His name is Les Murray, and I am looking forward to spending a week with him.

It's late.  Saint Marty is going to bed.

Bottles in a Bombed City

by:  Les Murray

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.