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May 22, 2003 By Uncategorized One Comment

Just discovered Les Murray, who is no stranger to antipodean readers and many others no doubt, but is new to me:


Cotton Flannelette

Shake the bed, the blackened child whimpers,
O shake the bed! through bleak lips that
never will come unwry.  And wearily the iron-
framed mattress, with nodding, crockery bulbs,
jinks on its way.
		Her brothers and sister take 
shifts with the terrible glued-together baby
when their unsleeping absolute mother
reels out to snatch an hour, back to stop
the rocking and wring pale blue soap-water
over nude bladders and blood-webbed chars.
 
Even their cranky evasive father
is awed to stand watches rocking the bed.
Lids frogged shut, O please shake the bed
her contours whorl and braille tattoos
from where, in her nightdress, she flared
out of hearth-drowse to a marrow shriek
pedaling full tilt firesleeves in mid-air,
		are grainier with repair
than when the doctor, crying Dear God, woman!
No one can save that child.  Let her go!
spared her the treatments of the day.
 
Shake the bed.  Like: count phone pole, rhyme,
classify realities, band the head, any
iteration that will bring, in the brain's forks,
the melting molecules of relief,
and bring them back again.
		O rock the bed!
Nibble water with bared teeth, make lymph
like arrowroot gruel, as your mother grips you
for weeks in the untrained perfect language,
till the doctor relents.  Salves and wraps you
in dressings that will be the fire again,
ripping anguish of agony,
		and will confirm
the ploughland ridges in your woman's skin
for the sixty more years your family weaves you
on devotion's loom, rick-racking the bed
as you yourself, six years old, instruct them.

The first time I read this poem my eye caught in different places. It started with the word “unwry” in the first stanza. Having that word followed by “wearily” made me initially read “unwry” as “unwary.” I had to double back, smiling at the word play.

But then it continued…the mother “reels” out instead of “reaches”, “chars” instead of “chairs.” I thought the whole thing strange and just the product of reading too rushed, so I slowly read the poem out loud and the same thing happened. On the same words.

It is as if there is signal noise built into this poem. Deliberate places to trip and pause, a poet that asks you to sit still and concentrate even as he lulls you into the seemingly easy flow of the work.

It’s beautiful and engaging and lovely all at once.

Many Murray links (poems, reviews, audio):