You Were Broken

for Les Murray

The amazed, massing shade

for the glacial valley, made

from a single araucaria

that smashed its way

by micrometers of birth-push

under five centuries of dusks

of carbon dioxide and rainfall,

while the volcanic rocks made landfall

against its unrolled, harbouring roots;

and the roots took the rocks in their arms

and placed them, magically,

like stone children, about itself

as it unfolded its fabulous tale:

of the wood heart mourned to flint

by slow labour and loneliness,

by what it could not reach, yet see

at distance, and of the sound of that sea,

and of the cruel brightness

of butterflies and grasses,

foreknowledge of their brevity,

of a heard stream, overhearing

prints of otters on its plane stones,

gold wagtails sprying over

the gravel and shallows of courtship;

of orange blames of gall-wasps, honey fungus,

the watch-turning of tree-creepers;

of blights of summer lightning,

of fire damage and that dark

year’s mark worn secretly,

a ring, forged inside a ring;

then the winter’s coronation closing

in a swaying crown of redwings,

cones, drab diagonals of pine-fall,

the lead winds hardening, and while

the stone children wept with rain

the great tree sheltered them.

Fiction

I was haunted by falsehood from the start, some brink of this reached

by late childhood. To keep lying, to pile it up, was how to live

because fiction tied the parts and parcels of name. Fiction was the poached

life history of travelling folk. Fiction was the electricity and rates.

Paid for your shoes. Fiction took the bus to the store, was allowed

by family law to shoplift. Fiction told the old story every night.

Fiction was poor but dishonest. Fiction gave birth before a grate,

placed my placenta on the sizzling clinkers. Fiction liked comforts.

She had the brains to earn them, but Fiction stayed out late.

Fiction was a virgin before marriage, of course. She laid the hoard

of the tale tall before you. You were bidden to believe in this

despite the fact it was fiction. You had to grow askew. It’s hard

quarrelling with Fiction. Because Fiction is you: your bones

are thin beams of fable; and your blood, when it pouts at your lips

draws through its black alley. Fiction has good fingers, she has sewn

then unstitched the same shroud for years. Fiction longs for reunion

with her lover. He died strong and striking. He swam out of turn

down a long and burning sea of blood. Fiction yearned to restring the yarn

for herself, demanded a better ending. Her children learned their part

and played it from affection. But Fiction began to believe her tale.

                                                                 It collapsed into art

in which Fiction was the lead, and her children chapters and verses.

Her friends would spin about her screaming Author Author

Haunted by so much falsehood, a brink was reached.

from David Morley’s The Invisible Kings   Carcanet Press  www.carcanet.co.uk