The Night Ride
Gas flaring on the yellow platform; voices running up and down;
Milk-tins in cold dented silver; half-awake I stare,
Pull up the blind, blink out - all sounds are drugged;
the slow blowing of passengers asleep;
engines yawning; water in heavy drips;
Black, sinister travellers, lumbering up the station,
one moment in the window, hooked over bags;
hurrying, unknown faces - boxes with strange labels -
all groping clumsily to mysterious ends,
out of the gaslight, dragged by private Fates,
their echoes die. The dark train shakes and plunges;
bells cry out, the night-ride starts again.
Soon I shall look out into nothing but blackness,
pale, windy fields, the old roar and knock of the rails
melts in dull fury. Pull down the blind. Sleep. Sleep
Nothing but grey, rushing rivers of bush outside.
Gaslight and milk-cans. Of Rapptown I recall nothing else.
poem by Kenneth Slessor
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Lesbia's Daughter
LESBIA'S daughter, I shall tell no lie,
Here's no fit amber for such a dainty fly.
Let them embalm your beauty whoso can
In boastful odes, I'm a more honest man.
Lovers' abodes with poets' words are paved,
But prudent girls would get those vows engraved,
For brass than paper being something stronger
May last, it's more than like, a fortnight longer.
Where's the fine music that the fossil men
Of lost Lemuria brandished on a pen?
All tossed in earth—men, music, lovers gone—
And where's the lust a skull has for a bone?
If joy can turn a moment to a year,
Why take to Then and There what's meant for Here,
Or nurture for a cemetery tense
The curious pleasures of impermanence?
Look for no lovers on that later scene,
Let it avail you Are, who shall have Been,
Burnt utterly the stick you had to burn,
Lived once, loved well, gave thanks, and won't return.
poem by Kenneth Slessor
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Mephistopheles Perverted
(Or Goethe for the Times)
ONCE long ago lived a Flea
Who kept such a fine, fat King,
Not that he held with royalty,
But more for the appearance of the thing,
And gave his Majesty to hold
(Such pageantries are far too few)
A sword of ruby-hilted gold
That possibly might hack a cheese in two;
But lest this glory might begin
To prove the regency too far,
His thunderbolt they made of tin,
And changed his godship for another Star.
Thus when the Monarch drove abroad,
With stars like buttons round his chest,
God-fearing Fleas would all applaud,
And alien Lice be grudgingly impressed.
Such relics every Flea must flaunt,
If only as the final trump
That mocks Materialism's taunt,
[...] Read more
poem by Kenneth Slessor
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Country Towns
Country towns, with your willows and squares,
And farmers bouncing on barrel mares
To public houses of yellow wood
With '1860' over their doors,
And that mysterious race of Hogans
Which always keeps the General Stores….
At the School of Arts, a broadsheet lies
Sprayed with the sarcasm of flies:
'The Great Golightly Family
Of Entertainers Here To-night'–
Dated a year and a half ago,
But left there, less from carelessness
Than from a wish to seem polite.
Verandas baked with musky sleep,
Mulberry faces dozing deep,
And dogs that lick the sunlight up
Like paste of gold – or, roused in vain
By far, mysterious buggy-wheels,
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poem by Kenneth Slessor
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Fixed Ideas
RANKS of electroplated cubes, dwindling to glitters,
Like the other pasture, the trigonometry of marble,
Death's candy-bed. Stone caked on stone,
Dry pyramids and racks of iron balls.
Life is observed, a precipitate of pellets,
Or grammarians freeze it into spar,
Their rhomboids, as for instance, the finest crystal
Fixing a snowfall under glass. Gods are laid out
In alabaster, with horny cartilage
And zinc ribs; or systems of ecstasy
Baked into bricks. There is a gallery of sculpture,
Bleached bones of heroes, Gorgon masks of bushrangers;
But the quarries are of more use than this,—
Filled with the rolling of huge granite dice,
Ideas and judgments: vivisection, the Baptist Church,
Good men and bad men, polygamy, birth-control. . . .
Frail tinkling rush
Water-hair streaming
Prickles and glitters
Cloudy with bristles
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poem by Kenneth Slessor
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Rubens' Innocents
IF all those tumbling babes of heaven,
Plump cherubim with blown cheeks,
Could vault in these warm skies, or leaven
Our starry silent mountain-peaks—
O painter of chub-faced, shining-thighed
Fat Ganymedes of God—what noise
Would churn between the clouds and stride
Far downward from those rose-mouthed boys!
Down to our spires their lusty whooping,
Fanfares of Paradise, would speed,
Far down to dark-faced clergy stooping
Round altars of their doleful creed;
And God, whose wings of silver sweep
Like metal afire on heaven's rim,
Would daze them with a twinkling peep
Of those young moon-stained cherubim—
Then, for a trice, their skies might sparkle,
And some gold ichor splash amid
Those most respectable, patriarchal
Purveyors of stale pardons, hid
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poem by Kenneth Slessor
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To a Friend
ADAM, because on the mind's roads
Your mouth is always in a hurry,
Because you know odes
And ways to make a curry,
Because you fall in love with words
And whistle beauty forth to kiss them,
And blow the tails from China birds
Whilst I continually miss them,
Because you top my angry best
At billiards, fugues or pulling corks out,
And whisk a fritter from its nest
Before there's time to hand the forks out,
Because you saw the Romans wink,
Because your senses dance to metre,
Because, no matter what I drink,
You'll hold at least another litre,
Because you've got a gipsy's eye
That melts the rage of catamountains,
And metaphors that pass me by
Burst from your lips in lovely fountains,
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poem by Kenneth Slessor
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North Country
North Country, filled with gesturing wood,
With trees that fence, like archers' volleys,
The flanks of hidden valleys
Where nothing's left to hide
But verticals and perpendiculars,
Like rain gone wooden, fixed in falling,
Or fingers blindly feeling
For what nobody cares;
Or trunks of pewter, bangled by greedy death,
Stuck with black staghorns, quietly sucking,
And trees whose boughs go seeking,
And tress like broken teeth
With smoky antlers broken in the sky;
Or trunks that lie grotesquely rigid,
Like bodies blank and wretched
After a fool's battue,
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poem by Kenneth Slessor
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Taoist
THOSE friends of Lao-Tzu, those wise old men
Dozing all day in lemon-silken robes,
With tomes of beaten jade spread knee to knee,
And pipe-stem, shining cold with silver, poised
In steaming play, and still a finger free
To dog the path of some forgotten pen;
Almost their bee-sweet ancient words incline
My mind to those old pagan ways, beloved
By mandarins and mages, now but dust
In drowsy pyramids. What creed is this,
Save that which those philosophers discussed
In gold pavilions, over musky wine?
'Repenting always of forgotten wrongs
Will never bring thy heart to rest, for thought
Repairs no whit of evil; rather cast
Thy meditations in that utter void
To which all human deeds resolve at last . . . .'
So runs the burden of their thousand songs.
Here, in this dark Star-Chamber of the soul,
You stand arraigned, O slayer of my heart . . .
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poem by Kenneth Slessor
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Thieves' Kitchen
GOOD roaring pistol-boys, brave lads of gold,
Good roistering easy maids, blown cock-a-hoop
On floods of tavern-steam, I greet you! Drunk
With wild Canary, drowned in wines of old,
I'll swear your round, red faces dive and swim
Like clouds of fire-fish in a waxen tide,
And these are seas of smoke we thieves behold.
Yet I've a mind I know what arms enchain
With flesh my shoulders . . . aye, and what warm legs
Wind quickly into mine . . . 'tis no pale mermaid,
No water-wench that floats in a smoky main
Betwixt the tankard and my knees . . . in faith,
I know thee, Joan, and by the beard of God,
I'll prove to-night thy mortal parts again!
Leap, leap, fair vagabonds, your lives are short . . .
Dance firelit in your cauldron-fumes, O thieves,
Ram full your bellies with spiced food, gulp deep
Those goblets of thick ale—yea, feast and sport,
Ye Cyprian maids—lie with great, drunken rogues,
Jump by the fire—soon, soon your flesh must crawl
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poem by Kenneth Slessor
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