Subhuman Redneck Poems by Les Murray

Author:Les Murray
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

EACH MORNING ONCE MORE SEAMLESS

Mother and type of evolution,

the New Testament of the scholars

may be likened to a library catalogue

of the old type, a card index console

of wooden drawers, each a verse.

And you never know which ones are out,

stacked up, spilt, or currently back

in, with some words deleted

then restored. And it never ends.

Reputations slide them out,

convictions push them in.

Speculations look backwards once

and stiffen to salt-crystal proofs.

Dates grow on palms in the wilderness

and ferment in human minds—

and criticism’s prison for all poems

was modelled on this traffic.

Most battered of all are the drawers

labelled Resurrection, The.

Bashed, switched, themselves resurrected

continually. Because it is impossible,

as the galaxies were, as life was,

as flight and language were. The impossible,

evolution’s prey, shot with Time’s arrow.

But this one is the bow of time.

Shadowy at a little distance tower

other banks of card-index drawers,

other myriad shelves, jammed with human names.

Some labelled in German are most actively

worked over, grieved, and reinserted.

More stretch away in Eastern scripts,

scarcely visited. Dust softens their head-words.

Yet the only moral reason to leave any

in silence fragments and reassembles

in the swarmed-over, nagged, fantasised

word-atoms of the critics’ Testament.

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