Self and Dream Self

–Les Murray

Routines of decaying time

fade, and your waking life

gets laborious as science.

You huddle in, becoming

the deathless younger self

who will survive your dreams

and vanish in surviving.

Dream brings on its story

at the pace of drift

in twilight, sunless color,

its settings are believed,

a library of wood shingles,

plain mythic furniture

vivid drone of talk,

yet few loves return:

trysts seem unkeepable.

Urgencies from your time

join with the browner suits

walking those arcades with you

but then you are apart,

aghast, beside the numberless

defiling down steep fence

into an imminence —

as in the ancient burrow

you, with an ever-changing cast,

survive deciding episodes

till you are dismissed

and a restart of tense

summons your waking size

out through shreds of story.

The Margin of Difference

–Les Murray

One and one make two,

the literalist said.

So far they’ve made five billion,

said the lateralist, or ten

times that, if you count the dead.

Vertigo

–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.