The International Terminal -- Les Murray

Guest poem sent in by Steve Forsythe

(Poem #1958) The International Terminal Some comb oil, some blow air, some shave trenchlines in their hair but the common joint thump, the heart's spondee kicks off in its rose-lit inner sea like an echo, at first, of the one above it on the dodgy ladder of love -- and my mate who's driving says I never found one yet worth staying with forever. In this our poems do not align. Surely most are if you are, answers mine, and I am living proof of it, I gloom, missing you from the cornering outset -- And hearts beat mostly as if they weren't there, Rocking horse to rocking chair, most audible dubbed on the tracks of movies or as we approach where our special groove is or our special fear. The autumn-vast parking-lot-bitumen overcast now switches on pumpkin-flower lights all over dark green garden sites and a wall of car-bodies, stacked by blokes, obscures suburban signs and smokes. Like coughs, cries, all such unlearned effects the heartbeat has no dialects but what this or anything may mean depends on what poem we're living in. Now a jet engine, huge child of a gun, shudders with haze and begins to run. Over Mount Fuji and the North Pole I'm bound for Europe in a reading role and a poem long ago that was coming for me had Fuji-san as its axle-tree. Cities shower and rattle over the gates as I enter that limbo between states but I think of the heart swarmed around by poems like an egg besieged by chromosomes and how out of that our world is bred through the back of a mirror, with clouds in its head --and airborne, with a bang, this five-hundred-seat theatre folds up its ponderous feet. -- Les Murray

Here is another poem on a different aspect of flight - it is almost the
opposite of Walcott's poem [Poem #1957]: anticipation vs. completion, the
anxiety of departure vs. the expansive consciouness of Walcott's being in
flight, almost formal vs. free-flowing verse. It captures well all the
emotions evoked by the beginning of a long journey. The depiction of the
actual takeoff ("Now a jet engine...") brilliantly evokes the final physical
and mental rush.

Steve Forsythe

[Links]

Biography:
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Les_Murray

Official site:
  http://www.lesmurray.org/