[She puts the candlestick and the essay on the table.]
THOMASINA Then I will not go. Once more, for my birthday. [SEPTIMUS and THOMASINA start to waltz together.
GUS comes forward, startling HANNAH.]
HANNAH Oh!?you made me jump. [GUS looks resplendent. He is carrying an old and somewhat tattered stiff-backed folio fastened with a tape tied in a bow. He comes to HANNAH and thrusts this present at her.]
6. An A grade.
.
2820 / LES MURRAY
Oh . . .
[She lays the folio down on the tahle and starts to open it. It consists only of two hoards hinged, containing Thomasina's drawing.]
'Septimus with Plautus'. [To GUS.] I was looking for that. Thank you. [GUS nods several times. Then, rather awkwardly, he hows to her. A Regency how, an invitation to dance.]
Oh, dear, I don't really . . .
[After a moment's hesitation, she gets lip and they1 hold each other, keeping a decorous distance between them, and start to dance, rather awkwardly.
SEPTIMUS and THOMASINA continue to dance, fluently, to the piano.] END
1993
LES MURRAY
b. 1938 Leslie Allan Murray was born at Nabiac on the north coast of New South Wales, Australia, and grew up on a dairy farm at nearby Bunyah. He was educated at Taree High School and the University of Sydney, where he studied modern languages. After military service with the Royal Australian Naval Reserve, he worked as a translator in the Australian National University, Canberra, and as an officer in the prime minister's department. Since 1971 he has been a full-time writer.
Remaining true to his roots in the Australian 'outback' (despite the global shuttling expected of a major poet in the late twentieth century), Murray has emerged as a powerful celebrant of the natural world and agricultural work. His substantial Collected Poems (1998), dedicated 'to the glory of God,' bears witness to a staunch and highly individual Roman Catholicism. His celebration of nature includes human nature and reveals a sensibility generously attuned to the hopes and fears, hurts and happinesses of ordinary lives.
Murray seems intent on proving that the provincial farmer living at the margins of the former British Empire can write poetry as learned, authoritative, and technically virtuosic as any from the metropolitan center. The language of his poetry startles and amuses, reveling in the fecundity and elasticity of English. In poems of metaphorical lushness and sonic opulence, he plays on the eddying reflections of homonyms and rhymes, alliterations and consonances, to suggest a profound interconnectedness among things. As Derek Walcott has said of Murray's work: 'There is no poetry in the English language so rooted in its sacredness, so broad-leafed in its pleasures, and yet so intimate and conversational.'
.
ON REMOVING SPIDERWEB / 2821
Morse
Tuckett. Bill Tuckett. Telegraph operator, Hall's Creek, which is way out back of the Outback, but he stuck it, quite likely liked it, despite heat, glare, dust and the lack of diversion or doctors. Come disaster you trusted to luck,
5 ingenuity and pluck. This was back when nice people said pluck, the sleevelink and green eyeshade epoch.1
Faced, though, like Bill Tuckett with a man needing surgery right on the spot, a lot would have done their dashes. It looked hopeless (dot dot dot) Lift him up on the table, said Tuckett, running the key hot
io till Head Office turned up a doctor who coolly instructed up a thousand miles of wire, as Tuckett advanced slit by slit with a safety razor blade, pioneering on into the wet, copper-wiring the rivers off, in the first operation conducted along dotted lines, with rum drinkers gripping the patient: d-d-dash it, take care, Tuck!
15 And the vital spark stayed unshorted. Yallah!2 breathed the camelmen. Tuckett, you did it, you did it! cried the spattered la-de-dah jodhpur'-wearing Inspector of Stock. We imagine, some weeks later, a properly laconic convalescent averring Without you, I'd have kicked the bucket . . .
20 From Chungking to Burrenjuck,4 morse keys have mostly gone silent and only old men meet now to chit- chat in their electric bygone dialect. The last letter many will forget is dit-dit-dit-dah, V for Victory. The coders' hero had speed, resource and a touch. So ditditdit daah for Bill Tuckett.
1983
On Removing Spiderweb
Like summer silk its denier but stickily, oh, ickilier, miffed bunny-blinder, silver tar, gesticuli-gesticular,
5 crepe when cobbed, crap when rubbed, stretchily adhere-and-there and everyway, nap-snarled or sleek, glibly hubbed with grots to tweak: ehh weakly bobbined tae yer neb,
io spit it Phuoc Tuy! filthy web!
1990
1. I.e., the nineteenth century. 'Sleevelink': cuff knee to ankle. link. 4. I.e., from southwest China to southeast Austra2. God be praised! (Arabic). lia. 3. Long breeches for riding, close-fitting from
