The Head-Spider

Where I lived once, a roller coaster's range

of timber hills peaked just by our backyard cliff

and cats undulated scream-driven round its seismograph—

and climbed up to us with an indrawn gasp of girls.

Smiles and yelling could be exchanged as they crested

then they'd pitch over, straining back in a shriek

that volleyed as the cars were snatched from sight

in the abyss, and were soon back. Weekdays they rested,

and I rested all days. There was a spider in my head

I'd long stay unaware of. If you're raped you mostly know

but I'd been cursed, and refused to notice or believe it.

Aloof in a Push squat, I thought I was moral, or dead.

Misrule was strict there, and the Pill of the day only ever

went into one mouth, not mine, and foamed a Santa-beard.

I was resented for chastity, and slept on an overcoat.

Once Carol from upstairs came to me in bra and kindness

and the spider secreted by girls' derision-rites to spare

women from me had to numb me to a crazed politeness.

Squeals rode the edge of the thrill building. Cartoonist Mercier

drew springs under Sydney. Push lovers were untrue on principle.

It's all architecture over there now. A new roller coaster

flies its ups and downs in wealth's face like an affront.

I've written a new body that only needs a reader's touch.

If love is cursed in us, then when God exists, we don't.

Notes:

The Push: An Australian bohemia existing from the 1940s to the 1970s. Nominally libertarian, it in fact enforced a fairly pedantic inversion of ordinary norms and practices. Its most famous alumna is Germaine Greer.

Copyright Credit: Les Murray, "Head Spider" from Learning Human: Selected Poems. Copyright © 2000 by Les Murray. Used by permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, LLC, http://us.macmillan.com/fsg All rights reserved.

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Source: Learning Human: Selected Poems (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000)