POETRY ... Les MURRAY

LIFE CYCLE OF IDEAS
Les Murray

An idea whistles with your lips,

laughs with your breath.
An idea hungers for your body.

An alert, hot to dissemble and share,
it snatches up cases of its style
from everywhere, to start a face.

An idea is a mouth that sells
as it sucks. It lusts to have
loomed perpetual in the night colours;
an idea is always a social climb.

Whether still braving snorts
ordering its shootings, or at rest
among its own charts of world rule,
amaturing idea will suddenly want

to get smaller than its bearers.

It longs to be a poem:
earthed, accurate, immortal trance,
buck as stirrups were
blare of the panther.

Only art can contain an idea.

From Subhuman Redneck Poems
Les Murray
(Farrar Straus Giroux, 1997: 1997 T.S. Eliot Prize for Poetry)