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UPON A ROW OLD BOOTS AND SHOES IN A PAWNBROKER'S WINDOW, by                     Poet's Biography
First Line: Ah! No! / you are not a soldierly upright now!
Last Line: Far, far from here.
Alternate Author Name(s): Maurice, Furnley
Subject(s): Pawnshops; Shoes; Pawnbrokers; Boots; Sneakers; Shoemakers


AH! no!
You are not a soldierly upright row!
In wearisome disillusionment
Brooding on newness spent.
Your uppers might keep one's instep free from rain,
And should these leak, the overflow could drain,
I maintain,
Through the holes
In the soles.
But this isn't poetry, is it? No!
And yet there's an ode here somewhere; how should it go?
Poverty, plenty; joy and woe;
How should it go?

The gruesome samples here displayed
Make me afraid.
Whose the bluchers and whose
The golden couple next to the two outsizes?
But I'm not weaving sentimental stories
About these boots and their departed glories.
Up to blue heaven my entreaty rises
For food, for shelter, and not to pawn my shoes.

Abashed, not gaily
My puzzled vision scans
The bulging outlines of my trusty tans
Which so worthily plod
These pavements daily.
The toecaps take my stony stare
As I mutter, 'There ...
There but for the grace of God ...'
I think my shoe-tongues understood;
They said, 'Touch wood, touch wood.'
'Far, far from here,' says my loved Matthew A.,
'The Adriatic breaks in a warm bay.'

Yet the eternal shuffle of well-booted feet
Disturbs my wanton musing in the street.
Brushing shoulders with sweet and twenty,
Here's poverty, there's plenty.

A chemist's sign is rolling eternally over;
'I wonder,' a flapper squeals, 'what's on to-night.'
Limbs loaded like fat bees from plundered clover,
The women emerge through doors of living light
From the emporiums where joy is sold
For bogus promises to pay in gold.

The spruiker spruiks; your fortune told; three courses; bob the lot.
(A rotten game, the spruiker's, but it's a job he's got.)
The flappers flap in cocktail juice; the saucepan's cold on the hob;
'Lone Pine was hell!' the diggers yell; 'but, Christ! it was a job!'
The high signs twinkle, and squat trams trot blithely up and down;
The bootpawner plays hidies in the alleys of the town.

Sometimes he stands and stares
At the beautiful, useless wares
In the windows' taunting displays,
At the signs that flicker and leer and variously rehearse
Methods and schemes and plots,
Registers, carriers, slots;
Loud ways and low ways
To drain the pedestrian's purse.

Gorgeous effects of electric illumination
That might have been a poet's inspiration
Grown common by incessant imitation.
Cascading streams of colour fall
From the shoulders of the divinely tall
Alluring but somewhat unresponsive models that
Proclaim a frock, a corset, some particular hat.

But Hunger has its vision
Of gorging in realms Elysian.
One day, as a bootpawner passed, a model turned;
He paused and gazed till the eyes of the model grew dim,
The lids dropped slowly and he knew she burned
With a terrible love for him.
He resolved to return at dusk and in tones expressive
Demand more liberal terms, as the price was excessive;
But when he got back in the gloaming and found her cut off
at the waist
He retreated in haste
To the dark
And slept alone in the park.

One night, from a culvert arch,
When the moon was a wind-blown husk,
I heard the mumbling march
Of the bootpawners spoil the dusk.
Their hollow entrails made
A noise like drums in the shade.
It seemed they walked on grass,
So soft the footfalls fell.
The cushioned heels fell soft
As I listened and watched them pass.

I caught a rhythm, a word,
As they sang and spat and coughed.
How shall I ever tell
The terrible things I heard?
Their lips were white and blue
(Could any words mean what their eyes mean?);
The words were bitter, mournful or true --
Most, nearly obscene.

The bitumen peels
Our naked heels;
No work, no work;
No wages, no wages;
No foil to burk
The southerly's rages;
No crust to thrust
Down ravenous gullets,
Though windows are crammed
With succulent pullets.

Be damned, be damned,
You delicatessen!
We've burned and learned
Our terrible lesson.
Guts ache, hearts break,
But never the glass --
We yearn, we burn;
We pass, we pass.

'Far, far from here,' let Matthew Arnold say,
'The Adriatic breaks in a warm bay.'
But not so far from here,
O Matthew dear,
The knots of slimy eels writhe under the rustic bridge,
The sunbeams burrow among the quivering elms,
The tufts of cloud throw shade on the level lawns,
Where a world is green and clean.
The pods fall ceaselessly the whole night through;
The roaring bees
Worry and tear at the throats of the swaying poppies;
The wind's an invisible cloud of scented wool,
Stroking us, patting us, lifting the leaves to the sun;
And all the way from Caulfield station to town
The encroaching pigface pours
Its molten magenta down the sides of the cuttings.

The towers of Melbourne have been wrought
From rock and trouble and grumbling toil,
Or out of the sliding slush the churning concrete-mixer
Spews into a hideous iron-befangled mould.
But watch those towers from the St. Kilda Road;
Their windows ablaze in the sunset,
The floating towers with their bases muffled in trees
And the trees cooling their feet in the water,
And behind, long splashes of cloud.

Gaze from the footings up, gaze from the summit down;
Over the river the trees, and over the trees
A wonder of drifting towers
Awash in the evening's dusky gold
Backed by an opal sky whose clouds
Are gashed with enormous wounds of crimson light.

All so complete, so quiet; all so true.
Why, then, debase this vision with old rue?
Are our devisers less, then, than the dreamers who begot
Camelot? O Camelot!
Although those towers are gold and green,
Or spread with a thousand blended hues,
It's little all that would mean
To the fellows who pawned these shoes.

Some pair among the drab and crooked row
May once have trod the lawns of the riverside
Or danced at a Lord Mayor's show.
But the last remnant of hope, happiness, pride
Seems to have gone; they've grown so desolate
Since they crunched gravel by some moonlit gate.
They meet my look with a groggy, shamefaced leer,
And muse on mountains that have known their stride,
Or rocky steeps defied;
They have gone brushing and rustling through
The warm grass and the dew,
Been yellowed with pollen and petals of maimed flowers,
In paddocks of shadows and showers,
Far, far from here.





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