Memories of the Height-to-Weight Ratio
I was a translator in the Institute back when being accredited as a poet meant signing things against Vietnam. For scorn of the bargain I wouldn't do it.
And the Institute was after me to lose seven teeth and five stone in weight and pass their medical. Three years I dodged, then offered the teeth under sacking threat.
From five to nine, in warm Lane Cove, and five to nine again at night, an irascible Carpatho-Ruthenian strove with ethnic teeth. He claimed the bite of a human determined their intelligence. More gnash-power sent the brain more blood. In Hungarian, Yiddish or Serbo-Croat he lectured emotional fur-trimmers good, clacking a jointed skull in his hand, and sent them to work face-numbed and bright.
This was my wife's family dentist. He looked into my mouth, blenched at the sight, eclipsed me with his theory of occlusion and wrested and tugged. Pausing to blow out cigarette smoke, he'd bite his only accent-free mother tongue and return below to raise my black fleet of sugar-barques so anchored that they gave him tennis elbow. Seven teeth I gave that our babies might eat when students were chanting Make Love! Hey Ho!
But there was a line called Height-to-Weight and a parallel line on Vietnam. When a tutor in politics failed all who crossed that, and wasn't dismissed, scholarship was back to holy writ.
Fourteen pounds were a stone, and of great yore so, but the doctor I saw next had no schoolyard in him: You're a natural weight-lifter! Come join my gym! Sonnets of flesh could still model my torso.
Modernism's not modern: it's police and despair. I wear it as fat, and it gnawed off my hair though my typewriter clicked over gulfs and N-spaces where the passive voice hid some riveting cases.
But when the Institute started afresh to circle my job, we decamped to Europe and spent our last sixpence on a pig's head.
Any job is a comedown, where I was bred. Les Murray
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