Robert Gray

Stiff or sinuously,
those roots of stumps, piled up, are warriors’
spokes

It’s as though / she is being sucked out of existence sideways through a porthole / and we’ve got hold of her feet. / She’s very calm. / If you live long enough it isn’t death you fear / but what life can still do.

My father belonged among the generations of Australians whose ideal of behaviour was their image of an English gentleman. The gentleman was proverbial in this country until the nineteen-fifties, invoked in homes, in schools, in the streets. (As a boy, I heard a prostitute in Sydney shout after someone, ‘You ain’t no gentleman!’) Those who experienced this ideal through their imaginative reading, as my father did, were surely the most susceptible to it.

In the night, the gorging begins / again, in the spring / night, in the branches / of the Moreton Bay figs, / that are fully-rigged
as windjammers, and make a flotilla / along the street.

These are those that in the distance seem a swarm of gnats / those that with their barking want to rally us in a campaign against the stars / those that torment their prey / those that leap up to look at us as equals in the face / those that have broken a precious vase…

A slow effervescence of wind-lifted rain / on knuckle and cheekbone / sweet / occasional prickling / that is met as I walk above the creek, having come down a lane / and out to the back / of the long yards at the edge of town / fragile assault / in the steamy afternoon.

Back from a sea sweaty with stars, or from one black and flowing like crepe. / From a sea that erupts / and falls on them so hugely that only the radio mast could have shown / in the foam, if they’d had one. The fishermen have been taught, / by each other, that if swept off / in such a sea, without a jacket, which they don’t wear in their work, / to swim straight down and make an end of it, / since they will never get back.

A game of cricket on the English grass, in / the slow-motion blast / of the sun and / amid the slow hand-claps — / the bats’ /
are similar but even slower strokes.

Lamps through the quiet house; outside, there’s rain. / Open windows; verandah; TV moon / next door, amongst dark fronds; the typewriter / sounds of wetness; and bougainvillea / entwining each carved white pole with a vine / cruel as wire.

I find your grave / is small, child-like; / you’ve always seemed / claustrophobic, / but this — too sad / as final ground; / such narrowness / un-American.