Tuesday Poem - 'Walking Around at Night' by Robert Gray

Walking Around at Night

The rising moon appears,

softly focused as a movie queen,

in a close frame

through the kitchen flyscreen.

I stroll outside and down the path,

leaving a radio;

the moon is buxom

behind the curtains of the willow.

It's soon an old fumy paraffin lamp

of a moon, lifted clear.

The hammer blows of barking,

a car clearing its chest, somewhere,

the slam of a tinny garage door

on concrete, and the voices

going inside that could be either

quarrelsome or boisterous.

In that dim-lit town, gable houses

wear a net veil

of leaf-shadow. The lawns, side-lit,

are wheatgrass, succulent and frail.

A parking lot is bare tonight

within its cold, immense

chain-wire. The shadows of some pebbles

loom like a chess defence.

A single tree on the Council lawn,

in 'subdued light', is still:

dressed up, a woman alone in the corridor

of a convention hotel;

a skinny tree, in knee-length fashion, and

leg-aligning, high-heel pose.

A little nervous and preening, tottery.

Another one of those.

Across the paddocks, backyards —

Above fences, the lounge room lights burn;

in the frosty night, thick like thistle fur,

a few porch lights are on.

I keep walking. A cow and the moon

(it's white as salt now), each a term

in some kind of sequence, I shoo

the cow, for a place to lie that's warm,

under a lichen-smoke and bird's egg sky.

Adrift on the rising night.

Going on, towards a razor-strop highway;

its streaks of light

are suddenly lifted away at the curve

and gone, each a stroke;

and the occasional heavy flat backwards

stropping, of a truck.

Waiting to cross (a short-cut back), I stand

in weeds. At every car,

they're strung with glutinous, distended drops.

The moon is bright as an old scar.

Well, 'Cumulus', Robert Gray's Collected Poems, is certainly a book and a half.

I've been through it twice, with a break of almost a year between first and second

reading, and now I am shelving it, but I couldn't say I've got on top of it. It's very

rich feeding, indeed. The star poems are for me for the nonce – 'In Departing Light'

and 'A Bowl of Pears' – (both from 'Afterimages' 2002) – but every time I turned a

page to focus on another poem (sometimes at random and out of sequence) I seemed

to be caught up in a whole new definition of starriness. Look, I liked damn near the

whole book (tiny bit tough on Thomas Hardy maybe on page 239??) The whole book

took my fancy. So which poem to pick?? I went for this one, because I have taken that

walk many times, many times, in many little towns, and this poem is the absolute

experience of that walk. As I was typing the poem up I was totally relishing the acute

play of the punctuation, and then I noticed the delicious rhymes!

http://johnleonardpress.com/?p=186

Tuesday Poem - 'Interruptions to Reading Poetry' by Jean Kent

Interruptions to Reading Poetry

1. In the Middle of David Malouf's Wild Lemons

I put down the poetry book and walk out

the front door. On the brick path, like a visitor

hesitating before broaching the house steps:

a small, slate-black rat.

It is shivering, poisoned, not-quite

dead. Its pointed ears

pick up my footsteps, but

barely. Its coat rises round it like a fur

around the neck of an opera-goer stepping out

into silence, each glittering dark fibre

still electric, still charged,

deep to every nerve. It is in the middle

of my path to anywhere — as precisely final

as a print from Dürer, perfect in every tiny

detail of ear point, bony paw, fishing line-fine

whiskers hooked

in an elegant, still nose. It is in the middle

of what I am carrying out of the house from my book —

wild lemons, a place in Tuscany, the body receiving

transfigured text …

                              Under a sky of singing blue

it is in the middle of its death

and will not

be transfigured. The flat world of a shovel

is what I bring it. Banged head. Final act.

When it rolls on the bricks it has the profile,

soft torso and premature paws

of an ultrasound embryo.

                                   At this moment when it should be

hard as stone, flung out of the world, instead it is so limp

and the day is stiffening around it.

I balance it on my spade

towards a last rest, a quick

                        sharp grave

under hydrangeas' already bowed

                         lapis-lazuli heads

and the noisy miner birds

which all day have been rehearsing

unholy choruses

hold their breath.

                        Under the hot rattle

of loquat leaves, their silence follows me

like the weight

of a just-closed book.

2. Somewhere in Charles Wright's A Short History of the Shadow

That petulant bird, the phone, warbles in another room.

Where I am sitting, sun has just sparked —

even though the sky outside is sulking.

Dark ranges at the edge of my view

are lugubrious dinosaurs, waiting to gobble what's left

of last night's moon —

and now here's this chain of song, its couplings tossed towards me.

I go like a dog to be collared.

Some dark man with his thumb on my name

wants to offer me pest control, as if he knows there are rats

slinking along the branches of my trees at night,

sly shadows whose teeth gnaw holes in everything at 3 a.m.

He hangs up even before I do …

My voice in its glove of politeness

must hold a bait of slowed time, some dangerous sweetness

I caught in my last moments alone in the poem —

                                                        but which poem?

and where in the book can I find it now? The black matt cover,

its edges scuffed, its sleek centre streaked,

has collapsed. Like an unpolished shoe

                                         it shows no sign of the white foot

                                         which lived in it two minutes ago.

The downward sloping leaves

                                         of pittosporums and loquats shiver

like the ears of sleeping dogs an arm's length from my chair —

sun ruffles the morning's dreaming fur …

                                                         
                                                          and the book,

                                 no matter where I open it —

                      the book

slides out of its fretful slipper —

                                it walks out into the dawn again

its ankles and its insteps so painfully white, its black

lines like veins

                      rising knobbled and tender toward

                                                          'the music of things'

while a gnawed moon

slides into grey mountains to grow again.

I couldn't help but agree with the blurb by Paul Summers on the inside

front cover of the hour of silvered mullet – that Jean Kent's poetry was

like 'an argument with the air'. It is a slippery, silvery sort of book. I

was at a loss, as I read, as to how to put my finger on its qualities. But

then, as its qualities invaded me, I minded less about pinning things

down, and began to let my mind float about here and there, in a most

particular intimacy with the drift and lift of its musicality.

http://pittstreetpoetry.com/emporium/jean-kent/

Tuesday Poem - 'The Mitchells' by Les Murray

THE MITCHELLS

I am seeing this: two men are sitting on a pole

they have dug a hole for and will, after dinner, raise

I think for wires. Water boils in a prune tin.

Bees hum their shift in unthinning mists of white

bursaria blossom, under the noon of wattles.

The men eat big meat sandwiches out of a styrofoam

box with a handle. One was overheard saying:

drought that year. Yes. Like trying to farm the road.

The first man, if asked, would say I'm one of the Mitchells.

The other would gaze for a while, dried leaves in his palm,

and looking up, with pain and subtle amusement,

say I'm one of the Mitchells. Of the pair, one has been rich

but never stopped wearing his oil-stained felt hat.

      Nearly everything

they say is ritual. Sometimes the scene is an avenue.

I invested in a copy of 'The Best 100 Poems Of Les Murray' (Black Inc)

because I was curious to see which ones he had picked. I didn't always

agree with him, I thought he had left out some corkers. (Aphrodite Street,

for instance). But I agreed with him about this one, it has to be in my top ten.

http://www.blackincbooks.com/books/best-100-poems-les-murray