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!

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