Robert Gray Poems

My mother all of ninety has to be tied up
in her wheelchair, but still she leans far out of it sideways;
she juts there brokenly,
able to cut
...

Swarthy as oilcloth and as squat
as Sancho Panza
wearing a beret’s little stalk
the pear
...

She and I came wandering there through an empty park,
and we laid our hands on a stone parapet’s
fading life. Before us, across the oily, aubergine dark
of the harbour, we could make out yachts –
...

These long stars
on

stalks
...

Clear water, in silvery tin dishes
dented as ping pong balls:
a lemon juice tinge of the staling light is in them;
they've a faint lid of dust.
...

In some last inventory, I’ll have lost a season
through the occlusion
of summer by another hemisphere.
Going there
...

Barely contained by the eyesight,
the beach makes one great arc -
blue ranges overlapped behind it;
each of them a tide-mark.
...

It has always seemed to me that neutral things would help us
if only we could hear
the eloquence
of their dumb ministry.
...

My mother all of ninety has to be tied up
in her wheelchair, yet still she leans far out of it sideways;
she juts there brokenly,
able to cut
...

There comes trudging back across the home paddocks of the bay
pushing its way
waist-deep in the trembling seed-heads of the light
the trawler, with flat roof and nets aloft,
...