Robert Gray - Haiku style

The once only time that I have posted our Australian poet Robert Gray (you remember, Salvation Army Hostel, back in June 2013), belies how much I truly love and admire this guy’s work.  I have this thing where if I love something, I try not to revisit it too often for fear of losing the fascination, becoming too familiar so there’s no intrigue, no mystique, afraid that the appeal will become diluted.  But now is the time for me to sample some Robert Gray because I’m going on holiday for a few weeks so I need to hone my observational skills for when I’m out there capturing daily journal entry scenes and events.  Having said that, I’m still not going to post my favourite Gray poem.  No, I’m going to post what I practice on.  I’m practicing on capturing pure objective experience – like taking a photo – and Robert Gray would have to be one of the best imagery/descriptive poets to learn from.  So I’m reading over a number of his Haiku style poems – Haiku is a Japanese style of poetry where in a short burst (3 lines; 17 or so syllables), two images or ideas (usually from nature) are joined together by what is known as a kireji (cutting word).  The idea is to capture and convey objective experience, with-holding from any analysis of what stands behind the images you have seen – with proper Haiku, the reader will leap to his/her own perfect interpretation.  So here is a sample from Gray, simply titled, 15 Poems.

15 poems

(Robert Gray,  1945 - )

 

The curtains blowing

open, a sock stretched apart,

wide meadows.

 

Following a van up

a winding forest road. Swallows

flit between us.

 

Darkness, lake-hush;

a rowboat, allowed to drift, bumps

the starlight.

 

As if the sun

out of boredom has doodled weeds ……

a backyard.

 

This moon, the last

tilted sauterne, in a glass

that’s firelit.

 

A definition

of art deco: in black and cream

the butterfly.

 

Boiling water

poured from a saucepan

into a water-bottle’s neck.

On the edge of your mind

the waves fall.

 

Wintry sunlight;

the dry, plastery legs of a woman

in tennis skirt.

 

Dark bedroom. Listening

to a rain-wet tree  -  its lovely

negligence.

 

Homesick for Australia,

a dream of rusty Holdens

in sunlit forests by the highway.

 

A cathedral interior –

these long tapers of rain lighting

candles on the twilit river.

 

Staved-in, the old rowboat

we had as kids

has foundered this last time

in a field of grass.

 

Wire coat-hangers,

misshapen, in a hotel wardrobe.

Steamy afternoon sun.

 

Cold swimming pool,

plastic blue. A bare tree’s reflection,

Its roots x-rayed.

 

Two magpies stepping

on the verandah. A ploughed hillside,

smoke and cumulus.

 

In his working life, Robert Gray was once Writer in Residence at Meiji University, Tokyo, so it stands to reason he can write a pretty good Haiku.  But what I do like about 15 Poems, is that each one is a true-blue Aussie Haiku.  Gray has replaced cherry blossom seasons and awakening of sweet oriental love with ‘rusty Holdens’, backyards, magpies and verandahs – and I can feel it!  It speaks directly to my experience as a country Australian.

My link to Robert Gray’s, 15 Poems is a number of short bursts I’ve scribbled over time on the back of shopping dockets, beer coasters, tissues and scraps of paper in the car – but don’t take my effort as a study in the Haiku form – I guess its verbose Haiku with sometimes a touch of analysis.  I wrote From Belmont & Back – 10 Poems as an exercise in instinctive observation – on your normal day, getting to work and back home again, take a snapshot, quick observation.  Haiku – it’s a fun exercise and it sharpens your powers of observation. Now I’m ready for holiday!

2014.  I get up, I go to work, I come home, nothing happens in my life; every day I see my world.
                                   Belmont & Back – 10 Poems.

 

I

Still of the dawn,

high on a hill, way out to sea,

lightning bursts without noise,

will there ever be,

any more of those,

grand naval battles?

 

II

A pile of musky shoes,

cracked and weary leather,

randomly arranged,

on the floor of my wardrobe,

viewed through a glass panel, they

might serve as equal reminder,

“Arbeit Macht Frei”.

 

III

Parrots arrive out of control

with schoolyard chatter,

before the bell is rung.

One lands on the balcony rail,

turns, lifts a feathered tail

and quickly drops calcium lime,

like a schoolboy re-dressing

from having run to the toilet.

 

IV

Commuter morning,

an old street woman,

shouldn’t need to do that,

pulls a wheelie bin over,

reaches for whatever’s inside.

A suburban hunter,

emptying and resetting her traps.

 

V

Grass grown halfway up the back,

of a floral club settee,

too soon for clean-up day.

Near here, another Fantastic furniture deal

and a flat-screen TV,

will have taken over a house.

 

VI

Barrel bodied man in Mayfield

gone to early retirement,

comes out on his verandah.

One plastic ribbon from the fly curtain,

catches and trails over his shoulder,

like the lash of a whip tickling flesh

in a moment before it is cracked,

Madame.

 

VII

Jack Russell from the cement,

outside the Sunnyside Inn,

keeps a one-eyed watch,

on his master’s mobility scooter,

moves up to the lambs-wool seat,

now the days are changing to winter.

 

VIII

Distracted, a DIY builder

progressing a villa-board shed

once started

along the house boundary, instead

pauses to examine and squeeze

at an old scab

on the end of his elbow.

 

IX

Popped bonnet,

of an early model Ford,

or Commodore,

commands public concern,

but its only for males

to stand and ponder stare,

as might a heart surgical team,

down at the engine bay.

 

X

Never before a sky that colour blue,

nor sandy clouds

spread across an inverted beach,

that the traffic descending to Belmont,

instead of the usual bullying,

slows to a reverent crawl.

                                                           J. O. White

 

 

 

Robert Gray - Salvation Army Hostel

Being a man; being alone in non-descript motel rooms on work assignment in impersonal cities and cold, remote, tin-pot towns.  I guess I’ve done my share over the years, enough for me to recognize in another man’s poem that he’s done some hard yards too and knows what he’s talking about when it comes to boarding in cheap accommodation.  A favourite contemporary Australian poet of mine, Robert Gray, captures it in his poem, Salvation Army Hostel.  Gray writes great descriptive poetry of nature, the Australian landscape and suburban life.  He comes from a similar background to Les Murray – grew up in a New South Wales country town and went on to become a professional poet.  Salvation Army Hostel may not be one of his more recognized poems, but I like it because I can relate to it – well, OK, I don’t think I’ve ever drunkenly pissed out the window of my hotel room, but I’ve lain and listened to the clattering, the dripping and the yelling, or things similar……………..

                                            Salvation Army Hostel

Robert Gray (1945 – )

 

I’m woken up – and God knows

what’s the time.  It’s

a woman screeching, over there

the other side of

the light well.

I strained against the window-wire, tonight, and saw

the bottom, with rotting rag,

cardboard – a no-man’s

greenish hole.  And there’s

evidently been rain,

surprisingly – the aftermath still

falling from a

broken gutter somewhere,

onto

that concrete

way down –

a clattering.  No …

she’s yelling at someone

on a floor above this who’s

taking a piss, out of his window –

It keeps on.  He must have

got a flagon in

this place, and have his cock out through

the criss-cross

grille.  A dripping

now, past me – turned over so’s

to listen.  I can almost see

his blind, bloated face up there

gasp.

No one else but that woman

seems awake.  Who suddenly drags her window down –

Both gone.

And I lie in the stiff, thin,

stencilled sheets

again.  Like an unresolved equation;

in this aperture.

 

I like the ‘hook’ Gray gives at the end of the poem, like an unresolved equation, in this aperture…  I keep going over it – what is the unresolved equation? what is the aperture?  Is the aperture simply his room and he’s lying on the bed in the foetal position, shape of a question mark (at the end of an unresolved equation)?  Or is the aperture an insight (opening) he has been given into the behaviour of people, who for whatever reason, are staying in the hostel?  A ‘resolved’ equation would imply the answer has been revealed, logic, solution.  But he can’t figure it out – what he has just witnessed is alien to him and the equation goes around and around in his mind – the guy pissing, plus the woman dragging her window down, plus himself, equals what?

Long before I discovered Gray's, Salvation Army Hostel, I'm in a concrete block of my own with the background muffled whir that comes from a rising elevator shaft, lift slides and privacy clunk of a balanced door allowed to fall heavily closed, and I try to describe and capture the emotion of loneliness and being alone in my poem, Lonely on a City.

 

1989.  One of those times when I’ve been put up at HMAS Kuttabul or booked into a hotel in Sydney to attend some course.  Finished work at 4 or 5pm.  Alone in the room.  What do I do now?

 

Lonely on a City

 

Watch the sun dapple

through venetian blind,

play shadow patterns

upon my arm,

shimmer dust

as there’s always dust

on venetian blinds,

and I run my finger along

one concave brittle slat,

to the plastic webbing

where dirt’s built up,

on the leading edge of my finger.

 

I scrape it

on a terrazo window ledge

with my thumb.

 

buses

busy in the street

with noise, constant

dull city traffic,

heard story floors high.

never pausing,

rise and fall,

like surf dumping,

on a deserted beach.

 

people are getting on

and getting off the buses

but they never look up.

                                                                               J. O. White