the home paddocks

You're back on the boards squeezing streams of water from your hair and back. And you think; moving down into the first line of a Robert Gray poem, that's like making a dive. Here's the start of one of them.


The Fishermen

There comes trudging back across the home paddocks of the bay,
pushing its way
waist-deep in the trembling seed-heads of the light,
a trawler, with nets aloft
and motor that thumps like an irrigation pump
on the monolithic cloud. That cloud is straining out the sunrise
of a Bible tract,
which shows a few lumps of islands and the one boat
in the blazing sand-box of the sea,
while close-up the edges of such a volatile grit
are being swept ashore.

It is all noticed by someone in pajama stripes
and venetian slats of light,
at one of the wide bungalows
above the wind-moulded scrub, by two early walkers going down a track
onto the dunes,
from where they will watch the baggy sea that is practicing its
ju-jitsu on the kelp.

Only the harsh approval of the gulls
that the fishermen are back, the small boat
swimming heavily with nose up,
after a night far out on the phosphorescent plain, in a seething culture
of hatching snake eggs, or from deep
in an icy slush
of moonlight, the sea corrosive-smelling
and raw like rust. Back from the cobra-flaring,
gliding and striking sea, goaded it would seem by their presence there,
who tear
up by the roots the nets and lobster traps;
from a sea sweaty with stars, or one black and flowing with crepe;
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 away
in such a sea, without a jacket, which they don't wear in their work,
to swim down and make an end of it,
since they will never get back.
They live inside a dream
out there; everything they know about is in shadow,
who sometimes see a liner,
further off, go drifting past them like a town
on the moon,
and who see the ocean vomit a black whale
as if that were its tongue.

(beginning of "The Fishermen", in Coast Road: Selected Poems (2014))


Robert Gray, born in 1945, grew up on the north coast of NSW. 

It's difficult to detach this poem in my mind from Tim Winton's Dirt Road, though Winton's fishermen are in WA. I'm sure Australian readers would see glaring differences between the two writers, but when you're reading far away and ignorantly the loudest thing you hear (since you can make out so little) is a shared character of sound.