Ron Pretty: Three Poems

Choking

 

Fruit of childhood and poverty:

green and prickly, tasting of

grass. Across the back fence

the green sickness snaked, fecund

and Catholic, providing bulk

for feckless kids, plentiful greens

and, graced with a brush of apple,

a faux dessert. Mothers, after a day

of coppers boiling and heavy wringers,

cooling by the back fence, gathering

green and tasteless fodder while

hubby washed down his wages

at the local. The vine easy

to grow as children: in whatever

hardy soil you planted the seed,

the first shoots soon appeared,

growing and clinging, attracting bees

and the rapid proliferation

of the poor man’s pear, its prickly

insolence. Money can’t buy them now,

no fruiterer worth his custom

would dare to stock them; they’re

well left in the nightmare memories

of depression children.

Ron Pretty

 

 

 

A Slate Sky

 

That time of day when the light fades

to its citrus tones and the air is still,

when only sounds of children and distant trains

disturb the silence, that is the time I sit

looking over the cemetery and the lake

waiting for my slow mind to catch the scent

of distant fires and nearer passions, the dog

next door corrosive on its chain, the fading

pulse of cicadas. Soon I’ll light a candle

to the dead, those fleeting images that float

diaphanous between the dream and waking.

 

She was the most obstinate of women: once

decided on her narrow path, no rage or reason

could tempt her. White-haired and aching

from a back beyond repair, her days were spent

on lists of good works she performed from

her iconoclastic texts. Neither pain nor penury

deterred her; but as she stood once at the sink

staring out at a slate sky, I heard a whimper,

a shiver of weakness, a doubt too strong

for once beyond the reach of any word,

a fear too deep for any consolation.

 

Pain she lived with for fifty years, her partner

in everything she did, as constant as prayer;

but when she looked at the imminent tear

in the fabric of being, like me she was afraid.

The light has faded from her eyes, the dead

branches of gums are stark against the sky,

but as I wait here, the fading noises of the night

and the pale future slowly opening before me,

I know I loved her, and know her fear.

Ron Pretty

 

 

 

River Flat

 

The crows are out tonight in the gums

away to the west. On the wings

of their calls I am carried into the hills,

the tablelands where lambs are winter-born

and Angus with his shot gun, double-barreled,

tramps the river flats trying, sometimes

succeeding, to protect the eyes where

the black wings stoop. Odd that tonight

on my safe suburban porch, this is the image

that falls across my iris

perhaps because my looking

was disturbed by an unexpected message

from a woman once I loved. I believed the eyes

had been plucked from that stillborn affair,

distant lands had called her and I was left blind,

grazing the screen of memory and despair. Yet now,

crows calling in the darkening gums, I hear

her whisper below the text

there was a lamb got up

one eyed, and tottered after its mother. I’d like

to think the ewe or the shepherd with his shot

welcomed it back into the fold even as

the crows were calling from the gums.

 

Ron Pretty