Rob Dyer Poems

After Ronsard

When you are old beside the quiet evening fire,
knitting and winding beneath the cold electric light,
...

After Spenser

I wrote your name upon Guerela Beach,
furtively on the lip of the last wave,
...

From Sydney

All along Manly Beach simulacra of swimsuits,
lithe limbs polished to an antique bronze beneath the parasols,
...

All the birds of evening have taken sudden wing -
out, out, away, over the Crosley right-field fence -
midst the cheering benches he slugs the bases home.
...

We have all at least once, somewhere else,
died: bloodless, uncertain, wanderers,
awaiting the judgment of motives -
no, not of deeds - they were judged, also elsewhere -
...

Who visits the old tin boatshed, now that the fish are gone?
the runway broken, in the storm of '69, they say,
the pulley rusted, one boat done for, the other -
I boot it, feels sound enough, just needs paint and use.
...

To Wittgenstein, Oxford,1957

Words stir and patterns coil at your hard saying;
thought, piercing the shapeless clay of memory's dug sites,
...

Oh smile not at me like an angel,
raise not your arms to gather in my lips,
say we lost each other while there was still time.
It is not true that on the judgment day
...

Our eyes meet, for one brief infinity
we gaze into the deep brown entrance
of our souls,
and are amazed.
...

Gazing at the tall-necked heron sweeping the bay,
the steep, torn bay at Pataua, where all my hearts reside,
I see adventurers set out beyond my narrow land
to worlds I cannot dream of and deeds the papers splash,
...