A Garage
By Robert Gray
In one of the side streets
of a small hot town
off the highway
we saw the garage,
its white boards peeling
among fronds and palings.
The sun had cut a blaze
off the day. The petrol pump
was from the sixties—
of human scale
and humanoid appearance
it had a presence,
seemed the attendant
of our adventures on the road,
the doorman of our chances.
We pulled in, for nostalgia,
onto concrete. From where
did that thing’s almost
avoidable sense of
sacrifice, or remorse,
arise? One felt it
as though a line
in the hand, drifted far off
somewhere, unweighted.
Who was this, in faded
cream outfit, with badge,
expressionless small head,
and rubbery hose laid
on the breast, dutifully
or out of diffidence?
Were arms being shown, and in
servitude or consent?
The stoic discomforts,
suggests a rebellion.
Elusively, such feelings
are wafted through us, but how
interpret them? A person
relied upon and yet
dangerous. Was this
another, or oneself?
Were we familiars of something
never to be known? I looked
down a blank street, of pines,
lightpoles, old houses
in shady yards, where it made
a genuflection, in approaching
the gentian-coloured hills;
then at the long workshop, a dim
barn, or empty corridor,
in the galaxy, with somewhere
far along it one star
crackling and bursting.
Then at the greasy
dog, in its narrow shade;
and at the old bowser—
a sense still proclaimed but
ungrasped, though everything
lay open. Someone shouted
acknowledgement, so we sat
quietly. The light
had become an interest
of this place, pronounced
in contrast with the peculiar
matt blackness of sump-oil
that was soaked widely
on earth, gravel, and cement—
an obscurity as opaque
as the heart’s, which was keeping on
with its tunnelling there.