Poems
by John
Grey
The Viper Within
Watch for
the ominous timber rattlesnake,
slithering predator
rattling coils,
ready to strike,
plunge poisonous fangs
into unsuspecting legs.
Beware the black head,
gray body,
dark blotches edged in white.
He could be somewhere
in these grasses.
Sniff the toadflax if you must,
pick the yellow trefoil,
even point your glasses
at the ruby-crowned kinglet
resting on a pine branch.
But listen for the rattle.
Make sure your feet
know where they’re headed.
There’s beauty here in abundance.
Green dominates
but every color
finds a fruit, a petal, a leaf, a stem,
to summer in.
And some take to skin,
to jaw, to forked tongue,
to the food chain’s
venomous interloper.
So take heed.
Die for beauty elsewhere.
Four Lights
On his sun-set porch,
with bug-zapper above,
he lights up a cigarette,
apportioning the glow
between the creamy red horizon,
the seductive shine
of the pest killer,
and the tiny flame
slowly sucked toward his lips.
His wife,
from the kitchen,
sees the gleam in that order:
the day acceding to night’s routine,
but with comeback plans for tomorrow,
the insect sacrifice,
the swarm secure in the knowledge
that for every lost comrade,
there’s three more to replace it,
and that tiny spark of a man
who smokes three packs a day,
despite his lungs’ protestations.
There’s no comeback in him.
There’s no replacement husband
in the wings.
He coughs three times
then turns toward the house.
The fourth gleam is a face
looking out,
a drooping mouth,
a shaking head.
The fourth light –
the brightest
or, at least,
the one that most resists fading.
It’s Me, Kinda
When I write about myself, I also write about three other people.
Some are named. Others are alluded to.
And those three people don’t just hang around like artist’s models
while I spend hour after hour sketching them.
No, they go on with their lives and these involve their friends,
their enemies, their families, their acquaintances.
This, of course, expands the subject of me exponentially.
One word of mine could corral a lawyer’s clerk,
a retiree watering his garden, a guy in prison
and some slinky lounge lizard having sex with a woman half his age.
These are not simply figments of my imagination.
They have lives and that brings in all the ones they know.
Yes, that mean’s you bus driver. And your wife with the laundry business.
And her brother in the Air Force. And the guy with the bunk next to his.
And that guy’s cheating girlfriend. And the girlfriend’s favorite
rock star, the one she met back stage, who autographed the top of her left breast.
The rock star is also part of this supposed autobiography.
How many groupies has he had? Welcome twenty-five more young girls
too easily impressed by long-haired celebrity.
And what about their circles? And their circle’s circles?
Here come the cousins from Germany. And the Welsh miner.
The Argentinian soccer player. The crew of the Caribbean cruise ship.
Everything I get down on paper is so crowded there’s barely room for me.
When I write about myself, that’s just the way I like it.
What Gives?
How did love get into the heart.
how did storge, philia, eros and agape
blow in off the wind,
tunnel their way into my mindfulness.
so deep?
What's with desires with no purpose,
endless needs?
It feels as if I'm now the domain
of a billion foreign microorganisms,
infectious agents replicating inside my cells
invading my sanity,
infecting even the refuge of self-interest.
Who asked my heart
to be sensitive, passionate, romantic, caring,
not solid in its solitude
but with another setting up camp
in its systemic capillaries,
pulmonary trunk?
What does joy have to do with ego,
inspiration with calculation?
My once pristine body
is like a weeping wound,
an outrage from without and within,
a sickness that cannot be cured
despite my greed and narcissism
the regard of the mirror.
Oh what has love done to me?
Or, more to the point,
who's this "me" anyhow?
My insides only ever answer to "us."
Widower
A tear is a cry on the way back out,
existence in terms of the skinny remorseful stray cat,
a wildflower losing petals to the wind of all dire prophets.
an ethereal disembodiment taking place,
on a wet day spewing my till of all that grey.
Every moment is dead in your breast.
Every moment triggers another crawling thing.
Autumn's transformed into a dress, in a closet coffin,
came to the door, on the ocean's surface, in my prisons,
threading my dream of butterflies
like asters and other highly fragile blooms,
or far off in a field trampled by feeding deer,
sagging in their heads where they think they're safe.
My eyes are nowhere, grown still, turned wooden.
Every afternoon threatened. Here a woman was lost.
I am here looking for her. She is here in so much spoiled beauty.
Where my eyes roll is the purest form of dream,
of emptiness supplemented by pictures.
of a cheek grown unlovely, of tiny white still-born breaths.
Is this a husband's dead memories returned?
Prophets, a distant kin of the deceased,
sees sky and sun and moon and water and air as separate worlds,
whisper, someday when you're dead,
your mournful soul will also talk and teach that
the same wind blows a widower to a window,
pounds fists on a brick wall that separates impossible aspirations
from the molecule dance of what can, what will be done.
My shoes are on the bottom of this. They are born again
in the photographer's flash. They run through the streets,
up my sleeve, through the hell of the mind. The light illuminates
no meaning, passes through, while fate belabors its point
releases a beetle and a songbird on which I may can step,
crush the indomitable, decimate the living, the loving.
Who will turn my collar down? Who's going to shift my topcoat
about my shoulders? I will continue to stand, without constraint,
repeating the woman's name.
The world of probability where I find myself trapped.
