Four Poems by John Grey

 

MARRIED NAME

 

So you’re now named after him.

It’s chiselled into your identity.

You’re no different

from every other married woman you know.

Occasionally, you ask each other

“who were you before…?”

but more for conversation,

not in aid of regaining something lost.

 

Actually, you don’t mind your new name.

It was like a buzzing insect at first,

flying in and out of your attempted grasp.

You finally snared it on your tongue,

repeated it over and over in silence.

Pure nonsense of course.

Hilarious when you thought about it.

But assimilated for all that.

 

And what of your old name.

It’s still there, in your family home,

your old bedroom,

but like a broken mirror

held up to your parents’ face.

They’ve lost a daughter,

gained a distorted image.

 

 

WHEN THE OTHER IS DREAMING

 

She rolls from the edge of the bed

to my body and back again.

The springs respond with the rough ping

of a rusted stringed instrument.

Not for the first time in our life together,

I am someone who’s in the way of her restlessness,

not a comfort for just being here.

Her dreams have set her off.

So she’s not really in a bed,

on a mattress, under sheets.

She could be tumbling down a waterfall.

Or dodging falling rocks.

Or being attacked by an intruder

and fighting back the only way she can.

If I was in her head with her,

I’d know better how to respond.

But I’m merely in the physical world.

I’m present but not accounted for.

 

 

DAN, THE NATURALIST                                                                           

 

Dan is that person

I imagine myself to be.

But I stick to trails.

 

He merely sees those cutout paths

in thick forest

as setting off points.

 

He can tell cinquefoil from wild strawberry

when they’re both nothing to me

but white flowers with yellow buds.

 

And the spring beauty’s

pink and white-striped petals

blush his cheeks the same colors.

 

He can rub his hand up and down

the bark of an oak,

sense how long it’s lived

 

and how many years are left to it.

He even has a soft spot

for leathery rosettes of dog lichen

 

and to see him trundling through

a bog of peat moss

is to witness a kind of love affair

 

between whorled branches

and his probing, knowing fingers.

He bends down in grass

 

to examine bobcat scat

and flutters through fern fields like wind.

And he does all the bird calls.

 

Why else would a deep-blue

indigo bunting appear

to fight off this apparent rival.

 

He can sit and watch, for hours,

turtles sunning on a log in a pond

or pick up a snake by its tail

 

and seem to elongate in joy

in parallel to the reptile.

Dan doesn’t put anything down on paper.

 

He’s too busy tracking

frog life cycles

to bother with that.

 

To way of thinking,

a poem should never

stand in the way of poetry.

 

THE BEACH IN WINTER

In November
migrant seabirds arrive,
rest on slippery rock ledges
to the sometimes loud,
sometimes wary, disapproval
of grey and white all-year residents.

In a couple of weeks,
they're gone.
Temperature plunges.
Laughing gulls are not laughing.

Docks are covered in snow.
No pelicans, no plovers.
The beach is as lonely
as ten lovers leaving me.

 

John Grey is an Australian poet, US resident, recently published in Orbis, Dalhousie Review and Connecticut River Review. Latest book, “Leaves On Pages” is available through Amazon.