ANY MOMENT NOW
In her teens, my mother played tennis.
I have seen the snaps of her,
up on her toes, both arms raised,
left hand gripping white ball,
right with fingers firmly around
the handle of her racket.
Rumour has it that she could
have gone far in the sport.
But that never happened.
There are no photographs of her
in her early twenties, holding up
the first-place trophy,
collecting the winner’s check.
She went from promising
to wedding glossies with no
record of the in-between.
She was already the woman I remember,
bent over the sideboard,
peeling carrots, shelling peas,
while we kids grabbed at the hem of her
skirt,
crying out for our needs, not hers.
She didn’t once express regret
but, if a camera was around,
she instinctively turned away,
as if there was already enough evidence on
file.
Like that picture of her in white, about to
serve.
Any moment now, racket will smack ball.
But it’s been years since any moment now.
ISAAC
I always wondered
would Abraham really have killed
his own son.
The word "sacrifice"
seems
the ultimate euphemism
especially when it was
the unwitting Isaac
who would have made the ultimate
one.
I asked my father once
what would he do
if God requested a similar act of
him.
He just muttered something about
"Old Testament" and left
the room.
I figure God has moved onto
more reasonable demands these
days:
church on Sunday, adhering to
commandments.
Besides, with some fathers I've
met,
dispatching an ungrateful brat
could feel too much like a
blessing.
Still, I can't get that image out
of my mind:
Isaac's head on the rock,
Abraham about to swing the sharp
blade down,
God at the last moment staying his
hand.
Some days, it was a vivid
illustration
of the ongoing quandary of
religion.
Other times, it said something
about how fathers are with sons.
I could be thankful that there's a
New Testament,
a Jesus with the loving face of
God.
or relieved that I had no
children.
BOUNDARIES AT THE FAST FOOD RESTAURANT
A school bus parked
and out stepped two adults
and six autistic children.
The guys behind the counter
obviously recognized them,
joked between themselves
until the group came through the door
and their faces went all solemn.
The other diners looked up for a moment
but then continued munching on their meals.
They didn't wish to be coerced into
sympathy.
One of the children let out some kind of
wail.
A middle-aged couple closed their ears
by lowering their heads even more.
Meals in hand, the group went looking for a
table.
The prayers inside that restaurant were
palpable -
"Please God, not near me."
They made such a scuffling sound finding
seats.
And when the kids spoke,
the words came out loud and misshaped.
Food was unwrapped excitedly.
They'd barely sat when one boy had already
spilled ketchup down his Charlie Brown
T-shirt.
A girl tried to eat a bagel.
Her face was soon lathered in cream cheese.
Another sang a nursery rhyme in between
bites of fries.
Her run of notes approached strangulation
pitch.
The children conversed, sometimes happy,
sometimes angry, in their own private
language.
Napkins floated to the floor.
A bun was dropped. Tomato slices took
flight.
The adults tried to empower their charges
as best they could.
Mostly their job was to make sure
they kept within the boundaries of suitable
behaviour.
Those boundaries sat at every other table.
They contained none but themselves
And they were squeezing tighter.
THE LITTLE MATCH GIRL AND THE DRAGON SLAYER
My mother sold matchsticks on a street
corner
in
the bitterest chill of winter.
My father was a knight, a dragon slayer,
a
rescuer of women in towers.
But when my mother had accumulated enough
pennies,
she
opened a matchstick store,
and
had heating installed.
My father took on one dragon too many,
suffered
serious burns over half his body
and,
to make matters worse,
he
fell when scaling a castle tower,
broke
his right leg in two places.
After years of selling other people’s
product,
my
mother opened her own matchstick factory,
franchised
out a number of new stores
though
she kept the original for nostalgia’s sake.
My father was invalided out of the age of
chivalry,
stayed
in the house mostly,
saw
no one, spoke to nobody,
except
for the nurse my mother’s money paid for,
spent
his days snapping matchsticks in two.
SURVIVAL TACTICS
In an old cemetery
behind the new
pharmacy,
enough Abners and
Maisies remain
to justify a
rubbing.
It’s the last stand
of the dead of the
19th century.
Plaques on the
outside of houses
have it better.
Current residents
polish up
the original
owner’s brass.
With cleaning fluid
and a rag,
history gets
personal.
The general store
is shuttered
but the man who
built it up from nothing
is still there
above the doorway,
holding on with
flaky paint.
The ballfield does
its inspiration prouder.
The first guy to
play ball
is iron-embedded in
the entrance gate.
The library boasts
a few dust-covered volumes
of town records.
There are plenty of
births, deaths and marriages
in undigitized ink.
A name here, a name
there,
survival is
tenuous.
But short of living
forever,
this is as good as it gets.
John Grey is an Australian poet, US resident,
recently published in Stand, Washington Square Review and Rathalla Review.
Latest books, “Covert” “Memory Outside The Head” and “Guest Of Myself” are
available through Amazon. Work upcoming in the
McNeese Review, Santa Fe Literary Review and Open Ceilings.
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