Five Poems by John Grey

 

IN THE FAR NORTH OF NEW HAMPSHIRE

 

You’ve been more like oxen than man,

yoked to the same fifty acres

for fifty-five years,

twelve hours a day,

seven days a week,

ten years of school

but a lifetime of schooling,

making the stony soil pay.

 

In the saddle of the tractor

or down in your dirt,

through drought and blizzard,

floods and cancers

on the back of your hand,

you've carved out a living

on land more fit

for growing rocks than crops.

 

Your wife's dead.

Your kids work in the city.

You're the last generation

to plant and harvest,

bend your back to the point of breaking,

day after day,

season after season.

 

When you go,

most likely 

this land goes back to nature.

Just not human nature.

 

 

THE MIST IS

 

A thoughtless haze,

interested only in itself,

with a sun perched on

its upper edge.

 

It rises like a watery scarp,

from pond, sea

and woodland shadow.

 

Not content to sink cottages

in cloud-beds,

it reduces traffic

to pale, yellow eyes

peering out of and into

the vapours.

 

And men

to their own grimness,

exiles from the light,

struggling to find their way forward.

 

The mist has no love

for details.

And no foe greater

than the hand in front of my face.

 

 

HER PHYSICAL WORLD

 

She got up in the morning,

looked in the mirror,

swore to herself

that wrinkle

beneath her left eye

wasn’t there the night before –

misquoting Donne,

any new blemish diminishes me.

 

She scowled, felt aggrieved,

angry at her body

for adhering too closely

to the rules of time,

as if her face wasn’t aware

of all those wonder creams

she’d rubbed into its pores.

 

She wanted to cry

but that would only accentuate

that traitorous line

in her flesh.

Pale, it was bad enough

but red

and it would shine

like her drunkard husband’s nose.

 

She made a vow

never to look into mirrors again,

to believe only what

her insides were telling her.

Unfortunately, they were

in town crier mode,

declaring her another day older

and with a brand new wrinkle to match.

 

But then the room lit up a little

as sun broke through a cloud.

It hadn’t been a wrinkle at all,

merely a trick of shadow.

She felt no better.

What was a shadow

if not a foreshadowing.

 

 

THE CHILD I USED TO BE

 

As a child, each morning began

as if the world was beginning,

new sights, new sounds,

new colours, new people.

 

The sky was different, the clouds

assembled into shapes I’d never

seen before, and the dog, though

obsessed with his routines, was

always willing to try a different trick,

at my suggestion or his own volition.

 

School may have been another name

for repetition but if I listened closely

the lessons moved in a direction slightly

outside the range of what I knew already,

and there were maps and words

that triggered daydreams,

and always recess,

other kids doing other things,

all a novelty that I needed to pick up on.

 

My play was when I separated

in two, teacher and student, one telling

the other that the fence was easily

surmountable while the other did

the climbing, or downplaying the

danger of the lizard that his underling

bent down to pick up by the tail.

 

Even night, despite its removal

of all outside details, merely confirmed

the fact that a boy, on his own,

in his bedroom, was in close company

with sensations, thoughts, imaginings,

all strange, unique, advancing my cause

in tiny increments or giant leaps,

so that, no matter the moment,

I was never the same as in the one preceding.

Those were dynamic time.

Blink and you’d have missed

the child I used to be.

 

 

THE WAIT

 

My impatience

is as dull

as the face of a servant.

 

No wonder.

I am in service to it.

Especially when you are expected.

 

It no longer champs

with indignation,

merely repeats in a monotone,

“Why is she never on time?”

 

My restlessness wants me

happy and unconcerned,

willing to wait

for as long as it takes.

 

It also says,

you’re not worth

getting annoyed over.

 

So, my impatience

has moved to a neighbourhood bar,

sits patiently 

while the bartender serves the party

who arrived before me.

 

If, when you

finally show,

you want to know

where to find me,

I’ll be with my impatience

at Barry’s on Main Street.

 

My indifference

will have joined me by then.

 

 

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.