Poems
by John
Grey
The Man Who Can No Longer Hear
The sound was here
when I was ten.
But today,
it's nowhere to be heard.
But I've held down a job in that vacuum.
I've made friends with my hands.
The sub-titles on my television screen
describe noise to me.
And I have a lover.
I touch her gently.
Her mouth opens
but nothing comes out
I have to rely on her face,
her body, for any and all responses.
Thankfully,
Katy is everything
sound used to be
Local Color
There they are,
strung along
the barb-wire of a fence,
Moose and Clay
Seth and Larry…
two chewing,
one whistling,
one just staring at
the mountains in the distance –
been there all summer
most like it
like the grapes that
don’t get picked
because they’re rotten –
only these grapes
are mostly lazy -
wind’s picking up,
October’s on its way -
“anybody got a cigarette?”
asks Clay –
he’s not holding out
for an answer.
Watering
I am a solitary figure in my backyard,
holding onto a hose whose nozzle
sprays a bed of heat-wilted flowers.
I must seem like God to those thirsty
petals and stems but my thoughts are
in a different place than heaven,
as I contemplate the bills coming due
and an imminent in-law visit.
Like when it rains, the garden’s
sudden sustenance is incidental not designed.
I am balancing numbers in my head.
I am looking for inoffensive words to draw on
when offensives ones are spoken in my direction.
And, all the while, water flows, plants drink
heartily and flowers can get on with life.
The bills, once paid, will leave me chipmunk poor.
The version of myself, after the in-laws depart, will
be of the tired and drained and totally defeated variety.
Maybe I should concentrate solely on this watering.
I’ll be a better man if that is all I do.
The Noises And I
A noise awakens me on Wednesday mornings -
the school buses have met their stentorian match
in the behemoths of trash pickup.
Not even screaming kids can come anywhere near
the decibels of the grinder truck, as every fallen branch,
fast food wrapper, chicken bone, fish head, cereal box,
is milled on the spot into suburban American chop suey;
and then there’s the recycler, where every mayonnaise jar
must come in clanging contact with all beer bottles
and soup cans or the guys on board are not doing their jobs;
the kids don’t stand a chance, nor do their big yellow wagons,
not even the one with gears that gnash like grandpa’s teeth.
I can sleep through the school routine – sometimes, in my
dreams, I’m back there myself – the real thing just adds ambience.
Thursdays are a different matter – this time, it’s the street
sweeper that jolts me out of bliss – sure, its brushes are soft, barely
more corporeal than wind – but it’s the way its sound slips under
the boisterous boys and girls, maintains a level, just above silence.
My subconscious listens despite itself, expects nothing in that
particular wave-band and, once occupied, it may as well be a garbage
truck. You see, I’m ruled by expectation. Every so often, it abdicates.
Checkerspot
It knows its meadows, this checkerspot,
fluttering from flower to flower
of white turtlehead, its body a black
exclamation point, breeze spreading
wings wide, gracefully pleating that
chessboard-pattern, the trailing orange rim.
It doesn't bother with the city park,
the shadow of the abandoned mill,
that brown curdle of a stream.
It wants nothing to do with the
rusty junked car or the syringes
or the condoms or the graffiti scrawl
across the belly of the busted leap frog.
At the sun's coaxing, this butterfly bursts
from larval web fully formed and feeding,
its universe scaled by a dozen of my strides
but with nurture and support enough
for many a cycle from egg to imago.
I had to drive by that park to get here.
Some kids were hanging out.
Hollow-eyed. Listless. Shabby clothes.
Foul mouths. Bored down to their second-hand
sneakers Not a butterfly between them.
