Poetry: Selections from John Grey

Marriage Year Ten

It has not gone the way originally intended.

Less a pleasure palace, more a hard and granular

fun-obstructing series of tasks.

They've taken options of which they were

previously not even conscious,

just to get things accomplished in a particular way.

So it ends up as something completely different

from the original plans and expectations.

Not quite a travesty. More an effigy.

Not that they plan to torch it any time soon.

On Any Given Day in the Forest

A bright orange chantarelle

pokes through dead leaves.

 

A spider stretches a web

taut between trees.

 

Chickadees natter on low boughs

as a crow caws high in the canopy.

 

The horse chestnut is in bloom

and a yellow birch is teething.

 

All of these lives are needed.

All other lives concur.

Professor

He perused the book

with the aid of reading glasses

and a spit-wet thumb.

Something made him smile.

Something made him frown a little.

 

Considering he was looking at an illustration

of a subdivided sphere

transformed into a polyhedron,

such a reaction

required a total subjugation

of any human emotion

to the humor or otherwise

in unusual properties of space.

 

Then he stared, long and hard,

at the perplexities,

the twists and turns

of a Mobius strip.

As far as I know,

there is no real world equivalent.

The Woman in the Book

I came home

to find you in the parlor,

reading a book by the table-lamp,

your face given up to the story,

and not that pain so large and sullen,

it terrifies me.

 

You looked up

and a little of you returned,

although you were still half

in the novel’s characters,

the machinations of the plot.

 

Another time,

you might have fallen into my arms.

Or poured wine into two glasses.

But what were real people

halfway through their journey,

compared to those fresh, just starting out,

and with the advantage

of being in print.

 

The book was your respite.

Within its pages, you could wait out time.

So much going on

and yet nothing was expected of you.

If the author was God,

you had the advantage

of being a disciple.

 

I thought I was coming home to cancer

but, instead, you greeted me

from the safety of two lives

making a go of it,

with many chapters to come.

 

You felt guilty enough to close up

your book, respond to my presence

with all that was left of you.

I apologize.

No one should ever have

to give up a story line

for my sake.

John Grey is an Australian poet, US resident, recently published in Sheepshead Review, Stand, Poetry Salzburg Review and Hollins Critic. Latest books Leaves On Pages, Memory Outside The Head, and Guest Of Myself are available through Amazon. With work upcoming in Ellipsis, Blueline and International Poetry Review.