John Grey
John the AuthorSo John it is. Not the King. Not the Baptist.
A discussion of dust...a pillar of ice. Moonlight scavenging my eyes at night like gulls at a picnic plate. Always one step in the circle, always beginning again, in this house, a place I know more from memory than feel, surrounded by the yawns of empty coffee cups, closets stuffed with past lives. back cramped by chair in which I carry on changing short sighs into long sentences, on this latest round trip called writing Thursday is it? I abandoned the calendar years ago. I am an inspector of study windows. of illustrated books and dictionary meanings. I surrendered my claim to life the morning I noticed the dew like diamonds twinkling on the grass. "You can't eat grass," my mother said. But fawns do. And here you are, come visiting as if I'm nothing but a street sign, as my life is not lived between a bookcase and a trash can filled with crumbled up sheets of paper. I do nothing whatsoever outside of here. And yet you speak as if I'm standing in twenty acres of land. No, this is my tomb. You speak to the dead in the clothes he slipped on this morning. But you arrive with love, the universal predator. And what do I have to fight you off with. A keyboard? The Complete Works Of Shakespeare? For all this, I conform. Your head rests on my shoulder like a cloud. I kiss your check, that treasure of last century. We make love, rows of faces, sweaty, unkempt, fading into night. "You can't fade into night," my mother said. But fawns do. ReunionWe meet up again
in an east side cafe after ten years - I won't say ten long years – our words of greeting match shock against curiosity, send old angers into battle with the heavenly tenor of current situations - no wonder there's mumbling and stuttering and some particular riffs on the unspoken: would you like some coffee with my unanswered questions? how about a Danish, to go with real or imagined hurts? eventually, we laugh together, catch up on a decade, end up feeling better for the encounter – accidental reunions are all the rage so I've heard - funny but I used to think that rage was all the rage. Looks Looks LooksI have respect for these bones
I wrap my odious flesh around; they're like an audience who won't leave no matter how bad the jokes; they're serious, inflexible, solid, stolid; have to love that in a skeleton. My priest always warns against the "sins of the flesh" but he never shames the tibia from his pulpit. I'm willing to believe that God made the bones and the rest was left to the devil and fashion magazines, and of course the odd dermatologist and plastic surgeon, at our instructions of course; so I have to admire the quiet assuredness that seats me in a chair, lays me flat out in a bed, and sure the muscles do the hard work, but fingers without bone would drop the planet on my foot, likewise bone-less legs would have me toppling, and thigh-less thighs would see my head dangling like a limp flag from my knee, except I wouldn't have a knee; but then another woman comes along to test my frail sincerity: she runs her fingers down my cheeks, says she likes my face. My skull deserves the compliment but it's my tan that quells the blush. My LotI'm too comfortable, too accepting
of my current situation, to pay any attention to what got me here. And, as for the others who have it worse, my self-centeredness can't get out of its own way. Starving children without a slice of bread between them, fleshless skin, morbidly morphed faces - I can't see a thing from my window. And the yard is too serene, too closely clipped, to be a war-zone. If there are bodies out there then they sure do resist my eyesight. No floods, no droughts, no drive-by shootings, no anger, no guilt, nothing. I’m too immersed in kindness to even get a line on cruelty. I do read the newspaper, watch television, but still don't recognize anyone I care to know. At sunset, my wife sits beside me on the patio and we sip wine together as we watch the sun go down. For all the fire, the primeval forces at work, that sunset seems to me quite uneventful. Likewise the coming of night. It's never the coming of darkness. In the CrowdAn overweight bruiser
and a woman with a stomach as hard, as rigid, as the base of an equestrian statue - that's just some of my competition for the limited amounts of air in here. All of us are where we are, at the behest of someone else's elbows, their thighs. I am no longer singular, just part of slowly moving whole, lungs fighting for breath, feet carried along by the legs of strangers. I don't move as much as I am moved. And there's no way for me to set out somewhere on my own. Even the slightest opening doesn't quite squeeze my way. The space is so populated that everyone is oblivious to direction. Are we here? Are we there? Will we ever get there? Will we ever get here? Where are we going anyhow? Maybe it's tickets for the show we're after. Or we're just struggling to get into the ball park. Or we're nudging toward a famous author signing books. In the midst of a crowd, purpose gives way to sweat, to pushing against my own grain. I'm just lucky if I'm not trampled or I don't trample somebody. I see a space but it's quickly filled. I'm constantly clashing with the nearest flesh hereabouts. Arms reach over me like waves of water. I could drown at any moment. Somewhere, in the distance, I do believe that someone actually makes it through the turnstiles or into the club or to the ticket window. So now I know why I'm here. I'm lining up to be them. |
My Hard TimesI have so much to tell you
but let me make myself comfortable first. The fire's been lit and I've never seen a brighter, felt a warmer, flame. And I'm seated on this couch. Let me just say that if these cushions were any softer they'd be breath. My legs can touch the floor if I want them to. Or they can float in mid-air. I'm in robe and slippers and, had I been born a hundred years earlier, I'd no doubt be reaching for my pipe. I pat that soft fur of the spaniel at my feet. Does that count? And here comes my wife with two steaming cups of hot cider that my nose has already succumbed to while my taste buds are licking their lips. She cuddles up beside me and the beat of her heart takes center stage while, in the wings, her head drops gently onto my shoulder. Now...where was I...my hard times... let me begin... Do I Stay With Her or What?A few thoughts hung around
like bad kids that won't go to bed - what about? who am I to? why not? so she had a heart as big as a ballplayers ego - but her dress fitted her like the skin of a mermaid and her thighs were a busy reception desk with a flask of whiskey in the bottom drawer - women - I live in total ignorance of them - it's only sometimes bliss - and the air was a spider web that clung to the edge of my throat where I made animal cries for help - my body was tense, arms wearying as if I was holding up one end of a bridge - darkness from an abandoned church, prowled slowly through the rooms - the cat showed up with a malignant face and tight green eyes - I hauled my real opinion of her from my head down to my mouth and I vomited - but I still wasn't really convinced - my stinking breath was a curtain of small clear beards it didn't dissolve, didn't float off, didn't move - still hasn’t moved An Aging WriterPossibly there is something on the bed,
and possibly this something is an old man, And what then? Archaeologists suggest digging in the bedroom's formal arrangement of elements where bony cheeks glimmer in morning sun, nostrils flutter like flags, waking can be viewed as complete. He is no longer judged by the quality of his flesh, merely his inscrutable artistic intent. Age is eighty or so but intention knows no limit. Nor does imagination. Something is incomplete. The insoluble needs solving. It is not about belief. That's his priest's domain. And there are no leisure options - just interruptions. There's pills of course - to tune down the heart, to regulate the stomach. And new studies suggest... but he never reads new studies. Doctors, he reckons, only exist to bother the intelligent. Not even accounting for the size of the bills they send him. He grabs hold of the bedpost and stands. For a moment, he's bones, skin tissue, hair. but then his mind kicks in and he rubs droopy eyes with droopier knuckles. Another day on his own terms. It will take the form he's planned for it. A history of Thomas Jefferson. A primer on Lepidoptera. Maybe something in the middle. American history versus moths. Writing has always been an impulsive media. First, coffee to evict the ghosts. Then, as per protocol, that old creaky chair, the typewriter. It's how he's been doing it for sixty live years. Arthritic fingers take to the keys like a fish to a puddle of rain. The Dying DeltaAfter a Southern dream
of a young woman in a white dress sprinting across the lawn of an antebellum mansion, chased by some bearded guy with a gun waving the flag of the great disorder, I get down to sadness in a cypress swamp. Landscapes suffer and who knows a delta's needs, a blue sky in brown water, a marshland getting by on luck and the dutiful splendor of the merest forms of life. In sweaty khakis and heavy boots, I trudge through the swill clouds of a lowly heaven where egrets are angels and the alligator is god. Time to pray, I'm thinking. Time to pray. There are laws of nature that are not themselves anymore. Yet their small print holds me up though knowing it's the likes of me who made them what they are - shrinking waters, ghost trees, decaying mangroves and a vanishing frog. Your killers once ordered slaves into the fields to the great whip of heat and called them songbirds. That's how they abandon their true history. Now you are nothing but the lie behind the legend - an estuary of a once mighty river, a waif abandoned to the homes and highways, and we all know what charity that brings. AccumulationFirst light flakes of snow
fall onto the sidewalk and poof! they disappear. No use staring down at the cement when more of the things are alighting on my hair, vanishing among the flecks of gray without a hint of dampness. Across the street, a couple are speaking to each other but their words do not carry. And a car is ambling down the road, so slow, so quiet; its engine doesn't register as sound. More flakes pat against the sides of buildings. Without my witness, they would never exist. A block down, a pretty girl, long, lanky and blonde, even with fake fur to thicken her, awaits entry into the hardware store where she surely works. The snow-flakes that disappear in her tresses, down her neck, across her cheeks are as invisible after contact as the key she does not have to let herself in. Eventually, of course, enough next to nothings will create something out of this. The word "accumulate" comes to mind. But am I not accumulating: flakes and couple and car and building and loveliness. A weatherman might forecast me as just a dusting. But I'm out on the sidewalk on an early December morning, taking it all in, and ready to be deep. |
Working Man
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I depart my pointless job,
cross the parking lot, one of the minority who are not yapping into cell phones as the sun too clocks out. The briefcase is the millstone of choice, these days. In my grandfather's day, it was the lunch-pail. The old man used to tell me how grateful he was to earn an honest regular paycheck. The office squeezes what it can from me then the traffic applies its own version of that ever-turning vise. By the time I turn into my street, you could mistake me for a clam shell on the beach. My neighbor waves as I extract bills from the mailbox. I don't have a white flag in me so I wave back with my hand. It's not so cold but I start up the fireplace anyhow. I need to do something that's just for me. I even prepare an actual meal. The company thought they had all of me. But I was saving myself for this. Warm skin and satisfied taste buds - a salary commensurate with the effort required. Any overtime is sleep. |