Poetry
by John Grey
Red
Sky At Night
At twilight,
waning sun smears one last coat of red
across the river,
to hitch a ride on that current,
to make open sea before dark.
And there's enough red left over
for the windows,
for the room facing west,
and your parent's eyes
turned toward all that diminishing,
an orange glow to the glasses in their hands.
It's a fake fire
but they take it as warmth anyhow
as they clink their years together,
and the pink house,
and the crimson car.
You're sixteen
and the sky is the color
of the blood in your veins.
Red rages like all that you've not done yet.
Then it soothes like the congratulations
along the way.
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Winter
Assault
Night, eyeless murderer,
is at the window.
Snow, incessant smotherer,
presses its pillow to the ground.
And the cold,
that close associate of death,
is moving through the cracks, the pores,
is out for blood.
There's wind, the knife thrower,
ice, the mad barber.
And Winter, that hoary Fagin of seasons,
with its chilly band of
thieves and cutthroats.
How do we survive, you ask me.
How are we not victims.
We are victims, I reply.
And that's how we survive.
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People
In The Water
Down to my knee-bones, I taste the artificial sweetener of ocean.
With my heart in my mind, salt water can't get rough on the tongue
no matter how much it goes for the blood with its lap lap lap
percussion.
I'm the object of someone's devotion and I don't care that the
gulls squawk otherwise.
I've got held hands, caressed shoulders, a chest that's known
a thousand fingers.
The waves can't rattle me. Nor hot sand. My bare feet sing.
Look, there's another man rolling in the
foam. But he's brother death.
His heart slows to a crawl while mine beats faster.
His wife was buried by some rough-looking middle-aged workmen
from Albania.
She was martyred. And not by the virulent sun.
But I've a love to conjure with. I could
breathe underwater on its oxygen.
Brother death meanwhile thinks all ocean is a shroud. But it's
clumsy with his body,
throws him out of there in no time. He swallows a rock but it's
no heavier
going down than his breath. Meanwhile, the shells dance to tide-pool
waltz.
A wedding dance, a funeral march, depends on who you ask.
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