John Grey
A MAN LEARNS TO FLOAT ABOVE THE CITY
Sunrays hover in clear blue noon,
the antipodes of midnight, reversing
all previous blindness in searing fire,
in blinding glare from chrome-plated cars
to skyscrapers’ million glass eyes.
I’m steamed from the cars I pass,
buckled by the shadows I cross.
The summer is as physical, as unimaginable,
as young lady killers, foxy babes,
who set the scene I am not part of,
tanned, regal, half-naked,
and hair lacquered by light.
Sweaty insignificant adulthood
is not a care of youth.
Their brains are pure junk.
They don’t suffer that unwelcome intermittent voice
that lectures and cajoles each intersection –
try forging your own life out of all this.
This smoke; this heat; greased, gravy-hued air,
crisscrossing jackhammers and blaring horns,
maniacs wielding cabs,
the blue and white Rhino belligerence of buses,
and the factories, the bustling factories,
and towering over them,
some guy, helmeted, goggled,
shearing with an acetylene torch,
bent over sheet metal that sparkles gold
with each prod of his flame.
I step back to the sidewalk
to avoid a rush of trucks, SUVs,
that are challenged by a light about to go red –
monsters, bullies, oil tankers,
Goliaths hauling container after container
on route to the docks - one more
box of goodies to pile atop the others,
awaiting a vessel to take them somewhere, anywhere.
The port city exudes invisibly
across the planet, an influence transcendent.
So why does it keep me here?
It’s lunch time. Food is as fast as hands can make it,
a melting pot of menus: the Italian guy
with sausage and pepper sandwiches,
Puerto Rican girl writing out the daily specials in Spanish,
a black woman grilling meat,
a laser-thin blonde nurse on a park bench
spooning yogurt through thin lips,
the latest Vogue flapping on her lap –
swirling around her,
the inevitable crowd scene, a molten tapestry.
But does it really contain anybody?
Everything is so random.
Am I in here anywhere?
It’s a struggle not to become caught up in the numbers,
to be nothing more than backdrop to my own life –
as a price to pay for living in the city.
I’ve just an inkling of how
details accumulate into a kind of dulled vision,
full of all there ever can be - this
cloudless noon, in the fused hands
of the sun, beginning meets end…
no doubt, our private star dreams all stars
from the distant nova that have already been there, done that,
to the tiny spark billions of miles away,
far from making such dazzling connections
between life and death.
And me – I’m as clueless as yesterday;s weather forecast.
But then a crow descends and drops on a dead mouse
that I can barely discern in the grass.
The bird assumes my longing to be lifted up
as it soars to an oak’s highest branches,
cradles the light in black wings,
shatters it into shards of magnetospheric plasma,
so my bare eye becomes a refracting prism,
given to seeing in kind. Suddenly,
all the unwittingly mutated people go
about their formatted lives on a new scale: the light
is the symbol for this moment sifting through
the body's nervous system, and an erratic heartbeat
orders armies of feet into step with music,
incessant, availing, that ignores the frayed
days, whims, downtime amidst trash,
unruly accidents, uncalled for misery;
or because it knows these rushes upward
take even something as unholy as uselessness
up into the heavens.
I’m an aspirant with splintered voice, feverish
from ingrained illusion, claiming higher ground,
my evolutions ringing in the spheres -
so each deception takes me further,
a half-moon unfazed by daylight,
hailing the result from above.
There is a flight that outdoes
all known methods of being lighter than air.
Its jet packs burn like a phoenix.
Its brightness centers the atmosphere.
It engenders a new world
in spears of phosphor
that crumple and straighten,
frolic and fuse like magic wands,
chorded strings that set numberless songs aglow,
fresh grasp of newly woven wings
set free with super-endowed brilliance,
rayed showers, Eden regained.
In this light the man appears
who can rise or fall
according to muted motions of hello and farewell,
with face that turns and comes forward to claim
a smile dormant in the afternoon air,
stunned in the street, making their appeals,
offering their contracts –
at last, they have a reason to love.
GUNNERS
Hugh and his brother Phil
were hooked on guns.
And they loved war documentaries
on the television
Especially when the talking heads
discussed strategy.
When the old man was done
with his 'Soldier Of Fortune' magazine,
they scurried with it
up to their bedroom,
cut out pinups of the Uzi, the Luger,
the Colt 45.
Hugh's dream was to own his own Glock.
No school bully would mess with him then.
Phil couldn't wait to join the army.
His dream artillery was an AK47,
a killing machine.
Their father took
Hugh and Phil
for the first lesson with a real weapon.
It was his hunting rifle
versus tin cans stuck in the forks of a tree.
He barked out instructions:
point toes,
stretch shoulders back,
take the rifle's heft,
hold steady, aim...
Bam! Hugh missed
but it never was about the target.
Just pulling that trigger
hit a bullseye for the boy.
Phil followed.
He winged one.
That delicious ping
echoed through the forest,
uprooted every crow, jay and warbler
for miles.
GUNNERS
And yet Hugh went on to be a doctor,
Phil, a mechanic.
Phil did buy himself a hunting rifle
but it stayed mostly locked away in a cabinet.
Beyond their dreams,
their father's teaching,
a brief flirtation with BB guns,
neither of them ever did
fire a shot in earnest.
Hugh never played with dolls as a child
but he grew up to be a whizz
with a human body in his hands.
And there were never any tiny tin cars
in Phil's toy box.
It so happened that some accidental tinkering
when he was seventeen
was the start of a lifelong relationship
with car engines.
But no denying that
there sure was a lot of shooting
in their childhood dreams.
A veritable fusillade.
Imagined bodies were left in the dust.
And then imagined killers stopped imagining.
A CROW'S WOMAN
The crows won't let me go to sleep
And among them—who would have thought it?—was Suzanne.
And in Providence?
And my once and future lover?
And I lie with my shadow
as if it was solid flesh.
And the rivers swell with blood amid the sludge -
slaughtered in your name, Suzanne -
your animated skin, your blazing eyes.
I bed down in sea-swathed Newport,
below the cotton undulation of a cloud,
an empty floating vessel but for Suzanne,
aching for the fluttering of a butterfly,
the feathers of a bird,
but given over to the stones, the gravel.
Great suffering had fallen on Rhode Island .
I'm anchored in this fact,
wish I'd I never set foot in Providence,
or that men will not again be caught -
if it's true that this is a fable,
then why does the river, the flames,
lament me -
crow, crow, crow,
crow, my cawing minstrel -
there's nothing in Providence - but a phantom -
just eyes, mouth, fingers
on such a night as this by the river's rim,
the hurricane barrier,
shadows and whispers there.
She floated in the gondola's wake -
fire touched her - she spoke only to the flame -
and she was there, on the banks of the bay -
pursued by me, pursued for years by me -
so many bodies cast,
so many souls so designed as to remind me of my frailty -
mournful crow, that's how you were made,
carrion's slave - always asking the question -
what is love? what is not love? and what is there between the two
with full breast wisp, moon on hair, and this ghostly statue of her leaving.
John Grey is an Australian poet, US resident. Recently published in the Homestead Review,