The July Selected Poet is John Grey

Please feel free to email John at: JGrey10233@aol.com

SEVENTY YEARS LATER

Spanish moss drips from trees.
House sheds shingles.
Old rusty knocker clanks
against rotting doors.
Cracked windows rattle.
Floor-boards groan.
Pipes clatter.
Two bent and withered sisters crouch together
in one threadbare satin chair
amid the dust and webs
of the ancient family sitting room.
Older brother Tom, in tattered bloody gray uniform,
is slumped into the shabby sofa,
eye-sockets blank, flesh green as moss,
but skeletal fingers still tight around his rifle.
“Quiet out there,” whispers Amanda.
“Maybe the war is over at last,” rasps Esther.
Amanda shakes her weary head.
“Sad. So sad. A million of our boys dead.”
“A million and one if you count Tom,” adds Esther.

CONSEQUENCE

I ask myself,
heart and head,
is someone there?
There is someone.
A shape
like a flower
blooming under snow.
A wisp
like the last draught of sun
between the trees.
A presence
like the mist
on a cold lake’s surface.

But then I wonder
what does this visitor
want of me.
Memory,
a wildflower spark
in the thick forest
of my forgetfulness?
Feeling,
a mote of tenderness
toward all that’s
passed before?
Revenge,
for my living,
its threadbare substitute
for existence?

So I’m sorrowful,
sympathetic,
and terribly afraid.
I’m not alone
this chilly midnight.
Oh I have lived a dark
and shameful life
these past few years.
I’m here with my consequences.

SECOND FLOOR      

I arrive by night
as moon gilds honey
on dark, unbuttoned wind,
the sky in the oblivion
of its fetal stars,
my hunger passionate but still enraged,
up wall, through window,
to bedroom,
parting the golden curls
of your throat with my tongue,
pressing home my bleak horizon
with long white fangs,
your face, a startled deer
fetching its own end
from the unreal thunder shake
of my eyes,
immense night of exalted blood,
as ancient world inhales life,
exhales a luscious mirror
of my face,
pale, feminine,
and dripping crimson.

HANGING TREE

Its outer limbs
reverberated
against the shake
of its dead leaves
as if a body had
just been cut down
and it wasn’t until
late May that
the reluctant sun
finally burnt off
the thick chunks of ice
that shrouded
its vein-like roots.

THE CHOPPING BLOCK   

hack a limb away       
for the thrill    
of seeing it
grow back
and when it doesn’t,
imagine it there anyhow,
a beautiful, sculptured thing
reflected in your
motionless eyes

and why not excise
a part of you,
the will behind
the act,
dismembered and bloody,
off to the side
of your public face,
that sweet siren steepness
of crass love
and showery autumn walks
to the lake
with the object
of your experiments

start as equals
at the water’s edge,
her hands scratching
your naked chest,
yours tumbling
down her spine
faster than her hair

calm her with the
stark grey of your ax,
how high your arm can raise
when lifted by the mist

tell her
this is where she is
in your history
explain that whatever
she loses to her demons
she gains in your
regeneration

John Grey is an Australian-born poet, but moved to the United States in the late 1970s. During the day, John works as a financial systems analyst.

John has been recently published in Connecticut Review, Kestrel and Writer’s Bloc, and has more poetry upcoming in Pennsylvania English, Alimentum and the Great American Poetry Show.