John Grey\'s poetry

水仓E

John Grey is an Australian poet, playwright, and musician.Latest chapbook is "The Secret Address" from Snark Publishing. Recently had work in Bovine Free Wyoming, Jersey Works and Lynx Eye.



■Wind Child  

Don\'t ask me why the wind picks up.
Maybe it\'s at the request of chimes
in want of ringing,
windows that haven\'t rattled in so long.
Maybe it senses how my shirt
needs to feel like a sail sometimes
or my hair longs for a scouring
less contrived than shower and soap.
One minute the wind is barely bothering
the poppies, the feathers of the finches,
next it\'s making itself known in all directions,
shaking branches, blustering newspapers,
shuddering church spires.
Maybe the wind just needs to bellow
how alive a wind can be sometimes.
Like the way I hear and feel my father,
even now.
Just to be dead these many years,
he has to live in me sometimes.


■ A Foggy Nantucket Morning

Fog crawls
across the sand
like gray mules
hauling bags of
light\'s white diamonds.
Even a hazy morning brings hunger
so sanderlings whip themselves
into faster and faster gaits;
gulls dart in and out of the mist,
a flash of white, of wing, of beak,
like reflections in dusty mirrors;
pelicans, like trucks in mist,
haul fish between sea and sky.
A few people are out,
strolling the beach,
their shapes struggling
against invisibility.
A dog runs free.
A man gallops his horse.
A jogger lumbers by,
sweating and panting,
like all the air is his exhaled breath.



■ Cousin Moira


Her eyes
observe everything
but send no information
to the brain,
She is like a camera,
always ready to snap
the world around her
but no way to show us all
the photographs.
She sits up in the cupola
late at night,
freed of us,
our petty details,
takes on the heavens
with her stunted vision.
Come up sometimes
when she is sleeping,
when a disturbed eye opens unknowingly,
reveals an awe,
dark as a cave in most places
but intermittently lit by stars.


■A Walk Back to Blue Lake  

In a world of many
this is the one thing.
Many jobs, many people,
but only the one eleven
at night, only one trail
through dark-grained trees,
only one moonlight
opening up old footprints
like blossoms,
only one lake, only one
way of hunching down into
the rhythm of its black lapping,
only the one canoe
scything through those waters,
no longer remembered
as the rotting, weather-
cannibalized wreck it
became, but sleek and
birch brown and running
sharp as a blade.
Many days and nights,
many memories, but only
the one way of seeing
them clear.


■Size

I was a runt of a kid.
Even fully clothed,
I got no bigger than my nakedness.
People didn\'t talk to me,
they presided over me.
Everything was a giant
that turned on me,
squezzed my face even smaller
with a glare.
Anxious to grow,
I counted the dawns in inches.
But it was always the present,
always me with my eyes closed,
trying to imagine my head
touching the ceiling,
my arms stretching from wall to wall.
It was the time
someone in the neighborhood died
and my parents sat me down
to explain death to me.
What a strange way
for all that size, all that authority,
to end, I thought to myself.
After that, those bigger
still turned to fix me
with a stare.
But I saw the dark in the distance
ahead of them then.
I stayed back in the light,
anxious never to outgrow it.


■The Lake, Years Later

I remember my fishing companions:
the old man,
gray-chinned, smelling of tobacco.
The other boys
with the makeshift rods
and stolen cigarettes,
the dirty jokes and
lines strung out in hope
over the murky water.
I don\'t remember one caught catfish,
one unlucky trout
snagged on a crawdad,
not one flap of fin,
one gasp of fishy breath
at oxygen overload.
Like rivers and banks,
most my memory disappears
in the depths of evening.
But people remain.
With long line and good bait,
I still catch them being here.


■ A Woman of the House  

She has always worked of course.
Her rough hands would tell you that much.

She did it all for us, for him,
she would summarize if she ever took the time.

She stands out on the sidewalk sometimes,
as if she is about to flag down the next car,

go off and do things she\'s never done.
But the house is all that stops for her.

She confesses, despite the way it goes nowhere,
she is glad for its journeys.


■ Of Gardeners Before Me

Where do gardeners go
when they die?
Still following
that ancient regime,
backs bent,
heads bowed
plant level,
threshing the soil
with willing fingers,
then tossing seed into
its cracks, its gutters
in gentle impregnation,
bare arms collecting sun
like rooftops gather rain,
eyes imagining
sweat into radiance?
All around me,
I hear the crackle
of bone, of trowels,
of fingers kneading mud,
of summer songs
humming in the
roots of wind,
and wonder what blooms
some place beyond
my senses,
what petals flutter,
stalks take root
in dimensions out of reach
of thought,
of imagination,
and how do they compare
with these roses,
still looming rich and red
in family flower beds,
like flares shot
from the decks of memory,
years after she planted them.

[此贴子已经被作者于2003-12-6 12:27:28编辑过]

王敖

多谢, 一定仔细看