—Guitar Artwork Courtesy of Public Domain
RESTAURANT EAVESDROPPING
I wasn't trying to eavesdrop
but what can you do.
The tables are so close,
and some couples
are just louder than us.
They never stop talking,
while we enjoy our silences.
It's that vacuum theory again.
As our lives shrink,
our neighbors’ presence expands.
I feel her complaining, his anger.
And when bitterness turns to sorrow,
to apology, to smiles,
I'm right there with them.
Sure I tell you I love you.
But he loves her is what I'm really saying.
I wasn't trying to eavesdrop
but what can you do.
The tables are so close,
and some couples
are just louder than us.
They never stop talking,
while we enjoy our silences.
It's that vacuum theory again.
As our lives shrink,
our neighbors’ presence expands.
I feel her complaining, his anger.
And when bitterness turns to sorrow,
to apology, to smiles,
I'm right there with them.
Sure I tell you I love you.
But he loves her is what I'm really saying.
MAKER OF MAPS
The stream is silver, robust.
stoked by inciting snow,
egalitarian in the way its watery fields
feed poets and painters,
hikers and fishermen.
It's madcap
as those wild Irishmen I met in New York,
but friendly in its rowdiness,
with splash and swirl.
inviting me to every bar in town.
I lean over the wooden railing,
my body an overture
to a symphony joyously unfinished,
where woodwind thought surprises
deep brass of bone,
where trout fill a small watery stage
before an audience of hook and line.
Five hundred miles away
is a town of people
who know, in ways that only
make sense to mourners,
what I cannot do.
But here’s a breath they cannot take back,
there’s a landscape they can
never build upon,
overhead, a sky too fat for framing.
ALL ABOUT THIS WILD LIFE
"Plenty of wild-life in these parts,"
the man in the convenience store had said,
though he never mentioned
"wild" means "still", "life" means "death”.
But there they were, like litter on the roadside,
my first bob-cat flattened, skinned just like
an unlucky neighborhood tabby.
And an armadillo, its suit of armor
no match for highway trucks.
I slowed as if every mile per hour
put another life at threat, but nothing
braked the road kill.
"What was that turtle thinking?"
my wife asked. "And don't
opossums ever learn."
We passed an ignorant deer,
turned over on its back,
four legs stiff and straight
and pointing to the sky.
And then a dumb skunk,
whiffed the remnants of
its futile smell,
an hour or two beyond
the time it sprayed the tractor wheel.
A car passed us,
a huge tan bloodhound in the back seat,
poking its head through the window,
bellowing low
how not every animal was dead.
"So if we take them with us,
it's okay," I told myself.
Then you spied the crows
feasting on a splattered woodchuck.
Our car startled them.
They begrudgingly took off
leaving behind their carrion.
"Good grub just a half mile down the road a-ways,"
the man in the convenience store had said.
THE MARTINGALE FAMILY
The Martingale family’s annual vacation
can’t really begin because there’s a
beached whale taking up their favorite
tanning and picnic spot.
They stand in a line, mother, father,
eldest daughter, youngest daughter, son,
just off the roadway,
equipped with cooler, beach towels,
sun screen, even a badminton set,
all looking down at the great lump
of gray and white whose heart is beating
futilely against its own heaviness
while its fin flaps more and more slowly
as it waves goodbye to the world.
So much for pristine white sand,
azure waters, Montana-sized sky
and round and golden god-like sun.
“This shouldn’t be allowed,” says the mother.
“Where’s the…” the father stammers.
A name for those who push behemoths
back into oceans eludes him.
“Why did it have to happen
this week of all weeks,”
blurts out eldest daughter.
Youngest daughter’s eyes well up.
She was hoping some coloring
would disguise her acne outbreak.
The son isn’t sure that
a dying whale is a bad thing.
He’s eager to poke a stick
in its heaving side.
The Martingale family are
the perfect example of
unforeseen circumstances, uprooted plans.
For compassion, for empathy,
I suggest you look elsewhere.
SOLITARY VISION
Tuesday night, laundromat,
stench of boiled clothes,
detergent dust, eyes swamped
by ceaseless spinning in all directions,
the folders, the stutters,
the talkers, silent types with
heads in year-old magazines.
And lint, everywhere lint.
Like moths to the flame of fiber.
But there's someone I haven't seen before.
Young, pretty. She holds blue underwear
up to the light, like fish tank glass,
with the rarest of species shimmering,
floating, behind.
Wednesday night, library, bring back
three books one of which I read,
aisles of must and paper dandruff,
cover rot, frayed edges.
And whisperers, the terminally quiet
with battered copies of the classics,
another layer between them and the world
to go with their eye-glasses.
1 examine my clothing for the lint,
nothing, words will have to do.
And someone I've only ever seen
the once. Young, pretty.
She selects a recent best seller,
puts it back, fondles the Nabokov
for a moment or two, puts it back,
goes with her first choice.
Thursday night, supermarket,
carriage before me like a mother's
womb, a child of corn-flakes, soda
and t.v. dinners I shall have this week,
the smell of cold in the refrigerator aisle,
dank meat, wet lettuce, the nausea
of competing spices.
The lint is dollar signs. The paper trail
that leads to my most famished wallet.
But then someone I've only ever
seen the twice. Young, pretty.
She's buying soup mix and it's
an instant endorsement. Yogurt in lieu
of ice-cream. Lean cuts. Diet everything,
She's saving her figure... for what?
for when I see her in the downtown traffic?
when I spy her in the music store?
in the far corner at McDonald's?
at the cinema, the two of us,
in the dark, alone, separated by six rows?
Lives are ultimately blue-prints, I'm finding.
Where they go astray is in the shirt
wrinkles, the missing page, the milk sour
because I forgot to check the date.
She loses a sock, she hates the hero,
the bananas have more calories than she thought.
Nothing in there about working up the courage
to speak to her.
Nothing in her diagrams that would allow
her the space to listen.
Maybe tonight I will see her in my dreams.
With me, compromise has always been a solo act.
ANTICHRIST
I watched Rosemary’s Baby by myself
in the apartment
with the lights low.
And then The Omen,
same scenario,
only a glass of wine for company
(it remained unsipped by the way).
In a small dark room,
on a lumpy couch,
I was witness to the birth of the antichrist
whether it was Mia Farrow
gently rocking her yellow-eyed
bundle of feral joy
and Lee Remick’s dead offspring
being swapped out
for a sweet smiling proxy
for all the hell below.
Sure, in between,
I saw my share of westerns,
rom-coms, war epics etc.
but none that stayed with me
as compellingly as the progeny of Satan.
That’s why I don’t trust the son
a mother introduces me to
on my solitary walk through the park.
And I stay clear of the pickup basketball game
One of shirts or skins could well be
the false Messiah.
I don’t even accept the offer of the kid
who volunteers to help me load my groceries
into the trunk of my car.
Sure he may just want a tip.
But it could well lead to a deadly immersion
in a lake of burning sulfur.
People like to remind me
that I was a little boy once.
And sure I broke the vase.
But that was clumsiness
not perdition.
I watched Rosemary’s Baby by myself
in the apartment
with the lights low.
And then The Omen,
same scenario,
only a glass of wine for company
(it remained unsipped by the way).
In a small dark room,
on a lumpy couch,
I was witness to the birth of the antichrist
whether it was Mia Farrow
gently rocking her yellow-eyed
bundle of feral joy
and Lee Remick’s dead offspring
being swapped out
for a sweet smiling proxy
for all the hell below.
Sure, in between,
I saw my share of westerns,
rom-coms, war epics etc.
but none that stayed with me
as compellingly as the progeny of Satan.
That’s why I don’t trust the son
a mother introduces me to
on my solitary walk through the park.
And I stay clear of the pickup basketball game
One of shirts or skins could well be
the false Messiah.
I don’t even accept the offer of the kid
who volunteers to help me load my groceries
into the trunk of my car.
Sure he may just want a tip.
But it could well lead to a deadly immersion
in a lake of burning sulfur.
People like to remind me
that I was a little boy once.
And sure I broke the vase.
But that was clumsiness
not perdition.
A LIFE GIVEN OVER TO FUNERALS
A telephone clicks.
A door quietly closes.
An email goes unanswered.
Or we just take different paths.
We spend so much of our lives
being cut off from people,
yet only when they're really dead
do we make a big show of it.
From now on,
I'm going to mourn every chance I get.
I’ll sob at twilight, turn ashen
when people show their backs.
You say goodbye and I send flowers.
Your “Write soon”
is a priest’s incantation
as he stands over the grave
of no contact for months.
Why let it all gush out on dead ground.
May as well let my tears flood a rock.
May as well proclaim.
“God, I miss that toe-nail clipping,
that strand of hair.”
From now on, whatever is part of me
has to answer for its absence.
Even an hour apart
should involve a burial.
There’s nothing more final
than “Until the next time.”
_____________________
Today’s LittleNip:
THE BLUES
—John Gray
Someone left the front door unlocked.
Guy ran up the stairs, found his Missy
in bed with another man,
blew his head off with a shot gun.
Another’s been picking cotton all day,
with bent back and sun-scarred face.
A third met the devil through the demon drink.
A fourth can’t stay out of the gambling den.
A fifth finds his only pleasure
with the ladies of the night.
If it wasn’t for me and my second-hand guitar,
you’d know none of this.
____________________
John Grey is an Australian poet and US resident, who has recently been published in New World Writing, North Dakota Quarterly and Lost Pilots. His latest books, Between Two Fires; Covert; and Memory Outside The Head are available through Amazon. He has work upcoming in California Quarterly, Seventh Quarry, La Presa and Doubly Mad. Welcome back to the Kitchen, John, who first visited us in April of last year.
____________________
—Medusa
John Gray
For future poetry happenings in
Northern California and otherwheres,
click on
UPCOMING NORCAL EVENTS
(http://medusaskitchen.blogspot.com/p/wtf.html)
in the links at the top of this page—
and keep an eye on this link and on
the daily Kitchen for happenings
that might pop up
—or get changed!—
during the week.
Photos in this column can be enlarged by
clicking on them once, then clicking on the x
in the top right corner to come back to Medusa.
Find previous four-or-so posts by scrolling down
under today; or there's an "Older Posts" button
at the bottom of this column; or find previous poets
by typing the name of the poet or poem
into the little beige box at the top
left-hand side of today’s post; or go to
Medusa’s Rapsheet at the bottom of
the blue column at the right
to find the date you want.
Would you like to be a SnakePal?
Guidelines are at the top of this page
at the Placating the Gorgon link;
send poetry and/or photos and artwork
to kathykieth@hotmail.com. We post
work from all over the world—including
that which was previously published—
and collaborations are welcome.
Just remember:
the snakes of Medusa are always hungry—
for poetry, of course!
Northern California and otherwheres,
click on
UPCOMING NORCAL EVENTS
(http://medusaskitchen.blogspot.com/p/wtf.html)
in the links at the top of this page—
and keep an eye on this link and on
the daily Kitchen for happenings
that might pop up
—or get changed!—
during the week.
Photos in this column can be enlarged by
clicking on them once, then clicking on the x
in the top right corner to come back to Medusa.
Find previous four-or-so posts by scrolling down
under today; or there's an "Older Posts" button
at the bottom of this column; or find previous poets
by typing the name of the poet or poem
into the little beige box at the top
left-hand side of today’s post; or go to
Medusa’s Rapsheet at the bottom of
the blue column at the right
to find the date you want.
Would you like to be a SnakePal?
Guidelines are at the top of this page
at the Placating the Gorgon link;
send poetry and/or photos and artwork
to kathykieth@hotmail.com. We post
work from all over the world—including
that which was previously published—
and collaborations are welcome.
Just remember:
the snakes of Medusa are always hungry—
for poetry, of course!
