JohnGrey2

LAZARUS POEM

I write poems once more
aching for your green eyes,
hungry for your saliva,
toasting the walk in the woods
where we bewildered birds and wildflowers alike
by being hemmed at the waist
and walking on four legs.
Boughs thwacking against our thighs
were no match for our unparalleled affection.
Nor the steep climb, the rocky underfoot,
just more ruddy angles of our indifference
to any landscape not of flesh and bone.
It was an interlude of happiness
and I ask no forgiveness from the miserable
who were not there.
I do my suffering with them now.
And yet my pen yields to a smile.
My lips are pursed by memory.
A word or two open then close like an embrace.
The sound of a sentence back to me grants
such irrational concessions.
I would have not believed
were it not for poetry.
I came with nothing but death
and yet your features are in the blood,
the air, the silences.
It’s what these clocks have always feared…
your past dictates my present.
Child, do not wonder at the obstinacy of love.
It is love that succors obstinacy.
And I’m through begging trails and ghosts.
The arts will do for me.
And the sun reigns, and the trees part,
and the room lights like a forest floor.
And you are still my lover.
Do not ask me how.

BEAU'S BODY

It's not Moses they pull from the mangroves
but the son of the guy who owns the local hardware store.
Not Pharaoh's daughter doing the pulling either
but some state cops in sky-gray uniforms, spit-brown shoes.
And that black-eyed, bloody kid is
not someone with great calling unless
setting an example to other teenage punks
who drink, who drive, who get so rattle-snaked,
they can't tell swamp from highway
is a calling.
But certainly, no one, not even the wild-eyed
preacher who's only blitzed half of the time,
can claim this solemn, leach-infested moment
as a turning point in a new humid,
mosquito-swarming, alligator-bellowing, brand of religion,
as the chapter, verse, where its Bible
starts getting interesting.
Still, the town shuts down the day of the funeral
and that never happened to Ancient Egypt.
And his mother grabs an old wire comb
and parts the corpse's hair.
The Red Sea has got to start somewhere.

In The Parlor

Mark this place with gold
or, if not, strands of yellow hair.
Not merely fabric,
it's a mirror of the heart.
So adorn, adorn this place.
A many-headed weight was lifted here.

Listen. The older ones return.
The house will fill with the heavy burden
of their bones.
Our sparrow chirps must acquiesce
to the weary wrinkles of their wisdom.
So hurry. Don't hide the evidence.
But decorate it with the arcane art of secrets.
Just in time.
How loud they talk the path to your front door.
But lips, they are a silence speaking yet.
And soft skin, it is a whisper.