YOUNG AMERICANS

They’re cherubs compared to me
and their eyes are ten times as bright.
They can hold an audience
while I’m merely walk by alone.
And see where the sunlight falls.
Not on me. On them.

They’ve a lot of life ahead of them
and a big space to live it in.
They’re seeds and I’ve been reaped.
They’re nimble and look at me –
as sluggish as a terrestrial gastropod mollusk.

Their hair can be tousled but never hostile.
And for all their pulled faces,
they can’t quite disguise themselves.
They wear their colors large – red, white, blue.
I go about in shrunken hues.

They worship laughter.
They’re known to sob.
And the losses, no doubt, have started.
But they have years before 
deaths and heartbreaks
take on an accumulative effect.

They’ll be me someday.
They know it but they don’t feel it.
For they don’t waste their feelings.
They know better than to use me
as an example.



ANNOYANCES

A dangerous curve 
black and gleaming with oncoming cars,
a leaf daubed in late season snow,
that common quick embrace and parting 
seen on many a sidewalk –
an earth unfit for babies,
an afterword disguised as breath,
aging, that damnable hourglass,
	and ambition, yours, mine 
	and everybody else’s –
	the lack of a comics section
	in the New York Times,
	and, among my grieving,
	the death of certain trees –
people who won’t leave me alone,
burnt-out bulbs, anguish,
the disorderly dissolution of a life,
someone looking at me 
as if they already know what I’m about to tell them –
	anything that’s tissue-thin,
	or comes in a white box,
	or is a device whose purpose 
	is not immediately clear –
scraping fingernails,
wills that leave me nothing,
all of the useless things
that are so cheap and plentiful,
a handful of dirt versus an abstract painting –
	the agony of denial,
	the diffidence of guilt,
	diaphanous desire.
	drinking to the health of the dead,
	dripping taps
	and everything else that reminds me of time
the necessity of ingratitude,
the constant exodus of old friends,
the vacuity of famous people,
anticipation that’s derailed by bad weather –
	the inability to discern
	the constellations
	inventions that I get no credit for,
	worst of all, the comforts of anxiety –      
signing off – not annoyance –
I really am signing off.


NEWBORN SON						

On a moonless March night, a man was pumping 
a handcar through dairy country, inspecting the
line between Eumundi and Cooroy. He’d been
a cane cutter and a sawmill worker, served in 
the Air Force with the 2nd Airfield Construction Squadron.
And now he was a railway ganger, carrying 
out his duties in a world of invisible fences and fields,
a man who liked a beer, fishing, and a flutter on the races,
had many friends, a young wife, three daughters
and a newborn son. And a newborn son. A newborn son.

Unknown to the man, a station hand waved a banking engine
through, down that track toward the man who didn’t see
it coming until it was too late. The man was killed.
He was 35. And that was it. Poof. Nothing. A couple
of faded snapshots. One professionally done photograph
of the man, his wife, the three daughters. It was taken
before the son was born. He’s in uniform. The women
wear simple dresses. The family is not wealthy. 
They live in a rented house provided by the railway.
The picture is undated but roughly three years before
the son is born. The newborn son. The newborn son.
Six months old when the man is buried in the local cemetery.

There’s little left of the man’s story. The ones who would
know are all gone. The wife is dead. The daughters have
passed away. The son, no longer newborn, is left with
that photo, a clipping and nothing else. The son writes.
Ghost stories sometimes but the biggest ghost of them all
is never mentioned. There’s no connection. The man
can’t even haunt. And the son never felt his absence 
because he never knew his presence. He was born 
into all he knew as normal. At a point where his recollection
begins, he is telling people, “I have no father.”
Curiosity creeps up on him but not sadness.  
By the time he’s old enough to understand,
the wife doesn’t mention the man. She’s moved to 
the city. She’s worked a series of low paying jobs to provide
for four children. The son is happy enough. 
He’s no longer newborn. No longer a newborn son.




NEWBORN SON				

Family is just what you get, he figures. If there’s no man,
then there’s no man. If no one teaches you to hammer 
a nail or fish or drive a car, then there’s always poetry. 
And there’s these four women in his life, all older,
the daughters more like mothers to him than sisters.
People say he looks like his mother. No one mentions any likeness
to the man. Years pass, years when his name is never brought up
the once. The daughters marry, move out. The son travels.
He too marries. New generations put the man in his place,
a place so deep in the murk of family history, he can never be found.
And if there’s a man at all, it’s now that son. In fact, it has
been for such a long time. Ever since he was newborn. Newborn.
He’s all that’s left of the household he was born into.
He has no children, no newborn of his own. 
He sits in his study, his home thousands of miles from 
where he was born. He tells himself now it’s time to write
a poem, the poem, about his father. But there’s no way into
the man. The facts are old and they’re dry. So he writes of himself
instead. The newborn son. The newborn son. The newborn son.
But born to who? 

  
TO ALL THOSE IN OUR ESTIMATION

Hear this,
when it’s dark out, we start blessing people,
crossing over the river on a dimly-lit bridge,
or looking out a window at where street-lamps cannot reach,
hungry or just having eaten,
saying thank you to a Stop sign,
or running water in the sink.

After the unexpected deaths,
the dour hospital visits,
the cancerous news on the telephone,
we owe something to the living,
pass it on silently,
as the road narrows
or the plates sparkle as they dry.

Watching TV,
we leave spaces in our concentration.
Crawling into bed,
we don’t sleep without remembering.
Even in our dreams,
when the subconscious scrambles
people and lives,
we beg them stay there,
do what they do,
we need them.  

Hear this,
there’s nothing to hear,
not with the sheet up to our throats,
and the blanket spreading over us,
just a quiet we go on with, 
just a quiet that holds them here. 



FROM MY VANTAGE POINT

In the dark, you have no hands.
No shield. 
Not even eyes.
You’re a funeral procession
in all but breath.

At the same time,
I am the hammers in my head.
The day’s exchanges.
The rampaging bison in my memory.
And, as always,
the staccato drumming of my heart.

This is what we must make sense of.
This is what we’re dealing with
when we lay ourselves down to sleep.


John Grey is an Australian poet, US resident, recently published in Stand, Washington Square Review and Sheepshead Review. Latest books, ”Between Two Fires”, “Covert” and  “Memory Outside The Head” are available through Amazon. Work upcoming in the McNeese Review, Santa Fe Literary Review and California Quarterly.