JOHN GREY

JOHN GREY

Obit For A Street Musician

The newspaper lied.

You were not the son

of parents who’d long since

disowned you,

nor the brother of a man

you hadn’t spoken to in years.

Your only surviving relative

was a beat-up saxophone

that you played on street corners,

or outside the local Triple A

baseball stadium on game days.

And even that instrument,

most folks agree,

should have been buried

with you.

But newspapers can’t get

their fonts around

street musicians –

are they just bums

with a gimmick

or unheralded geniuses

ignored, dismissed,

into early death?

And then when there’s

someone like you,

they’re totally mystified.

You had a roof

over your head.

You blew your sax

because all else was boredom.

The newspaper could

have said –

no more jazz

for a quarter

at the corner of Ames and Water streets.

But they printed an obituary.

They got the dead part right.

But it was as if you’d never lived.

The Cotswold Village

 Where Your Grandmother Was Born

Your visit is like opening

a book of stories,

so familiar from what’s been read to you

even though you’re not a character in them.

But the church,

the thatched-roof houses,

the Jacobean manor,

the Pub with the swaying

highwayman sign –

each is a paragraph

whose wording you remember.

Same for the silvery river.

The fields where sheep roam

like clouds of wool on hoofs.

And the graveyard.

Was death ever quainter?

So many stones bear your last name.

You stop for tea and scones

at “Hannah’s Tea Shoppe.”

The owner’s name is Daisy.

But she’s Hannah in Daisy’s book.

Dying Bird

Everything is out of order,

takes some getting used to.

In the raspberries,

dying bird,

you try to cover it with a tissue.

You feel, with delicate fingers,

head ballooning,

muscles weakened,

wings broken on ruffled chest.

It's like a berry

that dropped without being picked,

tasted or left

to listen to

its own fading heartbeat

or ferment in the sun.

Most of life you take for granted:

chipping sparrow nest,

eggs, detached berries, instinct,

red-rimmed leaves -

shadows of memory

in a bird opening its mouth,

chin up, face in a heap,

your mother perhaps,

yes even her.

You kneel

in the gaze

of small pupils,

proof of another flesh,

white of the skin -

you break the crust,

your body echoes,

another's needs unmet,

trickle of blood

like berries in a pouch.

JOHN GREY

JOHN GREY is an Australian poet, US resident. Recently published in Transcend, Dalhousie Review and Qwerty with work upcoming in Blueline, Hawaii Pacific Review and Clade Song.