John Grey - Two Poems

Breakdown

You finally broke down
and called in the tree cutters.
You hated to see that oak go
but it was as dead as the old man,
and the same age roughly,
ninety years, as when he’d had enough
and the tree cutters finally axed
his bony frame for good.

You stood out in the backyard
with that chopped-up corpse,
examined the rings,
could count to eighty distinct ones,
the boyhood circles blurred
like a man’s memory,
but all the adult spheres
clear as if you were reading in a diary:
the painful thinness of some years,
the gorged-on plenty of others.

The workmen tossed the timber
in the back of a truck,
oblivious to you or your father,
or even the thirty years or so you’d lived
in the shadow of that mighty tree.
They were like the grave-diggers
or the red-haired woman who brought the flowers
to the funeral home.
You have to break down
if you want to get them in.



Factory Town

Kind of them
to make the air for me.
The stuff the trees,
the plants, the grass produce
would never do.
Almost gracious in the way
their chimneys
spew out more gray soot
than my lungs would ever need.
Even at night,
when the factories
seem like graveyards,
they're still considerate enough
to keep those smoke stacks pumping,
a warm red glow even in winter,
and in summer,
a steady string of toxic clouds,
thicker than humidity.
How do they survive, I wonder,
in the outer suburbs,
in the countryside,
where air is so innocuous,
and doesn't foam,
doesn't lather the throat, the nostrils.
How do you know it's air
unless you cough along
in rhythm to your breathing,
unless somebody tells you
that's the price of doing business,
unless you realize
how much you pay that price.


Australian born poet, John Grey works as financial systems analyst. Recently published in Poem, Caveat Lector, Prism International and the horror anthology, “What Fear Becomes” with work upcoming in Big Muddy, Prism International and Writer’s Journal.