Three Poems by John Grey

by John Grey

This Solitary Autumn

Temperatures drop.

Wind changes direction.

Autumn descends like a velvet shroud.

From your cabin window,

you’re witness to the death in the air.

You dread the drop of the unclaimed fruit.

Their soft impacts echo

like muted knocks upon a crypt door.

They don’t just fall.

They’re forsaken.

You fear the foliage turn,

as the air takes up a brush

dipped in blood and fading light,

paints the dying

in red and yellow and gold.

But there’s nothing you can do.

Branches shudder, drip and thin.

Leaves lose their grip, drift downward.

They settle upon the fallen, layer the earth

in a soft, rustling burial gown.

It’s more than a season,

more than a turn of the calendar.

All around you,

destinies are fulfilled.

And now within,

you feel this old realm letting go.

Your heart shudders and fades.

You’re being summoned

by some other place.

The Eternal Witness                                              

My thoughts brake

for shrieks, for screams.

I'm not so selfish

that the knife-edged holler of others

cannot interrupt my own soul-searching.

Do I love her…should I leave her...

willingly step aside for...

“Help! He has a hatchet!”

Dear victim,

you're not alone, believe me.

Not when I am here.

Your terror snags my flow.

Your cry for help overwhelms

my own innocuous entreaties for salvation.

Until the last echo of your frenzied wail

is tamped by the dark swamp

of night water,

you have my attention.

And same for the one

hurrying hard and panting,

brandishing that bloody blade,

excited voice heralding, "I've killed him."

I'm not so immersed

in my own meager successes

that I can't smile wide and long

as the orange peel moon above

and acknowledge the failures,

the triumphs of another.

In the dark woods,

we are all one creature –

the best of us, the worst of us,

and the witness.

And one of us is dead.

One of us is on the run.

One of us has the stomach

for anything.

Smears

In a smear of distant red,

dawn appears.

But the day is not yet a day.

It’s merely a residue

of the night before.

I am a man rubbing his eyes,

not yet with a name,

too much sleep in my body,

too little certainty in my head,

as though something else slept in me

and has not fully gone.

It may be getting light out

but the dark barricades

itself in my room.

And I am not alone.

I fear there is someone else

in the bed beside me.

My breath slinks out of hiding,

visible, shivering.

My companion though

does not breathe.

Without exits,

I can only go within.

And there dwells a mood,

singular and suffocating.

Then a voice whispers,

“What have you done?”

I shake the one next to me.

The body is cold.

A knife warms my hand.

If ever an answer

cried out for a question…

Did I say distant red?

I meant near. I meant a stain

that never will come out.

A false dawn if there was one.