John Grey
The Father Sale
It’s a yard sale.
No, it’s a father sale.
For that’s his toolkit on the porch
beside the raft half-deflated
and the rod and tackle box.
The rifle leans against the wall
but I have no use for it.
Same with the collection
of fancy cigarette lighters.
Mother drags grief into the yard
with each box as if a clean house
could put an end to mourning.
Buyers arrive early –
a red-haired man in boots
picks through the passions
of someone he never knew.
Photographs will remain.
But nothing to drop a rabbit at thirty paces.
No grease in the cuffs of his flannel.
I pretend I am not the one
who watched his lungs collapse like the raft.
These things -
still good, still wanted,
but not by me.
I don’t fish. I don’t smoke. I don’t hunt.
His life pokes through in clusters –
but I am not among them.
At Twelve, The Train
A train, a flash of silver, rushes by.
A plane can fly overhead all it wants
but it's never about going some place,
the way that locomotive is.
The engine flies over the ground I walk.
Six carriages rattle and rumble to keep up.
There's people at the window
though our common humanity is half a second here,
a flicker of gray steel there.
Other people's cars don't move me.
The rider, high on his horse, is a paltry inspiration.
For an ecstatic moment, I'm where that train is going,
the speed with which it's getting there.
But try telling that to the slow, slow, walk home
across the fields.
