"ON THE BEACH" and "WHAT WAS, WHAT WILL BE" by John Grey

ON THE BEACH

Moon pulling strings,

tide rolls in with a haul

of writhing kelp, uprooted pebble and shell.

When it’s time to ebb,

retreating waves will leave much of this bounty

as payment for the use of our beach.

Today, entangled in seaweed,

one of our own returns,

weeks-old and blue-faced,

the bloated body of a man.

It’s a gratuity

but only a curious gull is claiming it.

WHAT WAS, WHAT WILL BE

I have a tape of my mother singing “Que Sera Sera.”

Whatever will be, will be.

Don’t know why I’m thinking of that now

as I provide the med lab with my yearly

phial of urine, hoping they won’t find

the DNA of doughnuts and muffins

that my doctor warns me to stay away from

Alone, in this bathroom,

but nothing in my life is ever done separately.

I look back to the ones I once trusted

just to reassure myself

that life doesn’t come with EZ Pass,

that every step has to be paid for.

She played piano about as well as she sang.

It was a break from washing dishes,

scrubbing floors, dressing children.

She was more generous to the likes of me

than to any artistic pretensions she may have had.

Pans and silverware glistening in the drying tray –

that’s her legacy.

So is the steam of the iron, rubber gloves,

red scald marks on her right arm,

recipes trusted to memory,

turning the rusty faucet of the ancient sink

bakery bans with burnt bottoms,

working through the worst nausea ever

to put food on the table.

So I’m willing to grant her

an untuned piano, a cracked voice,

and the Doris Day she was in her imagination.

Even the upside down cake she baked the right way up,

when my father’s kidneys were turning to Swiss cheese.

So many things she could do at once –

boil vegetables, run bathwater, vacuum,

and here I am trying to perform just one act:

piss in the cup.

Like that song on the tape, for this particular moment,

my excretions, my urethra, is the story.

With thin soprano, she offers herself

to those who have survived her.

Dispatching a little of my waste,

I leave it up to the medical experts

to tell me who I am.

“Que Sera Sera” is as good as I can hope for.

Bio: John Grey is an Australian poet, US resident, recently published in New World Writing, River And South and Tenth Muse. Latest books, “Subject Matters”,” Between Two Fires” and “Covert” are available through Amazon. Work upcoming in Paterson Literary Review, White Wall Review and Cantos.