PUTTING YOU BACK TOGETHER FOR MY SAKE
 

I want to make you whole again
so where are the parts.
Haven't the Chinese the pieces?
Or was that the open sea?
Your lips are intact sure
but your tenderness is feeling up slabs of meat
at the Stop and Shop butcher counter.
 
And do you really want to be intact anyhow?
You've given your heart to the dead,
the starving, other people's dogs and babies.
That's your throat down there I'm sure of it
but the words it broadcasts
are from books and newspapers.
 
I still have the glue with me.
And I can ace a jigsaw puzzle any time.
But there's bits of you scrambling up trees
in New Hampshire forests.
There's more on your fancy European tour.
What if I almost have one section locked into place
but some tanager's stole the spirit?
Sure I recognize the skull
but the thoughts are Michelangelo or squirrels.
My blueprints begin and end with me.
 
You've got those pretty sea shell ears
but the hearing's off to the races, to Arabia.
And pert nose can't smell the scent of me
when the wind's blowing from yesterday.
But I'm a resourceful carpenter.
What I can't find, I'll just use shadow.
You can't help casting one.
And I can't help being one.
 

~ ~ ~ ~ ~
 

TAXI DRIVER'S BURDENS                            
 

There's a woman
in a mirror,
pecking at her beauty
with tweezers,
or arguing with gravity.
And an older man
conning over his bald spot
to gift-wrap his face,
and a teenager with raw heart
beating in his hands,
and three girls tottering between
high hair and lipstick.
Here's someone so hollow
she almost floats in the back seat,
a man who mutters “I am not dead,
I sleep,” then dies.
Whoever they are, he drives them
all past everyone they are not,
by all the places they are
not going to.
It.'s the one monologue
that different ones contribute to,
the servant speech
of one night shift master.
One day, a woman gives birth
in his rear view.
The baby cries like it already knows
no mother's driving this baby.


• John Grey lives in Providence, Rhode Isand, and has been published recently in Agni, Worcester Review,  South Carolina Review and The Pedestal, with work upcoming in Poetry East and Cape Rock.