Scouring the Waters
Two Poems by John Grey
Cranes
Cranes arrive at the lake.
It’s winter.
These slick birds beat back the wind
with folded feathers.
Their elegance
is up for useful things:
digging in the mud,
scouring the waters.
Bent like question marks,
they nod heads together and gossip:
migration tales,
the wisdom of the egg.
A gull offers a shrieking oratory.
The cranes dip and sip,
find peace with their thirst and hunger.
One stands on a solitary leg,
holds ground.
But the still
is never perfectly still.
Its head retreats
from a work of art
into its own invention.
Knees lock.
Neck stiffens.
Beak awaits instructions
from the eyes.
Another dances,
splashes in the icy water.
Rituals come easy to its body type.
A couple fly up to the trees,
prepare their nightly roost.
Cranes don’t dispute their right to be here.
They do not partition a place in their hearts for nature,
do not worry if this or that one
is the penultimate bird.
Cranes are not me.
They would never watch cranes.
A Boy and
a Stream
Thin stream skirts the foothills,
an indigent third cousin. to
the distant river that sends it
liquid care packages,
that swift, swarming current
a great civilization
compared to this simple watery village
of shallow water
and glistening gray stones.
I can stretch and step across it,
come cheek to surface
with its threadbare,
native collection of life forms—
squirming tadpoles,
buzzing blue-green dragonflies.
No one else comes here.
This is my private collection.
Like the books on my bedroom shelves,
I can open up a gleaming page
of nature any time.
It is small enough to encompass
and yet the seeds of everything
larger than itself are here.
It’s a mighty river in its own mind
like I am a man in mine.
I break the surface with my fingers
send gentle ripples in all directions. That’s how it begins.