The sky is grey on days like today. The air is a crisp, wet frame. Point your eyes downward. You’re alone. Watch your steps down grey sidewalks, up grey stairs and into your grey house.

The light in your bedroom is grey and thin—it cast shadows in places you don’t want them: the skin’s grey pallor, a grey cat, the grey cat toy she lays on your grey chest.

Lie down on your grey bed.

Think Gray, like a woman’s name, the color of your father’s hair, what to name a favorite scarf. Now like this color less. Think Grey: cool: slushing January streets, a slow shadow on my cheek, the hard look of your mother when you lie or steal or drink.

The tattoos were grey: grey wind always blowing through splashes of orange and red and green. It blows now across my neck and chest and my hands there, grey fingers at rest.

I think my ovaries are grey. Or was it the egg, pregnant with age and joy and doom?

Lamb’s ear is a grey plant, with grey leaves or silver, but its flowers color violet and lavender, or there are no flowers ever. I've heard these flowers are removed, the grey-wooly ear preferred to the spikes of purple-blue blooms.

The blossoms of certain cherry trees turn light grey just before they fall from branches and blow into memory, where some say everything is grey.

The word is grey.

Grey squares of stone in monuments. Grey lenses in glasses worn for a bright orange sun. Grey smoke rises from the firing of guns.

This is a grey season, punctuated by grey trees and grey squirrels that bury acorns under piles of grey-brown leaves. You will scatter grey ashes off bridges in grey handfuls. And you will weep.

Scatter mine at the ocean, please.

Grey clouds will form and release grey rain on you. Even the sky will turn grey for you.

Now watch it turn back blue.





©2008 Dr. Lacy M. Johnson All Rights Reserved.