The Job to Do
By John Grey

The past is morning glory climbing its vines.
It's woodland glades, once cleared, now reclaiming.
Weeds bury its roads. Wild-flowers flood its furrows. 
It's a heave of pebbles to be kicked, a litter
of bob-cat to slink away, a scattering of shacks
for ancient gold-trails to gnaw to dust.

The closed doors of old times are not without their
lintels in this house: the robust fruit on the side-
table, the boiling kettle that knows no other way to hiss,
an outline of my younger self that won't quite dissolve in
me, the way I sometimes speak slowly, prosaically, as if
repeating the words of long dead elders.
 
The past is back there somewhere, in the open country
beyond these rooms. It's in here, close as a name
on my lips. It's disparate fragments that still connect,
like the axe in the cellar, the distant tree it felled,
the oaken bucket stuffed with store-bought flowers,
far-off glistening fishermen's waters it once ladled.

The past is powerful but, these days, not enough
to sustain me: there's the child in the crib, the woman
in the bed, the bills, the worries, the things to be done.
Yes, all around me, the past is morning glory
climbing its vines. But it still knows when it's dusk,
when it's time to close up accordingly.