Grey again, Nova Scotia late November
Grey, a month’s elegy got the expired hardwood fires

​

    Of October, Smoke grey, the kind of grey
Earnest TV meteorologists explain as

​

    “Prolonged seasonal low pressure,” a monochrome
Ceiling so persistently low, they, say, it can floor you. Actually.

​

    It’s a barn-board grey, abandoned wasp nest grey;
The delicate, cupped receptacles of the papery comb

 

    Veined grey, oval or hexagonal, the insides a deeper, 
Darker grey, the base mud-daubed underside rafters,

 

    The south side, usually, of a sloping roofline,
Cedar-shakes or sheeted aluminum, the soffit shadows

 

    Mouse grey, whale grey, From Middle English grei or grai,
Borne from Angle-Saxon graeg, farther back

 

    The Dutch grauw and grijs, the German grau,
A modest, monkish grey, cassock grey;

 

    Habit grey, cloister grey, prayer grey. And when
The ocean winders shift and steady– a brighter

 

    Oil paint grey; pine-truck first snow above dogwoods– 
A burnished, reddish grey, as in the fervent faces

 

    Of Rembrandt; or a stave of power lines silvered
Blue, an almost translucent snow skin thickened

 

    To ice-grey on culverts, the colour of war
Corpses–nothing at all left of late summer

 

    Streambeds’ green-going-grey, only a starker, bleaker, near
Winter grey, an angry grey, like the grey of Guernica.

 

    Long weeks of sullen evening grey, 
The sloe grey of Debussy’s Nocturnes, the darkening

 

    Chords of his cancerous fate: fitful sleep
Grey, indolence grey. “Prufrock” grey? “Ash Wednesday” grey.

 

    Guilt, repentance and sackcloth grey. Early,
The inconspicuous grey of the grey

 

    Flannel suit. And if nirvana is a disinterested grey, that
Grey. Dying old-man whiskered grey, dark slate gravestone grey

 

    The dirty grey of storm clouds building at 20,000 feet,
An approximation of the bony shoulders

 

    Of orphaned girls toiling in the factories
Of Hugo’s soot-cindered Paris, les grisettes, and the guttered

 

     Smiles of syphilitic prostitutes in the dancehalls of Lautrec,
Stifled cries leaked out through the walls a republic

 

    Of greys, feeble gaslight sighs and grunts and moans.
North-Atlantic hegemonic grey, this one, certainly more protracted,

 

    More diffuse, than the moist that swept in one morning, swift
And obliquely, in another November, twenty or so odd

 

    Years ago, a mist that blanketed the Piazza Cavour
In Rimini, home town of one Federico Fellini, where I’d been

    
    Stranded for a week (national rail strike), and where
I watched a man in a grey suit and matching fedora

 

    Appear out of that mist like a lost ghost
And pass slowly in front of Cinema Fulgor and stop to stare

 

    At the empty lobby through the sinuous windows
Of its art deco. For a moment, I was convinced

 

    It was Fellini himself, but then a small child came
Running across the piazza and into the man’s grey

 

    Lanky arms, shouting “Papa! Papa!” and while this reunion
Assuaged my disappointment that the man wasn’t’ feeling Fellini, 

 

    It couldn’t have dissolved my utter disgust in discovering
That his favourite bar had become an H&M.

 

    The whole town was closing down for the winter, shutters
Clamped tight on the inns and hotels, the cafes deserted

 

    Except for a few grey-haired men sipping espresso
And grappa at the Bar Masini, the dull rumble of the sea

 

    They ignored rising over the phantom sunbeds, the folded
Parasols stacked like firewood, the faded
    
    Dwarf palms given over to the shoreline birds–
Gulls and plovers, or at least the Adriatic version

 

    Of plovers, long-legged, spindly, needle-beaked–
The mist rising above the façade of the Grand Hotel where,

 

    On the phone, after a dinner of parmesan risotto
And pigeon ragout that had arrived under a cloche

 

    And served no doubt with gloved hands by someone
In the standard grey-wool serge uniform of the day

 

    (Comical pillbox hat replete with chinstrap,
Like an organ-grinder’s monkey would wear), yes, on the phone

 

    In the room where he always stayed, the room

With the best possible view of the sea, Fellini suddenly

 

    Stopped talking, and went impossibly silent, and where, later,
They’d find him on the floor, crumpled, paralyzed, his face gone blank,

 

    Bereft of all colour, a marble-grey, felled and palsied
By stroke from which he’s never recover. He died

    
    Two months later, as if in a scene from his own film,
Rama, that end-of-the-world ecophagy of splendidly grotesque

 

    Vatican nanobots: nuns, priests, bishops, cardinals, all
On roller skates, gliding like drugged models along the catwalk,

 

    Crowned in garish wimples and tiaras, in gowns of multi-mirrored
Lamé, gaudy gold and genital mauve, the camera swooping up, up, high

 

    Into the pallid air above the Roman streets, exhaust
Spewed from Vespas and Fiats. Dissolve to a still, a close-up,

 

    The carcass of a dog, a stray, an old male, run over
And forgotten, left to rot on the Ponte Sant’Angelo,

 

    The clay banks of the river Tiber below, a grey,
Streaked like the treads of a worn tire, or the folds of a brain.

​

***