Ode to Southern Gray

John Davis Jr.

Paint color #35791 at Jones Downtown Hardware

Pencil-lead cursive in Flannery’s journals

Ernest J. Gaines’s trimmed mustache

Untrapped mice in Eudora’s Corner Store

Clouds over Zora’s tin-roofed houses

Steam from John Hartford’s Julia Belle Swain

Fretting of B.B. King’s Lucille

Andy Griffith’s date-night sport coat

Dust motes turning in Ryman lights

Not battlefield haze over Shiloh or Sumter

Not sweltering wool of a brushed uniform

Not generals’ beards on marble statues

Not musket balls or cold bayonets

Cows in the fog of the farthest pasture

Barn boards curled and weather-split

Uncle Ray’s after-dinner pipe smoke

His new-used tractor covered in primer

Aunt Doty’s hairdo for Sunday service

Spanish moss waving from cemetery oaks

Number two washtubs where pea hulls clang

Back porch steps and dusk goodbyes

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John Davis Jr. is the author of The Places That Hold (Eastover Press, 2021), Middle Class American Proverb (Negative Capability Press, 2014) and three other poetry collections. His work has been published by Tupelo Quarterly, Nashville Review, The Common, The American Journal of Poetry, and elsewhere over the last 25 years. He holds an MFA and teaches English and Creative Writing in the Tampa Bay region of Florida, his native state.