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wise words
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What is the difference between genius and stupidity? Genius has limits. - Albert Einstein.
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| Ron Jones |
9/5/02 |
Neighbor
We don't talk much to the neighbor
I have a thing for birds.
The neighbor has a thing for smoke,
Smoke pours across
our shared privacy fence, chokes
my bird, chokes me, but who am
I--some middle-aged guy who keeps
a bird, lives in a house, a cottage
a shack--thirty feet from a damned
neighbor, fifteen from his smoker.
I won't be first to tell him how delusion
sustains, how quickly a canary dies.
Last night he threw a party, smoke
from his BBQ wafted over the fence,
a gaggle of girls tambourined, steel
drummed naked. I turned off the light,
hovered at the window, breathing ash.
Spiral
Billie Barker barks a girlie show,
cottonwoods loose their seed.
The curses of strangers are strangely
adulatory, ripe pears dropping
from red, open mouths, nine
in all, like planets or months.
II
The worst happens agreeably enough
cell doors slam,
ice cream melts, flies buzz the dead
as well as the living; a razor slips.
Rooms filled with expectation await
another reason to hope.
Lovers will always rendezvous beneath willows:
stupid snow fall, winds cackle.
III
After men, women, land, children, work
all that lies before,
one still wants, knowing better.
Far From Home
One moment I dug
clay thinking nothing
out of the ordinary
I might have desired
to create something; I
may have been found
wanting.
I hauled the clay
up a steep grade. It might
have rained, or it could
have been a sunny day.
So much water, so much
weight. There was mud,
of that I'm certain.
I Began Wanting
to say something straight
from the heart, maybe something
about my daughter, or perhaps
it was my lover I wanted to speak
to. It really doesn't matter, all
that ancient mystery.
The pump is broken, the water not potable,
dangerously high nitrate levels. The postman
drives up the road, delivers mail,
letters full of risky notions, a book
on the rise and fall of capitalism.
The air is clear the way air
will be when sunlight touches a woman's hair.
This is no novelty but a kind of subtraction
like the hard oak floors we sanded and stained
before we began
to wake apart. You can go back now
to whatever it is you were doing
that was so damned important.
Padre
Padre in the corrida
no longer lucid, rioja
and fiesta, Padre thought
when he thought at all,
I won't call this paradise
with my eyes closed.
Last night Padre lay
down with the Book of Trans-
gression concerning someone
who'd fallen from station,
an existentialist one might say,
a Sisyphusian character
in makeup, nearly human.
This house is a tree house
we stand under, Padre intuits
we are about a third of the way
up a tall Sitka spruce.
Padre believes in exact
measures and other pagan mumbo jumbo
if he hadn't been called, he'd have made
a life as a logger... they
roost in it--Padre's halos--
right outside
the window then off
they go to the garden
to scratch and eat.
© ron jones 2002
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