Atonement
Grind your teeth on atonement pangs. Lone rocks crop the low sky. You reach up with a steady hand. The clouds elude you.
Walk the brown stream, dip in your hands and face, drink deep. Forget the water leads always down. Brown drops crumble in heat to ascend, as must you.
2.
You’ve got to stumble three times. You try to walk, and that staggers your first summers. Drink love and fall forever.
You enter the brown room, where an hour stretches to blackness before time, songs flash bright between your ears, there is no difference between the song and your voice, your mind.
3.
You bleed brown into your chest, your head.
Luck cleaves to the gray channels. Don’t cling
too tight, you might miss it. Keep one eye open,
or you’ll miss her. Two eyes, and she’ll run away.
4.
You dive through the murk to the stone, pry it loose with tired fingers. Every day you dive
again, lungs ache and muscles scream as you drag it a hand’s breadth farther.
When the stone is on the shore, glistening, you laugh. The gazelle ran by as you pushed stones underwater, in a flash of brown.
Her flanks lit up the evening sky.
Ibiza 08 (after a pic by doris)
Vertical gelatinous sun,
like the final image of Robert
Duvall in THX-1138, standing triumphant in the telephoto lens, the waters heal my sore feet and the salt air purges my hangover. The distant scent of fish and oil and car exhaust cannot compete with standing on the edge of an element and willing yourself into the center of the solar system,
even if only in your imagination.
The sails flap contented, Gina takes off her top and lies in the sun. I fall asleep and sunburn. The pages
of her diary flip in the breeze. A gull watches us from the boom.
A cosmos is born in the sailboat’s wake, one far better than the one
I usually travel through in a sleeper ship at infinitessimal fractions of the speed of light, and wake up from
with bloodshot eyes and a creeping sense of defilement along my limbs and in
my soul.
beguining
raspberry twist of a girl
with all comets in her
jean’s pockets,
the atmosphere
I am losing because
we can’t breathe or
have breathed too heavily
and she dances
sings
plays guitar
intones the name
of God in
79 flavors
we are
rejoicing for the first
time since before the
war.
Tony Jones is a 36 year old poet who has been writing seriously for 21 years, and has been published in journals like Virginia Writing and Kronos. He lives in the beautiful Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, and took a succession of dead-end jobs that were nonetheless very productive of creative inspiration, though generally in a negative way, before deciding to finish his Masters in Religion, which occupies him presently. He lives with a cat, Sibyl, and far too many books on history, philosophy, theology, science fiction and, well, you get the picture…
Copyright © Tony Jones, 2008. All Rights Reserved.
