Richard Jones

The Spoon

by Richard Jones

Some days I think I need nothing
more in life than a spoon.
With a spoon I can eat oatmeal,
or take the medicine doctors prescribe.
I can swat a fly sleeping on the sill
or pound the table to get attention.
I can point accusingly at God
or stab the empty air repeatedly.
Looking into the spoon's mirror,
I can study my small face in its shiny bowl,
or cover one eye to make half the world
disappear. With a spoon
I can dig a tunnel to freedom,
spoonful by spoonful of dirt,
or waste life catching moonlight
and flinging it into the blackest night.



Why do poets write?

by Richard Jones

My wife, a psychiatrist, sleeps
through my reading and writing in bed,
the half-whispered lines,
manuscripts piled between us,

but in the deep part of night
when her beeper sounds
she bolts awake to return the page
of a patient afraid he'll kill himself.

She sits in her robe in the kitchen,
listening to the anguished voice
on the phone. She becomes
the vessel that contains his fear,

someone he can trust to tell
things I would tell to a poem.



Sky Funeral?

by Richard Jones

In a revered Tibetan tradition,
I read aloud to my father,
the dead are borne to mountains
and the bodies offered to vultures.

I show him the photographs
of a monk raising an ax,
a corpse chopped into pieces,
a skull crushed with a large rock.

As one we contemplate the birds,
the charnel ground, the bone dust
thick as smoke flying in the wind.
Our dark meditation comforts us.

I ask if he’d like me to carry him—
like a bundle of sticks on my back—
up a mountain road to a high meadow
and feed him to the tireless vultures.

"Yes," he says, raising a crooked finger,
"and remember to wield the ax with love."



Cherries in the Snow

by Richard Jones

My mother never appeared in public
without lipstick. If we were going out,
I’d have to wait by the door until
she painted her lips and turned
from the hallway mirror,
put on her gloves and picked up her purse,
opening the purse to see
if she’d remembered tissues.

After lunch in a restaurant
she might ask,
"Do I need lipstick?"
If I said yes,
she would discretely turn
and refresh her faded lips.
Opening the black and gold canister,
she’d peer in a round compact
as if she were looking into another world.
Then she’d touch her lips to a tissue.

Whenever I went searching
in her coat pocket or purse
for coins or candy
I’d find, crumpled,
those small white tissues
covered with bloodred kisses.
I’d slip them into to my pocket,
along with the stones and feathers
I thought, back then, I’d keep.


Richard Jones is the author of five books of poetry–Country of Air, A Perfect Time, At Last We Enter Paradise, The Blessing: New and Selected Poems, and The Correct Spelling & Exact Meaning. He is editor of Poetry East, for which he received a CCLM Editors Award, as well as two critical anthologies, Poetry and Politics and Of Solitude and Silence: Writings on Robert Bly. He is a professor of English at DePaul University and lives in Chicago.