Poems by M.P. Jones
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My Father, the Arborist
by M.P. Jones
From Canary Summer 2013
M.P. lives in Gainesville, Florida's urban Possum Creek watershed, where he works, writes, and raises backyard chickens.
My father never liked
cutting the old ones down,
but there was always some
century-old Water Oak
threatening the new renovations
on the quad or cracking
a fresh concrete foundation.
He took me out summers
and let the humid air wick away
any desire to follow his footsteps.
My father never let me touch a saw,
as if to keep the blood from my hands,
but he let me watch, and I learned
there is a note a tree makes
when the chainsaw pierces the last ringlet,
chewing the marrow of loamy heartwood—
the sound of letting go, and
sometimes the great trunk turns,
waving branches & crashes to earth,
making a sound it cannot hear.
My father was not an evil man; he was
like other men, just trying to get by.
where he knelt, mumbled
if I don’t,
someone will.
Forthcoming in the author's book, Live at Lethe (Sweatshop Publications, 2013)
© M.P. Jones
One-Man Renga in Late June, Lee County
by M.P. Jones
From Canary Summer 2015
Outside, thunder boasts
an impotent rain. Who stood
amongst strawbriars
with shadows growing long and
the day smooth in its lateness?
Why ask with words what
this world is for? Recalling
the winter we left
the oven on to keep warm,
fed our bills into the mouth
of a woodstove, one
by one, watching them tremble
and darken, then burst.
It is I who have walked
through overgrown paspalum
in air so thick that
each breath filled me with dark dreams
of mossy water.
All the way up the path home,
twisted as those ruined hallways
where the dead open
like blue doors in the forest,
amber knobs you fear
turning. Past the garden gate,
with night falling everywhere
where we stood, screaming,
when it was all we could do
just to draw some heat
between us, after late shifts,
driving home in dark flurries.
At the high hilltop,
the bees have not disappeared
from the possumhaw.
Why do we ask with words when
the air is thick with their song?
Forthcoming in the author's collection Reflections on the Dark Water, spring 2016.
© M.P. Jones