Two Poems by Andy Jones

Spirit in the Alfalfa

If I cannot hear you,
it is because you have blown
ahead of me

running and dodging
in the alfalfa,
functionally invisible

free now of blood,
free now of restriction,
the borders we delighted in

and still remembering me,
inhabiting all our memories,
if only once more

before broadening like an equator,
enlarging impossibly,
like the intimacy of God.

What Jukie Might be Thinking

When you get me pants to wash, check the pockets first for Kleenex.
I’ve told lies that have traveled around the world before I put my pants on.

When you are done with the sports section, just recycle it– you know I’m not going to read it.
Aristotle’s theater of pity and fear is recycled hourly in the gut of a poet.

If you see toys on the floor and are done playing with them, pick them up.
Each of man’s lost toys reminds me that we have no home.

Whenever you go upstairs, just ask yourself, “What needs to go up?”
The villain is like a man on a seesaw: he moves upwards and then down.

Watch how I test the temperature of the milk in the bottle on the inside of my wrist.
The watch on the wrist of the dead soldier moves at the same speed as mine.

Water the groundcover every day in the summer, or it will die.
The sweltering summer tells us to give thanks that all is ephemera.

Andy Jones
Where’s Jukie: Poems and Essays by Andy Jones and Kate Duren

* All proceeds from the sale of Where’s Jukie
benefit the Smith-Lemli-Optiz Foundation.