Richard Jones

What I envy in the open eyes of the dead deer hanging down from the rafters, its eyes still wet and glassy, but locked now into a vision of another life, is the way it seems to be staring at the moment when it died. The blue light falling through the window into this smoke-filled room is the same color as the mist coming down off the mountain that morning: the deer sees men with guns but also sees, beyond them, the endless mountains.

Swimming the English Channel, struggling to make it to Calais, I swam into Laura halfway across. My body oiled for warmth, black rubber cap on my head, eyes hidden behind goggles, I was exhausted, ready to drown, when I saw her coming toward me, bobbing up and down between waves, effortlessly doing a breaststroke, headed for Dover. Treading water, I asked in French if she spoke English, and she said, “Yes, I’m an American.” I said, “Hey, me too,” then asked her out for coffee.

My mother–half-deaf, a small metal box pinned to her blouse, and beneath the gray locks the hidden earphone, the wire running across her heart to its home in her ear–can barely hear me anymore. I’m just someone’s voice lost years ago, trying now to make myself clear, deliberately now, so she will see how hard the words come. Bent to her breast, I speak to the heart, almost hopeless, where hardly anyone is ever heard.

Valentine’s Day breakfast at Baker’s Square: Laura drinks coffee while I watch Andrew, who refuses to sit but chooses instead to stay in the restaurant’s vestibule where he opens and closes the big double doors over and over again, as if he’s practicing a grand entrance–entering, crossing the threshold, and letting the doors close behind him. I’m thinking, it wasn’t so long ago I carried my tiny son piggyback through the woods to a waterfall; wasn’t long ago I kissed Laura for the first time; wasn’t long ago I lived in the house with my dog and sat with my notebook at the kitchen table on Sunday morning after working all night– sipping burnt coffee and scratching out lines, lighting my hundredth cigarette, starting over again, determined to write a love poem.

In the tower the bell is alone, like a man in his room, thinking and thinking. The bell is made of iron. It takes the weight of a man to make the bell move. Far below, the bell feels hands on a rope. It considers this. It turns its head. Miles away, a man in his room hears the clear sound, and lifts his head to listen.

Even C.P. Cavafy– cynical, ascetic, unknown in his day– printed at his own expense poems no one would publish, poems intimate, personal, to share with readers he called friends. But I have hundreds of poems hidden away in a box. Even when I know Cavafy once wrapped verse with black and gold ribbons to give away as a gift.