Four Poems
Jon Cone
Alembic
The day could be made from elemental gray,
a day near the sea –
for the sea is complete,
complete within the muffled
diffuse –
of gray sky. We hold each other.
There is nothing
in the world we need,
so like a children’s globe are we, protected,
entire,
and when the world shakes
it becomes not less but
envelops us as we are more
than rapt,
permanent in matter
our completeness bestows,
cribbed by motions taken
from the sea-gray sea.
The Invention of the Idea of Chair
after Marin Sorescu
The fire came first.
Next the standing around
the fire as I stared glass-eyed
at its curling paper heart.
The darkness seemed a verge
set to smother
the community
I made there with you.
When we began telling
stories standing
became more like lower
back pain.
You said, ‘It’s this or sleeping
in the cave.
What an existence.’
Silence.
A bone,
the craw.
The necessary irritation,
then the thunderbolt.
A chair! A chair!
Then the white-
knuckled nothing that
follows after storm clouds go.
Sleds Made of Bone
There are iron
moments – how
human it is
to speak –
when one says
to another
I don’t know
& I don’t care.
Birds. A nearby
fountain. Two
homeless kings
at dusk.
Jeramiah and Fugitive Bell
Take inventory,
heretical Jeremiah.
Of the new potion
rich in radium.
Take inventory,
fugitive Bell.
For the squalid birds
at noon.
Pay heed with
an undistinguished ear
at their toothless horns of fear.
Elected Jeremiah!
Tenured Bell!
It is a day on which
to count:
the voluptuous bric,
the glutinous brac.
And you did and you sang
and you ran,
till the sun
in its blank number
came loud
to the high-counting lands.
Jon Cone’s works include LEAST (Greying Ghost), THE PLESYRE BARGE (Greying Ghost), SITTING GETTING UP SITTING AGAIN (Standing Guard in a Cornfield Press), and FAMILY PORTRAIT WITH TWO DOGS BLEEDING (Phrygian Press). He has appeared in several anthologies and numerous journals both online and in print. His collection, COLD HOUSE, is forthcoming in the fall of 2017 from Espresso-Chapbooks of Toronto, (Ont.), Canada. He lives in Iowa City. He can be followed on Twitter @JonCone.
