Roger Jones presently teaches at Texas State University in San Marcos and is poetry editor of Texas Review.
He has three collections of poems and work forthcoming in Cortland Review.
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FLATS FIXED
Dad knows a guy who fixes flat tires cheap.
East side of town, a rotten tooth of a garage.
Bald wheels lying around and a raucous machine
with jackhammer rackets that end
abruptly, pphssssshhhhhtt!
Old wobbly kitchen chairs in the lobby.
No talk, just waiting. Dad looks around.
He grew up a block away, seventy years ago.
There’s a book all around us that no one ever wrote.
Dad prefers that story to this one. Sometimes
he drifts off into nostalgia, quiet languor.
It’s easy to want the faraway to be close.
Soon the guy – backwards baseball hat – rolls the tire
back out. Good as new. Dad unpeels a soiled five,
takes another look around the building. Oil stains
and shadows. We hoist the tire back
into the truck. Things to do; just keep on driving.
WATER LEFT ON ALL NIGHT
Troubled nights, the early years.
I come down sleepy in the wee hours
to a whispering pipe, water seeping,
money heading out a hose, out a line,
into a floor, elsewhere. Gone.
Dream-ends like wet spider webs
brush across my face. I tilt my hearing
to the line as a child might lay an ear
against a railroad track. The slumbering
breath of children, wife, dogs behind me,
I follow the sound into the yard, find a hose
left on in a rubber pool. Water slides over
a weighted end, all the neighborhood at rest.
The bills, the family crimes. Like a hemorrhage,
this wetness in the grass, now stanched.
Socks damp, I drift back through dim halls,
fall into bed, eager to rejoin my sleep.
The dream-river flows south, takes us
homeward, strews us streamside one at a time,
each to our own story. Come morning,
I will find myself again in a cluttered yard,
all brambles and trash, awake to papers
and my own inconsequence.