James Land Jones

1934-1986

---

Friend, Mentor, Kindred Spirit

 

 



.....The Johnny Mercer House at Moon River where Jack and Jim lived in the early 1970s

Author of Adam's Dream: Mythic Consciousness in Keats and Yeats, Jim was also President of the Savannah Chapter of the Georgia Poetry Society, founder of the Oklahoma journal Nimrod, and a prize- winning poet. One of his best poems is

Belle Isle

Late spring and night. Rain-scented air
Surrounds us like a presence. Ahead,
Past threaded rivers, Belle Isle waits.
Beyond, St. Catherine's Sound unreels, a bolt
Of crumpled purple-silver, into the far horizon.


For months we've said we'll boat out to Belle Isle.
Now lightning plays about us in the shuttered trees.
Transparent knives of moonlight sculpt your face
Between my hands. Your eyes, grown deeper blue,
Compel my lips as birds are drawn to air.


I wait, a silk banner to be filled by you.
Give body to my body through your body.
Turn my empty cloth into a sail.
So fitted, voyager, what is Belle Isle to me?
I would explore the rivers of you all my life. 

Written "For Jack--14 Sept 1984--with love."

PREY

The mid-day meal claws its way
Up the oak trunk nearing the branch
Where waits a hawk still as a summer day
The hawk like a ghost fades in and out
Among the leafy branches almost vanishing
Unmoved by the animal that now hops
On the limb just above the hawk's perch

Is there a hawk at all or is my imagination
Projecting a Platonic form there in the tree
Why would I see a bird of prey perched
Cocked ready to swoop down on chipmunks
Like a guardian protecting his private garden
Hiding in the sunlight my governing father
My potus my doom the hunger of a hawk

Without the Red Glove

Naturally you would come on the Blue Moon
The last of this decade as you and I reach
Our own decade of incomplete decadence
Tonight after spring fever on the porch
That merciless Moon poured her light out
On the helpless dogwoods white delicacies
Delicate as that airy kiss of our two beards

Are we now Glaucon and Adeimantus living
In the realm of Ideals talking of music and art
Your feminine hands nails painted black belie
A tension that has turned a coral snake
Into a gender-fluid salamander held tender
In Schiele's grasp without the red glove
Thirsting for our blue pool of aberrant love