he said that

you do have me he said that
to me and those others for awhile
he said that his redbeard
the external wiring of the dynamo
concealing the workings of the cosmos
he told us a few stories
he tried to avoid patriarch
he couldn't teach he said that
if you don't already know this
you cannot be my friend
but I will try he said and married
and he saw that now maybe
I didn't know he didn't marry me

out of tulsa and its money and its dust
a dumpy kid when he was young
his mother told me one year he didn't talk
the next he did I see it hasn't changed he said
to me when I told him this story

this to his father:
ray jones you fascist freethinker oklahoman
like the rest of my relatives you raise
your own dust alongside of these days
where is your boy Jackie now? somewhere out there
still tethered to Nora still dreaming
of Emil the end now in sight those equations
nothing more than smoke rising from the prairie
theory not a poem memory not a solution

in the distance the boy is running through the dunes
I am what I am that's all that I am
that's all that I need that's all that I remember
red dust crusts on these pages

To Jack Raymond Jones, wherever you are these days. My friend at Saint Louis University1968-70. Husband to Nora, father to Emil, freethinker, partisan.

Removed Posts

To anyone who has come here via a search engine looking for information about Anastasia Sands: these posts concern a character in a novel written in the 1970s and are in no way involved with the current actress/porn star. To those come looking for information on Janet Hanrahan, she also was the basis for a character in a novel written in the 1970s and has nothing to do with any persons of that name today. Those posts were removed to avoid any confusion. Thanks for your understanding. Good luck with your search. The following piece comes from early notes for the novel, Strange Sins. The title comes from Raymond Chandler: "Her eyes were like strange sins."

Early Notes On Anastasia Sands

Out the back door
carrying her radio, visions of a sober life
up front today. No pills, she promises herself.
She seeks a simpler joy
in her sharp bones, pointed flesh.
She says, "I will make do
with sex today." She knows about adventure
& figuring the odds. She makes it clear
to all her wouldbe boyfriends
I don't want you stoned, again
I want you to care. I have feelings
I don't use you. But she is unsettled.
She is nauseous.
She feels the thrusts of memory, double-tracked,
incompetent to manage the multiple exposures,
she asks for an insurance of some kind.
Her brother snickers, pretends he sees
the future. He tells her
"it just gets worse." What makes
you think you can explain it?
You always were a bitch to me,
but I still love you though.


This piece is one of the earliest attempts to speak about a character, the main character, from the novel, Strange Sins. She is a teenage girl who is being tripped up by her memories of another existence. Ultimately it comes out that she is the reincarnation of another teenage girl who was sexually abused by her father and murdered and buried in a proximate location. Anastasia Sands was the name of a checker at Krogers on 2nd and South Grand, where I shopped at the time. I stole the name and set the book in and around the community of Saugatuck, Michigan, on the Lake. It is an area I was familiar with having traveled to Chris Beckman's family's house on the Lake a couple of times. One of them was my honeymoon with Becky McGovern. We drove up with Chris and Monica Schaeffer in February of 1970, long before this book appeared. There was a real revenge theme, ultimately, in this book and I met someone this had sort of happened to after I had done most of the work on the piece. Kind of spooky, really, but my Sister Diane, who speaks with ghosts on occasions, told me that a relative of our's from the previous century -1800s- had told her in a dream that I had the Sight, just as she does. I wish it were a little more useful, however.