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.