PATRICIA SPEARS JONES

WHAT I WILL MISS IS KISSING IN CABS

Even in my randy youth, I never so much as made out in public
But, you love kissing in cabs. You love moving bodies around in moving vehicles.
You have perfected the arc of command, solicitous, somewhat grand
in the masculine manner.
Working your hands down blouses, lifting skirts
Oh, it’s your arms around my waist, you hand on the cool of my chest
your fingers squeezing my left nipple, your tongue down my throat,
that makes me worry about the psyche of taxi drivers.
Will the Russian get a hard-on, will the Haitian throw us out?

Will we make it across the Hudson. to home?
And who will pay dearly for this bad behavior
 

PUMP

Somewhere, the devil rallies we shefolk fast before sunrise
and the knives that set quiet in their berths suavely
rise to find chests and stomachs of husbands, lovers.

Raymond Chandler slouches his favorite hat smiling.
He knows a woman’s heart, how weather met the rise and fall
of that pump that slurred her vision and ate away at girlish dreams.

Heat and ice. The price of stockings. What turns when the leaves die.
Crying and drinking and walking the side streets of exalted cities.
Moon howling is never enough.

Half moon over Harlem. half my heart healing
other half pumping last grasp of anger

a politician’s handshake.

Thus, the new century finds bar chatter foolish and men on cell phones
making the next date, daring to start anew what has been done
and done to death. Sweet talk storm wisdom flung on the floor

like expensive lingerie.
 

AUTUMN, NEW YORK, 1999

And I am full of worry I wrote to a friend
Worry, she replied about what—love, money, health?

All of them, I wrote back. it’s autumn, the air is utterly clear
and you hear death music--the rattle of leaves swirling

the midnight cat howling, a newborn baby’s 3 am
call for food or help or heart’s love

At the market, the green, red and yellow apples are piled high,
sweet perfume—once, I went apple picking in Massachusetts

a day of thralling beauty, my companions and I
had no desire to leave the valley—the plump trees,

the fierce pride of small town New England where a gift shop
exploded gingham, calico, silly stuffed toys

we stood within this shrine to cloying femininity of entwined hearts
and ribbons and bows like invading aliens, fascinated and appalled

years later, it seems as if that was a dreamscape
invented for the pinched-speech world of mid Massachusetts—

and here too, people throng around the dahlias—
the last of the bright fat flowers. Open. Scentless.

It is going to be a very hard winter and we all know it in our bones
an almost atavistic memory with instruction—wear heavy clothes
horde food, drink water, stand against the wind

listen.
 

Patricia Spears Jones is a widely published poet, arts writer, playwright and author of the collection, The Weather That Kills from Coffee House Press and the play Mother produced by Mabou Mines.  Poems are anthologized in Poetry After 911; bumrush, a defpoetryjam; Best American Poetry 2000; and Blood and Tears: Poems for Matthew Shepard.  Poems, arts writing and interviews have appeared in Bomb, Black Issues Book Review, Barrow Street, Callaloo, Kenyon Review, the Village Voice, Poetry Project Newsletter, The World, Essence, and the Boston Globe.