Creature Feature

At the riverbank,
cypress trees as old as America,

wrapped in muscadine
and scaled with plywood,

shade waters once as clear
as a camera lens, a place

so exotic it stood in
for Coleridge’s Xanadu,

Tarzan’s Africa, an Amazonian
Lagoon where the Gill-man emerged

from the black river, a remnant god
of some distant extinction.

I lean over the edge of my boat
to spot the monster

moving through the blue depths
but see only the distorted shape

of my reflection in the water.
Soon it will be July,

and I will be 30 years old,
knowing as much as I ever will,

which is almost nothing,
and carrying every question

with no answer, each carcinogen
of memory returning

like bluejackets in the spring.
Let me drift here awhile,

watching my shadow
hold what it can in the water,

a creature feared only
by coupling dragonflies

as the forest turns its mind
toward the setting sun.

There’s only so much
we can let go in this life.

Black Dog Blues

 “Let me tell you, mama,
what my black dog done done to me.
He cheated me from my regular,
now he's after my used-to-be” —Blind Blake, 1927

We thread our mundane path through the neighborhood,
past where roofers strip shingles into a green dumpster.

From high up in the live oaks, I feel a charged gust
disperse the humid morning static, and my black dog

wrenches me forward. The contours of yesterday
unfurl like mimosa leaves beside the neighbor’s shed

he pauses at to sniff the vacant burrow where, months ago,
a skunk had raised her kits. He brushes his nose against

a network of invisible marks as thunder curls its pitch
in the darkening sky. I count minutes until rain’s drumbeat

comes to erase these boundaries he’s so carefully drawn.
Racoon cypher, opossum semaphore, path of pasts,

fellow travelers known only by the wick of spoor,
and soon washed clean, these scent trails will be illegible

as the by-and-by, dark as the dirt the backhoes dredged
for a drainage pond behind my parents’ house. There, we found

how arrowheads surface like imperfect symmetries
of someone else’s memories ruminating in the cattails

along the water’s edge where older kids had planted pot
and would chase us into the scrub. As rain begins,

he pulls a little harder and we lose them tangled in the briars,
the tune of our steps disappearing in the leaves.

Madison Jones is an Assistant Professor of Writing & Rhetoric and Natural Resources Science at the University of Rhode Island. He received his Ph.D. in Writing Studies from the University of Florida in 2020. His poetry collections are Losing the Dog (Salmon Poetry, forthcoming) and Reflections on the Dark Water (Solomon & George, 2016). He has published over fifty poems in journals such as The Southern Review, Prairie Schooner, and Michigan Quarterly Review and anthologies including Mountains Piled upon Mountains: Appalachian Nature Writing in the Anthropocene. He was the recipient of a 2021 Poetry Fellowship from the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts, a 2020 writing residency from the Fairhope Center for the Writing Arts, College Poetry Prizes from the Academy of American Poets, and a Literary Award from the F. Scott & Zelda Fitzgerald Museum, among other awards. Find out more at madisonpjones.com, or follow him on Twitter @poetrhetor.

Published January 15 2023