Editor’s note: In this week’s Poetry Corner, we feature Richard Jones, the author of four books of poetry. He is editor of “Poetry East,” for which he received a CCLM Editors Award. He has also edited two critical anthologies, “Poetry and Politics” and “Of Solitude and Silence: Writings on Robert Bly.” He is a professor of English at DePaul University and lives in Chicago.
Cherries in the Snow
My mother never appeared in public
without lipstick. If we were going out,
I’d have to wait by the door until
she painted her lips and turned
from the hallway mirror,
put on her gloves and picked up her purse,
opening the purse to see
if she’d remembered tissues.
After lunch in a restaurant
she might ask,
“Do I need lipstick?”
If I said yes,
she would discretely turn
and refresh her faded lips.
Opening the black and gold canister,
she’d peer in a round compact
as if she were looking into another world.
Then she’d touch her lips to a tissue.
Whenever I went searching
in her coat pocket or purse
for coins or candy
I’d find, crumpled, those small white tissues
covered with bloodred kisses.
I’d slip them into my pocket,
along with the stones and feathers
I thought, back then, I’d keep.
Infinity and God
My five-year-old is enamored of the words
infinity and god, employing them
to map space and time. God is bigger
than our house, bigger than the city, bigger
even than the biggest monster or spaceship.
A race car’s infinity fast, boys eat infinity cookies,
his scrubbed face is, he says, infinity shining—
shining all the way up to God.
At day’s end,
God shrinks—small enough to become
the perfect stillness and perfect silence
that rests at the end of his nightly prayer.
And infinity spirals down to a feather in his pillow.
Heft I hold the words broken bones
in my hand; I hold the words
rib cage, the word heart.
I lift every word
like a stone or a feather.
The more beautiful words,
like heaven, or nothingness,
feel exactly the same
as fencepost or mailbox,
lamplight or shoelace.
Spirit
flits like a tongue of flame,
as insubstantial in the hand
as its brother, death,
which weighs exactly the same as life.
The Spoon Some days I think I need nothing
more in life than a spoon.
With a spoon I can eat oatmeal
or take the medicine doctors prescribe.
I can swat a fly sleeping on the sill
or pound the table to get attention.
I can point accusingly at God
or stab the empty air repeatedly.
Looking into the spoon’s mirror,
I can study my small face in its shiny bowl,
or cover one eye to make half the world
disappear. With a spoon
I can dig a tunnel to freedom
spoonful by spoonful of dirt,
or waste life catching moonlight
and flinging it into the blackest night. 
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