S

South Fork Yuba Equinox

The moon reflecting in a shopping cart
at the bottom of a slow river. You grew up here:

tell me you aren’t thinking of raw gold. Try
to tell me the river’s crustaceans

aren’t clapping their claws in the carat light.
From here we can watch autumn blaze the moon

some miles off. From this blue shore
we can watch a day twice: once above, once below water.

And we two are caught once again
between the thing and its reflection.

Tell me we could be anywhere else right now. Tell me
this one lie so we know everything else is absolutely true.


Photo by MUILLU on Unsplash

Douglas S. Jones

Douglas S. Jones allegedly lives in Colorado. His poems have appeared in Hayden's Ferry Review, American Life in Poetry, Blackbird, Watershed, Midway, and elsewhere.