Green Linden Press

Selva Oscura                                                                                                       —Richard Jones


Fond of white shirts, he’d roll up his cuffs
and type all evening at the kitchen table,
tall windows open, the bright summer moon
faulting weak lines and reproving dead ends
as he paced, harried, tired, unable to sleep,
or laid in bed, his mind racing on a pillow,
his eyes always open, the hours rolling by
like trains or tall white ships, like the clouds
of ideas he couldn’t quite get his mind around,
like visions he was too blind to see, even as
his heart of stone was breaking and the light
was cutting a path through the wilderness
to a gushing spring and a river flowing forth
into a desert where for so long he’d been lost.