Recovery
KATHRYN JONES
April 11, 2020
I fall
into the past
the future foggy
in my mind
I curl
into a fetal position
yearning to crawl
back into the soup
I tremble
with an inner quake
crushing my heart
at the epicenter
I dream
it’s all a nightmare
tricking me with
magical thinking
I awaken
to see a floating wall
faded rectangles
where pictures once hung
I weep
for voices remembered
the silence echoing
through empty rooms
I see
the faces of my ancestors
beckoning me
I yearn but I cannot follow
I long
for those who have gone ahead
in this closed vessel
my love has no place to go
I wait
to cross the river
until that day
life is a string of stepping stones
KATHRYN JONES is a longtime journalist, essayist, author, and teacher. A regular contributor to The New York Times and a contributing editor and former writer-at-large for Texas Monthly magazine, her essays have been published in Texas Monthly and in two anthologies, A Uniquely American Epic: Intimacy and Action, Tenderness and Action in Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch, (University Press of Kentucky, 2019), and Pickers and Poets: The Ruthlessly Poetic Singer-Songwriters of Texas (Texas A&M University Press, 2016 ). She currently teaches journalism at Tarleton State University and is finishing a biography of Ben Johnson, the Academy Award-winning actor (The Last Picture Show, The Wild Bunch) and world champion rodeo cowboy, to be published by the University Press of Mississippi. She was inducted into the Texas Institute of Letters in 2016.
