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  • Voice Making the Sounds of Engines, and: Ambition
  • Rodney Jones (bio)

Voice Making the Sounds of Engines

Aging imaginary friends, arbiters of loneliness and childhood, have they fallen on hard times, sleeping under bridges and eating from trash bins?

When I knew them, they already had wives, experience in the military, and full-time jobs: mechanic, truck driver, steam shovel engineer.

They used to help me construct roads in the yellow dust of the fruit cellar, among stacked pillars that held up the house.

Models, ideals, parrot and laminate of vox- mundi, backfiring, double- clutching, downshifting Guam and Corregidor to damn and motherfucker.

Except for the clean, well-spoken one, twisting his mustache like an appellate judge [End Page 105] or ambassador from the commonwealth of mothers.

And the rooster Caesar, worm-poaching with harem and sycophants. Vouden, vouden, we would go and he would show us the meaning of theatre.

Ambition

The new house had the air of a stationary ark ready to set out: the flood a freshet in each faucet—

the shine and lacquer smell, pecan floors, pine paneling, enameled washer and dryer, each plug-in an owl face

being attacked by a snake: the fear that he would slip and flush down the toilet balanced the hope that

the television’s Apaches might come out. Meanwhile, since the carpenters had left a few light boards [End Page 106]

stacked by the door, he plundered the vacant house in the field for more, six years old with an airplane to build.

Rodney Jones

Rodney Jones teaches in the graduate creative writing program at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale. His most recent book, Salvation Blues: One Hundred Poems, 19852005, won the 2007 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Prize.

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