DB Jonas is an orchardist living in the Sangre de Cristo mountains of northern New Mexico, USA.
His work has been widely published in journals throughout the US, UK, Europe and Israel.
His collection Tarantula Season and Other poems is available on Amazon, and a second collection, Flight Risk, is scheduled for release in 2025.
Visitations of Spring
April howls along the eaves.
Winter’s silver bird has flown.
Winter’s dire dove has fled
before the mad rejoicings.
The annotations of our minor key,
these iron mountains, rise
like thrusting spires of Lupin,
Foxglove, grasping Jessamine,
to muscle through the noisy night,
through darkest dreams of Hellebore,
this world arrayed in magnitudes,
Spring’s hawkmoth-haunted hour.
Of Time and Weather
Time and space are modalities with which
we think, not conditions in which we live.
– Albert Einstein
What did we know before we learned it?
What on earth did we possess before we found it?
Why did the flagrant world flash forth at all,
like lightning from a cloudless sky, and why
this rumbling noise of life, these fleeting cameos
that fasten in our mind’s creating eye?
The world we seem to safely occupy,
this consoling hologram of depth and shadow,
this endless winding road we seem to travel,
is our planar, two-dimensioned atmosphere’s
oblique projection of itself as something thought,
as distance, as the wandering course of time.
But what imaginings arise in these reflections,
these bright recursions in the mind! the way
the world avails itself of consciousness to find
in each examined dewdrop other worlds arrayed
within the smallest things, stranger worlds and larger far
than these in which they seem contained, where each
thing harbors what is vaster than itself, and teems
transfinite with the unchecked energies of life, with
unborn stuff of which the animate is made, that animates
what’s never been alive, yet sets it whirling round
its dispossession, ever emptying, ever replicating
what’s forever lost and time cannot contain.
As Gravity Builds Bone
It’s gravity’s tenacious grasp
resists the fiber’s braided rise
to prompt the angering bone.
It’s daylight beckons into being
each tender gathering leaf
and glazes every searching eye,
while dark aromas excavate
the eager nostril in reply
to what’s no longer there,
and cochlea coil to fix
incarnate every feral tremor
stirring in the vacant air.
Just so, each body that we are
is sculpted of the world entire
as scar, investiture or mute response
to all that lies outside of us, a world
outside the will, before the self,
each sinew of our provenance.
Anamneses
In the scant light of grief,
you cannot help but notice
how the bookshelves all turn grey,
the way each furtive spineless title
starts to rummage for its coat and keys,
now that all the band’s packed up
and bound for home, and all that’s left
of life’s bright dancing song
is the desultory jarring clink
of dirty teacups in the sink.
Oddly, you persist in seeing
grief as that which lies ahead,
and in your enervated, pointless rage
you cannot otherwise
than watch yourself unload
each silent grievance out
upon the vacant waiting page
to dissipate in disappearing ink.
In grief’s slant light,
these utterances drop
their heavy cargoes at the wharf,
onto the swarming dock
that groans beneath what time forgot,
unbosoming themselves of all
that excess baggage, all this vast
dendritic dream of life,
the deftly detailed features made
of living’s tattered after-image.
In the absence of a dreamer,
scotomas dance upon the retina
to a rhythm audible only
out along the narrow corridors
of unremembered thought, out
among the mirrored swans,
and only from this darkened door.
“Death is just so final,”
as she said to me. “Yes,” I may
have once replied, “at least
as final as our life.”
The Galway Review 